Complete Stories (24 page)

Rhett’s fingers danced across the phantom controls.

“Tfoo, tfoo, tfoom!”

The next day, Polly decided to take the bank job. It was dinky, but they paid five dollars an hour, and Mr. Hunt, the personnel officer, promised that there were opportunities for rapid advancement. After signing up and agreeing to be there Monday, Polly drove over to the mall to tell Rhett.

The mall was a single huge building jigsawed into a lake of asphalt. Crasher’s was in the middle, right by Spencer Gifts. It was dark and air-conditioned with a gold carpet on the floor. A row of machines was lined up along each wall, pinball on the right, video on the left. Polly liked the pinballs better; at least there you were manipulating something real.

The pinballs glowed and the videos twinkled. A few youths were playing, and the machines filled the room with sound.

Intruder alert, Intruder alert.

mmmmmwwwwwhhhhaaaaaAAAAAAAAAA-KOW-KOW-KOW!

Welcome to Xenon.

Doodley-doodle-doodley-doo.

Budda-budda-zen-zen-BLOOOO!

Try me again.

There at the back was Rhett, grinning and twitching at the controls of Star Castle. He wore a news-vendor’s change apron.

“I took the job,” said Polly, coming up behind him.

“Just a minute,” said Rhett, not looking up. “I’ll give you change in a minute.” He took her for a customer, or pretended to.

A fat spaceship rotated slowly at the center of the Star Castle screen. Surrounding it were concentric rings of light: force-fields. Rhett’s ship darted around the perimeter of the rings like a horsefly, twisting and stinging, trying to blast its way to the machine’s central ship. Eerily singing bombs pursued Rhett, and when he finally breached the innermost wall, the machine began firing huge, crackling space-mines. Rhett dodged the mines, firing and thrusting all the while. One of his bullets caught the central ship and the whole screen blacked out in a deafening explosion.

“That’s five,” said Rhett, glancing back. “Hi, Polly.”

“I went to see Mr. Hunt like we decided, Rhett. They’re really giving me the job.”

“Far out. Maybe I’ll quit working here. The machines are starting to get to me. This morning I saw a face on the Pac-Man screen.”

“Whose face, Rhett?”

The new board was on the screen and Rhett turned back to the controls.
Wi-wi-wi-wi-wi-wi-wi
went his bullets against the
eeEEeeEEeeEEeeEEee
of the smart bombs and the
mmmmMMMMwaaaaaa
of the force-fields.

“Reagan,” said Rhett, sliding his ship off one corner of the screen and back on the other. “President Reagan, man. He thanked me for developing the software for some new missile system. He said that all the Pac-Man machines are keyed into the Pentagon, and that the monsters stand for Russian anti-missiles. I ran twenty boards. Nobody’s ever done that before.”

There was a big hole in the force-fields now. The fat, evil ship at the center spat a vicious buzz-bomb. Rhett zapped it
wi-wi-wi
from the other side of the board. Then the ship.
BLOOOOOOOO
!

“Six,” said Rhett, glancing up again. “I’m really hot today. I figure if the Pentagon put out Pac-Man, maybe someone else did Star Castle.”

Polly wondered if Rhett was joking. In a way it made sense. Use the machines to tap American youth’s idle energy and quirky reflexes. A computer can follow a given program as fast as you want, but a human operator’s creative randomization is impossible to simulate. Why not have our missiles trace out Pac-Man monster-evasion paths? Why not tap every run that gets past twenty boards?

“Did President Reagan say you’d get any money?” asked Polly. “Did he offer you a job?”

“No job.”
Wi-wi-wi-wi-wi-wi-wi.
“But he’s sending a secret agent to give me a thousand dollars. If I tell anyone, it’s treason. Aaaaaauugh!”
Crackle-ackle-ackle-FTOOOM
. Rhett’s ship exploded into twirling fragments.

“Change, please?”

Rhett changed a five for one of the customers, then turned his full attention on Polly.

“So you’re taking the job at the bank? They’re really hiring you?”

“Starting Monday. Did you really see Reagan?”

“I think I did.”

“Why don’t you phone him up?”

“It was probably just a tape. He wouldn’t know me from Adam.” Rhett fed another quarter into the Star Castle machine. “I’m gonna work on this some more. See who’s behind it. Will you hand out change for me?”

“Okay.”

Polly tied on Rhett’s change apron and leaned against the rear wall. Now and then someone would ask her for more quarters, always boys. White males between fourteen and thirty-four years of age. Interacting with machines. Maybe, for men, women themselves are just very complicated video machines… . Polly pushed the unpleasant thought away. There was something more serious to think about: Rhett’s obsession. The whole time she made change, he kept plugging away at Star Castle. Ten boards, fifteen, and finally twenty.

But no leader’s face appeared, just the same dull target with its whining force-fields. A flurry of bombs raced out like a flight of swallows. Rhett let them take him, then sagged against the machine in exhaustion.

“Polly! Are you working here?” A big sloppy man shambled up. It was Dr. Horvath, Polly’s old Calculus professor. She’d been his favorite student. “Is this the best job a Killeville College math major can aspire to?”

“No, no.” Polly was embarrassed. “I’m just helping Rhett. Rhett?” Wearily her husband straightened up from the Star Castle machine. “Rhett, you remember Dr. Horvath, don’t you? From the graduation?”

“Hi.” Rhett gave his winning smile and shook hands. “These machines have been freaking me out.”

“Can I tell him, Rhett?”

“Go ahead.”

“Dr. Horvath, this morning Rhett saw President Reagan’s face on the Pac-Man screen. Rhett says the Pentagon is using the twenty-board runs to design the new anti-anti-missile system.”

Horvath cocked his big head and smiled. “Sounds like paranoid schizophrenia to me, Polly. Or drug psychosis.”

“Hey!” said Rhett. “I’m clean!”

“So show me
der Führer
‘s face. I’ve got time to kill or I wouldn’t be here.”

“Right now I’m too wrecked,” confessed Rhett. “I just blew the whole afternoon trying the break through on Star Castle. But there’s nothing there.”

Horvath gave Polly a questioning look. He thought Rhett was crazy. She couldn’t leave it at that.

“Come in tomorrow, Dr. Horvath. Come in before ten. Rhett’s fastest in the morning. He’ll show you…and me, too.”

“At this point Rhett’s the only one who’s been vouchsafed the mystical vision of our fearless leader?” Horvath’s pasty, green-tinged features twisted sarcastically.

“Put up or shut up,” said Rhett. “Be here at nine.”

That night, Rhett and Polly had their first really big argument in ten months of marriage. Ostensibly, it was about whether Polly should be allowed to read in bed when Rhett was trying to sleep. Obviously, it was also about her reluctance to make love. But deep down, the argument was triggered by the slippage of their relative positions: Polly was moving into a good, middle-class job, but Rhett seemed to be moving down into madness.

There was a lot of tension the next morning. Crasher’s didn’t open to the public till ten, so Rhett and Polly had it to themselves. Rhett fed a quarter to the Pac-Man machine and got to work. “What a way to spend Saturday,” complained Polly. “That machine doesn’t connect to anything, Rhett. You might as well be shouting into a hollow tree. President Reagan isn’t in there.”

Rhett didn’t look up…didn’t dare to. Three boards, six.

Horvath arrived, rapping at the metal grill that covered the entrance. As usual, he was wearing shapeless baggy pants and an oversized white nylon shirt. His glasses glinted blankly in the fluorescent light. Polly let him in.

“How’s he doing?” whispered Horvath eagerly.

“Ten boards,” shouted Rhett. “I’m in the groove today. Ten boards and I haven’t lost a man yet!”

Horvath and Polly exchanged a glance. After all the nasty, wild things Rhett has said last night, there was no question in her mind that Rhett had imagined his vision of the President. Surely Dr. Horvath knew this, too. But he looked so expectant! Why would an important professor take the trouble to come watch her crazy husband play Pac-Man at nine in the morning?

Horvath walked over to stand behind Rhett, and Polly trailed after. There is a single control on a Pac-Man machine, a sort of joystick. It controls the movements of a yellow disk on the screen: the disk moves in the direction in which you push the joystick. It’s not quite a disk, really; it’s a circle with one sector missing. The sector acts as a munching mouth, a hungry Chinese, a greedy Happy-Face, a Pac-Man. As you move it around, the Pac-Man eats the cookies and stop-signs in the maze.
Muncha-uncha-uncha-uncha
. Later there are also cherries, strawberries, grapes, birds, and bags of gold.
Gloooop
!

Rhett was on his fifteenth board now, and the four monsters that chased his yellow disk moved with a frightening degree of cooperation. But,
uncha-uncha-uncha
, the little Pac-Man slipped out of every trap, lured the monsters away from every prize.
Uncha-uncha-uncha-uncha-gloop
! Rhett ate a bag of gold worth five thousand points. That made a hundred-and-three thousand points. Horvath was transfixed, and even Polly was a little impressed. She’d never seen Rhett play so well.

The next few boards took longer. The monsters had stopped speeding up with each board. Instead they were acting smarter. Rhett had to expend more and more time on evasive action. The happy little Pac-Man moved about in paths so complex as to seem utterly random to anyone but Rhett. Seventeen boards. Nineteen.

On the twentieth board the monsters speeded back up. Rhett nearly lost a man. But then he knuckled down and ate the whole board in one intricately filigreed sweep.

The screen grew gray and full of static. And then there he was— Mr. President himself.

“Ron-Boy Ray-Gun,” said Horvath nastily. “I don’t believe it.”

“See?” snarled Rhett. “Now who’s crazy?”

”…thank you for helping our country,” the video screen was saying. Reagan looked friendly with his neat pompadour and his cocky, lopsided smile. Friendly, but serious. “Your photograph and fingerprints have been forwarded to the CIA for information retrieval. An agent will contact you to make payment in the sum of one thousand dollars. This offer cannot be repeated, and must be kept secret. Let me thank you again for making this a safer world.”

“That’s it,” said Rhett, straightening up and kicking the kinks out of his long, skinny legs.

“Are you sure?” demanded Horvath, strangely tense. “Couldn’t there be a higher level?”

“The screen’s blank,” shrugged Rhett. “The game’s over.”

“Push the Start button,” suggested Horvath.

“Pac-Man doesn’t give free games,” replied Rhett. “And I’ve got to open up in a few minutes.”

“Just try,” insisted Horvath. “Push the button.”

Rhett pressed the Start button with his skinny forefinger. The familiar maze appeared on the screen. The monsters moved out of their cave and the little Pac-Man started eating.
Uncha-uncha-uncha-unch
. Mesmerized by the sound, Rhett grabbed the joystick, meaning to dodge a hungry red monster.

But when Rhett touched the control, something about the image changed. It thickened and grew out of the screen. This was no longer a two-dimensional video image, but a three-dimensional hologram. The Pac-Man was a smiling little sphere sliding around a transparent three-dimensional maze. Rhett found that he could control his man’s movement in the new dimension by pushing or pulling the joystick. With rapid, automatic motions he dodged the monsters and set his man to eating cookies.

Polly was not so accepting of this change. “How did you know that would happen?” she demanded of Horvath. “What are you up to, anyway?”

“Just don’t disturb Rhett,” said Horvath, pushing Polly away from the machine. “This is more important than you can realize.” His hands felt strange and clammy.

Just then someone started shaking the steel grate at the entrance.

“Let them in,” called Rhett. “It’s almost time. I don’t
believe
this machine!” His face was set in a tight, happy smile. He’d eaten every cookie in his cubical maze now, and with a flourish of music it reset itself. Twenty-second board.

“Hey!” shouted the man at the grate. “Let me in there!”

He already had his wallet out.
Can’t wait to spend his money
, thought Polly, but she was wrong. The man had a badge to show her.

“CIA, Miss. I’m looking for Rhett Lyndon.”

“That’s my husband. He’s playing Pac-Man. Do you have the two thousand dollars?”

“He can only collect one. But he shouldn’t have told you!” The secret agent was a fit, avid-faced man in his thirties. He reminded Polly of a whippet. She rolled back the grate and he surged in, looking the whole room over at once.

“Who’s the other guy?”

“Beat it, pig!” shouted Horvath.

Polly had always known Dr. Horvath was a radical, but this outburst really shocked her. “You can leave, Dr. Horvath. We have some private business to discuss.”

Rhett glanced over with a brief, ambiguous smile. But then he had to give his full attention back to the game. The maze he was working seemed to have grown. It stuck more than a meter out of the machine now.

“I can do better than the Pentagon’s lousy thousand,” hissed Horvath. “I can give you anything you want, if only Rhett can help us defeat the Rull.”

“Freeze,” screamed the secret agent. He’d drawn a heavy pistol out of his shoulder-holster.

But rather than freezing, Horvath
flowed
. His whole body seemed to melt away, and thick gouts of green slime came surging out the bottoms of his pant-legs. The agent fired three wild shots anyway, but they only rippled the slime. And then a pseudopod of the stuff lashed out and struck the CIA man down. There was a moment’s soft burbling while the alien flowed over and absorbed its prey.

And then, as suddenly as it had started, the ugly incident was over. The slime flowed back from the agent, revealing only a clean spot on the carpet, and Dr. Horvath’s clothes filled back up. The head reappeared last of all, growing out of the nylon shirt’s collar like a talking puffball.