Death Dream (11 page)

Muncrief was on the phone, but he waved Dan into his office and pointed a finger like a pistol at one of the upholstered chairs in front of his broad cherrywood desk.

Dan sat as Muncrief said suavely into the phone, "That's right. The Pine Lake Middle School. It's the only one in the country . . . Sure, we could arrange a visit for you. I think you'll be very impressed. And the teachers love it! They don't need any special training, either. A day's orientation at the beginning of the school year is all it takes."

Dan's eyes wandered to the architect's rendering on the wall behind Muncrief: a low, windowless building of pure white with a tall slender tower by its entrance, almost like a minaret. Over the front door was emblazoned CYBER WORLD in computer-style letters.

Muncrief smiled at Dan as he continued, "That's fine. Great. I'll have my assistant set up a visit for you. Her name's Victoria Kessel. Hang on, I'll transfer you . . ."

He punched buttons on the phone console like a man whacking at mosquitoes. "Vickie? Got the superintendent of schools from St Louis on the phone. She wants to visit Pine Lake. Set it up, okay?"

He banged the phone back into its cradle. "Those school people! They're so unbelievably slow to move you could starve to death before they start to say hello."

Dan wanted to talk about buying more hardware, not the shortcomings of school administrators.

"We've got the best thing to hit education since lead pencils and all they do is pussyfoot around and come to visit and tell me how tight their blasted budgets are."

"Well maybe—"

"You know how much that school is costing me? A good-sized fortune, every month. But I keep it going because one of these days VR is going to be the only way those people will build their schools. The only way."

"We've got a problem," Dan blurted.

Muncrief raised his eyebrows. Dan began to explain that they needed more hardware to make the baseball simulation completely realistic. Muncrief's usually smiling face got tauter and tauter as Dan talked, and he realized that Jace had sent him in here because he didn't want to face the boss's ire.

"Another Toshiba!" Muncrief exploded. "Do you know what they cost?"

"We'll only need one—"

"The hell you do! You listen to me, Dan. I hired you to keep Jace happy, not to come running to me asking for money. If Jace can solve his problems with more hardware, what do we need you for? He's already got a Toshiba and two Crays and God knows what else. That's it! The piggy bank is busted! Now get back there and tell that big genius to get his brain in gear and make that baseball game work!"

Dan clenched his teeth so hard his jaw hurt. He pushed himself up from the chair and headed for the door.

"Hey, Dan, wait a minute," Muncrief called.

Dan turned back toward him.

The suave smile was back in place. "I didn't mean to yell at you. I know you're doing your best. It's just that we're running tight, financially. You know, I don't have the capital for major new equipment buys. Jace told me he had enough hardware when he asked me to hire you. There just isn't enough money in the company to buy anything big. Our cash flow is negative."

Dan nodded, tightlipped, not trusting himself to say anything.

"And besides," Muncrief added, pointing to his blank computer screen, "every additional dollar we spend on computer power for the simulation increases the ticket price we'll have to charge the customers. The accountants tell me we're already up against the limit that we can reasonably charge. We've got to be competitive with Disney and the other amusement parks, especially at the beginning."

Dan nodded. "I understand."

"You guys have to solve your problems without more hardware."

"I'll see what we can do."

Dan got as far as the door.

"Another thing," Muncrief said.

Turning, Dan saw that Muncrief was standing behind his desk, his face deadly serious.

"The media's gotten wind of what we're doing. We've been getting calls; reporters are starting to sniff around."

"So?"

"All media contacts must be handled by the front office. Understand that? I don't want any of the staff talking to reporters on their own. Somebody calls you, somebody starts pumping you at the local bar, somebody bumps into you at the supermarket—you tell 'em to talk to me. And you tell me or Vickie right away. We can't have leaks to the media! I don't want to wake up some morning and see a scare story about us on
Good Morning, America
."

"I carried a Top Secret clearance most of the time I worked for the Air Force," Dan said, barely keeping the anger out of his voice. "I know how to keep my mouth shut."

"Good," said Muncrief.

As he walked down the corridor toward the simulations lab, where Jace waited, Dan did not wonder why Muncrief was so afraid of the media. His mind kept echoing Muncrief's words,
I hired you to keep Jace happy. He hired me because I'm cheaper than a supercomputer. I'm cheaper than buying new hardware.

"No more hardware," Dan answered Jace, who was still slanted rigidly across the wooden chair. "I thought he'd have a stroke right there in his office, he got so worked up."

"Maybe he'd leave us enough in his will to buy the extra machine."

Dan grinned, despite himself. "Intel's working on a teraflop machine," he mused.

"Yeah, the Paragon XP/T," Jace muttered. "Probably cost a mint and have more bugs in it than Guatemala."

"It's not ready yet, anyway," said Dan.

Jace opened both eyes and lifted his chin a little.

"Muncrief must be really strapped for cash. He's always bought me whatever I asked for."

"Like me," Dan said, repeating silently that he was not worth as much as a new machine.

Jace ignored the thrust. "You're just gonna have to come up with something brilliant, Danno."

"Hey, you're the genius. I'm just a glorified technician."

It was a standing joke between them, sometimes a bitter joke. Jace took all the credit for their work and Dan stayed in the background, telling himself that Jace could not get along without him. But he knew that it was a lie; Jace did not need him. He might have found his life a little easier with Dan around, but if Dan disappeared off the face of the earth Jace would barely notice he was gone. Dan had been surprised and hurt when Jace had left him behind in Dayton; his comfortable view of their partnership and his own worth had crumbled. His work deteriorated; he was hell to live with and he knew it. Dr Appleton tried to straighten him out; Susan tried to be understanding and supportive. But then Jace had phoned and asked Dan to come to Florida with him and Dan's world bloomed into spring.

Until he realized that he would be leaving Dr Appleton, the man who had given him his chance, his career. The man who had been better than a father to him.

"I'll be able to develop VR systems for teaching," Dan had said to Appleton. "Medical systems for surgery, systems for operating spacecraft remotely—all the things we've dreamed about."

Appleton had nodded understandingly. "You might as well go with Jace, Dan. You haven't been much good to us or yourself since he went away."

Dan straddled the plastic chair backwards and leaned his chin on his forearms. "Why don't we just let the background details fuzz out? We can make the individual batter stand out when you're in the field, and the infielders and the pitcher when you're at bat. The details of the stadium and the crowd don't matter that much, do they?"

"The hell they don't!" Jace sat up in his chair, both eyes snapped fully open.

"But—"

"This is supposed to be an experience, buster. A full friggin' three-dimensional experience with sight and sound and feeling. The background is important. Vital. I don't want the user to think he's in some friggin' video arcade! I want him to be there! Yankee Stadium or Wrigley Field or whatever, he's got to be there with full detailed sights and sounds. Even smells."

"The smells are easy!" Dan said. "We can just pipe some vapor into the VR chamber."

"That's cheating."

"But it would work."

"Yeah. Maybe. It's the friggin' visual details we've gotta sharpen up. We can't go brute force if Muncrief won't spring for another Toshiba."

"It would make the price of the game a lot higher than Cyber World wants it to be, that's for sure."

"So we've gotta go smart instead of brute force. And we gotta do it pronto, Tonto. How can we get more detail without more computer power?"

Dan puffed out a breath. "Good question."

Jace went back to his rigid posture."

"What is this, yoga or something?" Dan asked. "I never saw you do this before."

"Shut up and lemme think." Jace closed his eyes and folded his arms across his scrawny chest.

With a shake of his head, Dan got up from his chair and started pacing the length of the lab again. There's got to be some way to put more of our existing power into the visual details, he told himself. Without sacrificing the background details. Got to be.

But another part of his mind argued, You can't get something for nothing. If you put more MIPS into the close-up details you're going to have to take bytes away from something else. That's all there is to it.

Dan started to agree with himself, but suddenly a new thought struck him. The persistence of vision. He had read the phrase somewhere, something about the earliest attempts to make motion pictures, a century or more ago.

The persistence of vision. What is there—

The phone rang.

Jake's chair was two feet from the desk where the phone sat, but he remained fixed in his rigid closed-eyed position.

Dan hurried toward the desk as the phone rang again. It was starting its third ring when he picked it up and snapped, "What is it?"

Susan's voice answered, "Dan, I'm sorry to bother you at the lab—"

"What's wrong? What's happened?"

"Nothing too terrible," Susan said. Her voice sounded steady and almost calm. Dan thought he heard a slight tremor in it. He waited for her to continue.

"I'm at the school. Angie's had a fainting spell. The doctor thinks it was just from excitement. She was using one of the VR games when it happened and she just seems to have screamed and fainted but there was nothing physically wrong and she seems okay now."

Dan thought that if Susan really believed Angie was okay she wouldn't have called him.

"Are you taking her home?" he asked.

"Yes. Mrs. O'Connell and the doctor both think it's best to take her home and let her rest for the remainder of the day."

"Mrs. O'Connell?"

"Eleanor O'Connell. Angie's teacher."

"Oh."

"I'm going to drive her home now."

"I'll come right home. Is Angie really okay? Can she talk on the phone?"

"You can talk to her when you get home."

"Yeah. Sure. Okay, I'm on my way."

He hung up the phone and found that Jace was sitting up. Peering narrow-eyed at him.

"What's wrong?" Jace asked.

"Angie fainted at school."

"Fainted?"

"While she was in one of the VR games."

Jake's face contorted into a frown. "How can she faint in a VR game? It doesn't make sense."

With a shake of his head, Dan reached for his jacket. "I'm finding out that twelve-year-old girls don't make sense very often."

"I told you not to have kids!" Jace called out after him as he headed down the corridor for the back parking lot, his jacket flung over his shoulder.

Vickie Kessel was on the telephone, promising the principal of Pine Lake Middle School that she would send a technician to check out the VR equipment that ParaReality had installed in the classrooms. A student had fainted while using the equipment and the principal insisted on a thorough check.

"Of course," Vickie soothed. "I'll have a team over there in less than an hour and they'll work all night, if they have to. We want that equipment to operate properly just as much as you do."

As she hung up the phone she saw Jace storm past the open door of her office, his lantern-jawed face set into an angry grimace. There could only be one person the company's resident genius was headed for. Curious, Vickie got up from her chair and headed for the corridor.

Sure enough, Jace ducked through the doorway to Kyle Muncrief's office and slammed the door behind him. She heard Jace's voice, but it was too muffled for her to make out the words. Then Kyle said something, loud and impatient.

Glancing both ways along the corridor to make sure that she was alone, Vickie tiptoed to Muncrief's video conference room and closed its door softly. Through the door that connected to Kyle's office she could hear the two men arguing. She went to the door and pressed her ear against it.

"What did you do?" Jace's voice.

"I just manipulated the game a little. That's all."

"You went too friggin' far!"

"Nonsense."

"Don't bullshit me, man. She's just a kid!"

"I didn't hurt her. How could I possibly hurt her?"

"She passed out, for chrissakes! You musta scared the crap outta her."

"We needed to get her reaction, didn't we?" Muncrief said, his voice high, defensive. "Okay, so we got it."

"Not so friggin' soon! She's just a kid. You shoulda worked up to it one step at a time."

"I didn't think it would hit her so hard. I don't want to hurt her, that's the last thing I want."

"She's just a kid," Jace repeated.

"Look, it's over and done with. She'll be okay and we've got the reaction we wanted. Right here on the laser disc."

"I oughtta quit," Jace said, sounding furious. "I should never have let you talk me into this. It's crazy. He's my best friend, for chrissakes."

"He'll never know. Unless you tell him."

"Why the hell did you hafta pick his daughter? There must be twenty kids in the friggin' class!"

"I didn't want it to be this way." Muncrief's voice turned almost desperate, pleading. "I need her. She's the one I need."

"I oughtta just walk out that friggin' door and never come back."

"You can't do that! You'll never find another company that'll give you a free hand to develop what you like, somebody who'll go to the edge of chapter eleven to buy you all that fancy hardware and get you the assistants that you want. You know that."