Death Dream (13 page)

Then Jace discovered sex and his sudden realization of the true reason behind his father's slavery stunned and disgusted him.

When Jace was little, his father virtually ignored him. "You're not a human being until you can hold an intelligent conversation with me," Jace remembered his father telling him whenever he asked the soft-chinned man to play with him or help him in any way. Even when Jace was rushed to the hospital with acute appendicitis, his father went ahead with his trip to some conference on education. "I can't do anything to help the boy," he had said. "No reason for me to miss my conference."

Once Jace started going to school his father became an unbending tyrant, demanding that his son be the brightest, best behaved; most honored student in his class. Jace rebelled in little ways. School was so easy that he could not help but get good grades. But he played pranks on his teachers and got into fights with the other kids. He became a discipline problem. And he learned that he could play his mother against his father, get her to blame him for his difficulties in "adjusting to his peer group" while he blamed his wife for "spoiling the child rotten."

Jake's earliest friend was his TV set. His first memories were of cartoon characters such as Bugs Bunny and the Road Runner. He laughed with childish glee whenever Bugs outslicked Yosemite Sam or the cloddish Elmer Fudd. Later he graduated to superheroes who righted wrongs and won the world's admiration while wearing wonderful costumes with masks and capes. The only effective way his parents had to discipline him was to turn off his TV. Later they had to physically remove the set from his room. By the time he was a teenager he kept his cartoon addiction a secret from the few acne-faced friends he possessed, but the Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles were his companions every Saturday morning.

By then he had discovered video games. Every nickel and dime he could lay his hands on went into video arcades. He pestered his parents for games that he could play on his home computer and even promised to behave himself in school if they would only buy him more games. They found it easier to placate their son than to fight against his insatiable thirst for more and more complex video games.

When Jace was ready for college he looked like the stereotypical nerd: a tall, gangly, pock-faced kid with unruly hair, squinting narrow eyes, and nervous mumbling voice. He knew that love meant pain and sex meant subjugation. Yet he was not so much afraid of other people as uncertain of how to make friends—or even of the need to have friends. He was almost totally self-contained.

But he was a genius. That became clear as he breezed his way through his first year at Berkeley, where his father taught mathematics. Airily, Jace transferred to the California Institute of Technology.

"Do him good," Jace overheard his father say to his mother. "He thinks he's such a hotshot, wait till he gets to Cal Tech and finds that there are hundreds of other kids just as bright as he is. And even brighter. That'll take him down a peg or two." There was no one at Cal Tech brighter than Jace. At least, no one that he would admit was brighter. On a campus renowned for brilliance and a certain easiness when it came to discipline, Jace began truly to shine. Even his pranks won campus-wide admiration. He blossomed socially. He made friends, almost all of them fellow male students. He avoided most of the women on campus. Love meant pain. Sex meant subjugation. He substituted the worlds he could create inside computers. He longed to make those worlds real, alive.

After three years his despairing faculty advisor warned, "You've got to settle down to some curriculum, Jace! You're picking classes here and there and making no progress toward a degree."

Jace had no interest in a degree. He had no desire ever to leave Cal Tech. He loved his life there. He attended classes when he chose to, yet still passed them all with ease. He lived alone in a series of one-room apartments, always thrown out sooner or later by a landlord or landlady who could no longer stand his indifference to cleaning. One irate woman got the FBI to search his room, certain that all the electronic gadgetry Jace had accumulated could only be the tools of a high-tech terrorist or a madman.

Cal Tech shelters its geniuses only up to a point. After six years the administration made it clear that Jace had either to buckle down to a stiffly-regulated curriculum that would lead to a degree and graduation, or they would throw him out unceremoniously forthwith. Jace might have eventually gotten his degree if it had not been for Ralph Martinez.

Martinez was a captain then, just returned from a combat tour of the Persian Gulf and, much to his disgust, assigned to a public relations swing through the nation's leading universities. He gave his perfunctory little illustrated speech in one of the Cat Tech lecture halls, then—as ordered—"met informality with interested members of the student body."

Barely a dozen and a half students showed up at the student lounge to talk with Martinez. One of them was Jace. Most of the students were interested in the supersonic airplanes and high-tech weaponry that Martinez had shown in his slides. Jace's only interest was in being the star of the group, and that meant he had to bait the hardedged captain unmercifully.

"You enjoy killing Iraqis?" Jace asked, a big-toothed grin on his gaunt, angular face.

Martinez's eyes flashed like flint struck with steel but he said nothing. They stood facing each other, the tall lean scarecrow with his hair pulled back in a ragged ponytail and the stocky, square-shouldered captain in Air Force blue.

The other students, all male except for one buxom young woman with an overly loud voice, seemed to move back as if they were getting out of the way of a shoot-out.

"Don't mind him," said the young woman disdainfully. "He's sub-human."

Jake's smile widened. Without taking his eyes off Martinez he said, "I mean, does it give you a kick to drop bombs on helpless women and children?"

"We bombed military targets," Martinez snapped.

"Then who the hell bombed all those women and children we saw in the news?"

The young woman stepped in front of Jace, as if trying to separate him from the captain. "What is this, Lowrey? Now you're a political agitator?"

"I just wanna know what it's like to kill people," Jace replied. "I never met a killer before."

Obviously seething, Martinez repeated, "We bombed military targets. Not every bomb hit its intended target, though. There was some unintended collateral damage—"

"Like that civilian shelter," Jace said. "How many people did you kill in there? A hundred? Two hundred?"

Martinez said, "That was a military command post. We didn't know they had brought the civilians into it."

"I thought you were using smart bombs," Jace sneered. "They sound pretty stupid to me."

"Then make them smarter, wiseass."

That stung. "Me?"

"That's right: you. Do you think we're a bunch of homicidal maniacs? Do you think we enjoy risking our butts and dropping bombs on people?"

"Yeah, I think you do."

"Then think again, asshole. I love to fly. Nothing in the world beats the thrill of flying a high-performance jet. But combat is something else. I've been there. I can do without it, believe me."

Jace shook his head in distrust.

"And if you're so fucking worried that we're killing civilians by mistake," Martinez went on, "then come and help us build smarter weapons."

"Not me!"

"Sure, not you. You'd rather sit back and make wisecracks about us. But you won't help us to do our jobs better. You're too fucking chicken to put your brain in gear and tackle the toughest problems you'll ever face."

Jace gave the captain a studied grin and a one-finger salute, then left the room. Martinez had clearly won the exchange.

Two months later Jace showed up at Martinez's new office in Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

"What the hell are you doing here?" Martinez had demanded. On his shoulders were the bright golden oak leaves of a brand-new major.

"You're a hard guy to find," Jace said, standing in front of Martinez's desk like a tall shabby scarecrow. His tee-shirt proclaimed,
Split Atoms, Not Logs
.

"I've just been assigned here."

"Well, you said something about tackling the toughest problems I'll ever face. Okay, I'm willing to take a look at your problems."

Martinez stared at him for a long silent moment. What Jace had not revealed was that he was fleeing from Cal Tech's determined effort to get him to graduate. And that he had neither forgotten Martinez's besting of him nor forgiven him for it.

"I got to reading about what you guys are doing," Jace said. "I don't wanna work on any weapons; I'm not gonna help you kill anybody. But there was some pretty interesting stuff about cockpit simulations—building better simulators. I got some ideas about that."

Martinez eyed Jace warily, then reached for the telephone on his desk. "I'll ask Bill Appleton to take a look at you." To himself he added,
If anybody can put this kook in harness, Appleton's the one to do it.

Before the week was out Jace was happily working in Appleton's simulations laboratory. He sent a picture postcard to his parents in California. It showed an aerial view of the city of Dayton. Jace did not put a return address on the card.

Eventually he phoned his mother, just to hear her voice, just to tell her he was okay and doing well and maybe hear her say she was pleased that he called. Instead she told him that his father was in the hospital dying of cancer.

"I can't do anything to help the boy," Jace said, echoing his father's remark from twenty years earlier. "No reason for me to miss my conference."

He did not even bother to send a card when he moved to Florida; he had merely left his forwarding address with the Post Office. His mother had not written to him in the fourteen months since he had moved.

Jace bicycled up to his bungalow in the yellowish light of the street lamps out on the avenue. The bungalow was tucked away behind the houses that fronted on the street.

Ghostly blue flickers from TV screens lit most of the windows he passed. The gravel driveway was dark, but he knew every bump of it. Somebody was barbecuing ribs: burning them, from the smell of it, Jace thought.

He leaned the bike against the bungalow wall next to the front door, then pecked out the elaborate security code on the keypad he had installed in the door jamb.

It beeped and winked green lights at him and the door popped open with a sigh and a puff of air like the airlock of a contamination-proof biology lab or an aerospace clean room.

The track lights he had installed along the ceiling came on automatically as Jace stepped into the room and kicked the door shut behind him. He had carefully opaqued all the windows and knocked down all the partitions, turning the bungalow into a single room that never saw sunlight. It was filled with television sets, computer boxes, display screens, keyboards, dull black remote control units scattered everywhere, green circuit boards lying on the floor, on the bed, on the long work tables that were the main item of furniture in the one room. Microchips lay everywhere like a fine high-tech dust. There was not a book, not a magazine or a journal or a report anywhere; not even a newspaper or a TV listing.

There was one chair in the room, a jet black curved recliner that looked like an astronaut's acceleration couch. Jace stretched out on it, his booted feet hanging past its end, cranked it down almost to a prone position and reached for the TV remote controls on the floor where he had left them. He turned on three of the TV sets lined against the wall, each of them showing a different channel, each of them muted to absolute silence.

There was no refrigerator in the house, no stove or microwave oven. Jace had removed the entire kitchen and covered the sawed-off pipes with cabinets that held videotapes. He ate at the lab and, lately, had been taking his infrequent showers there too. His own bathroom was too filthy even for him to feel comfortable in it.

Got to clean out that mess one of these days, he told himself as he stretched out on the couch, watching all three television screens at once. He knew he should be working on Muncrief's special project; he had the laser disc Muncrief had recorded from his special run of the Neptune's Kingdom game. But what Muncrief wanted bothered Jace down at a level of conscience that he seldom felt. There's nothing wrong with it, he told himself. He's not hurting the kid. Still, he felt uneasy, almost afraid.

Muncrief's a weirdo; I should never have gotten tied up with him. Except—except he gives you a free hand to do what the hell ever you like. He's right about that. Nobody else'd give me that kind of latitude. As long as I can keep him happy about his special project, I can do whatever else I want.

Aw, to hell with him, Jace told himself. So I'll make him the program he wants. So what if it's Dan's kid he's got the hots for. It won't hurt her and Dan'll never know about it. The kid herself will never know about it. And now that Dan's here we can polish off this friggin' baseball program and go on to some really neat stuff.

With a snort he pushed himself up from the couch and went to the table where he kept his helmet and data gloves. He slid a disc into the CD player that was hooked up to a series of computers that he had wired together, then slipped on the helmet and gloves. Trailing their wires he went back to the couch and stretched out his lean, lanky body. Now he was in a world of his own making, a world of enslaved robots and hordes of slimy evil alien soldiers ruled by a viciously beautiful goddess who looked very much like his mother.

His object was to wipe out the evil alien armies, liberate the robots, and capture the goddess queen for his own pleasure.

CHAPTER 11

"But she's got to use the VR booths," said Eleanor O'Connell. "The school's entire teaching methodology is based on the virtual reality systems."

Susan frowned worriedly. "Angie seems to be afraid of them."

"I can understand that, but we've got to work together to help her overcome this bad experience."

The two women were sitting in comfortable armchairs in a corner of the teacher's lounge of the Pine Lake Middle School. Susan was impressed with the near-luxury of the lounge's carpeted floor and cushioned chairs. There were neat little tables in front of a row of gleaming machines that dispensed snack foods and cold drinks. A coffee-maker burbled next to the sink where someone had left a white cardboard box filled with doughnuts. A couple of other teachers were relaxing on the sofas by the windows on the other side of the room. One of the women was smoking; Susan's nose wrinkled at the acrid smell of the cigarette.