Death Dream (20 page)

Dan felt his brow knitting into a frown. "A secure line?"

"I can set up a call from Patrick Air Force Base."

"That's over at Cape Canaveral."

"Could you drive over there tonight?" Appleton's voice sounded strained, urgent. "Or tomorrow morning?"

"Tomorrow's Saturday," Dan muttered.

"I know it's an imposition, son, but I really need to talk this thing over with you."

Two dozen excuses ran through Dan's mind. The only time he had to spend with his kids was the weekend. There was a mountain of work to do here at ParaReality. Susan expected him to help her over the weekend. He hadn't seen Phil awake since last Sunday.

He heard himself say, "Eleven o'clock tomorrow morning. Will that be okay?"

"Fine," said Appleton. "Let me give you directions and the name of the officer who'll take care of you there."

CHAPTER 15

Dan blinked and tried to remember how he got here. He was walking down his old street in his old neighborhood in Youngstown. He recognized the kids playing on the sidewalks and they stopped their games to wave at him.

But they'd all be grown-ups now, he said to himself, just like me.

Then he smiled and realized what was happening. This is a simulation. And a damned good one. How the hell did Jace learn so much about my old neighborhood?

He passed the tobacco store where the kids all bought their comic books. Fat old Mr. Stein waved to him from the doorway. But how did I get into this sim? Dan asked himself. I don't remember.

Then he saw Doc Appleton standing by the street lamp on the corner.

"What're you doing here, Doc?" Dan asked.

Doc's form shifted and suddenly he was Jace in that black gunfighter's outfit.

Jace grinned at him. "Draw, Danno."

"But I don't have a gun. I'm not in your gunfight sim, Jace, this is—"

Jace pulled both revolvers from their holsters and fired point-blank. Dan felt the bullets slam into his chest and knock him over backward into pain and pain and more pain.

He sat bolt upright in bed, soaked with sweat, his chest flaming raw.

"Dan, what's the matter?" Susan reached for the lamp on her night table and turned it on.

Dan was wheezing so hard he could barely speak.

"Oh my God," said Susan. "Where's your inhalator?"

"Dream," Dan gasped. "I was . . . back . . ."

"Don't try to talk." Susan got out of the bed and went around to Dan's side. She rummaged in his night table drawer until she came up with the inhalator. Dan had not had to use it since they had come to Florida.

He fumbled with the little plastic cap, then got the mouthpiece between his teeth and squirted a long acrid spray of epinephrine down his throat. Susan put her own pillow atop his and plumped them up for him.

"You've never had an asthma attack in your sleep before," she said, sounding worried. Looking worried too, even in the nude.

Dan sagged back against the pillows. "I had a dream," he croaked. "A nightmare."

She got back in bed and pulled the sheet over them both. Resting her head on the pillows next to his, she stroked his chest lightly as she murmured, "It's all right, Dan. It was only a dream. You're all right now." She turned out the lights and they waited in the darkness for his breathing to return to normal. Susan fell asleep before Dan did, her head on his bare shoulder.
It was that damned gunfight
, Dan grumbled to himself.
Jace's damned gunfight. That's what I've been dreaming about all these weeks.

Dan squinted into the blaze of the setting sun while driving along the Beeline Expressway back toward Orlando.

Traffic was lighter than usual this late Saturday afternoon, mostly trucks and semi rigs barreling along at more than seventy miles per hour despite the posted speed limits. Dan glanced down at his daughter slumped on the bucket seat beside him, her braided hair blowing in the warm wind coming through the car's half-open windows.

Her safety belt had slipped over her slim shoulder; he wanted to adjust it and tighten it up but he would have to pull over and stop the car to do that. A double trailer rig whooshed past the old Honda, making it shudder in its turbulent wake. Dan decided to keep on going.
The sooner we get home the better. I'll fix it at the next toll booth; they've got 'em every ten minutes, seems like.

It had been a long afternoon of walking and gawking at the Kennedy Space Center. Despite her early indifference, Angela had stared wide-eyed at the immensity of the Saturn V rocket booster lying on its side. "It's bigger than a whale!" she had said. "Bigger than a whole lot of whales!"

And the Vertical Assembly Building was so huge that the space shuttle orbiter standing inside it looked almost like a toy until they got up close to it. "The world's biggest building," Dan has told his daughter over the hubbub of the other tourists. "It's so big that sometimes clouds form up near the ceiling and it rains in here."

Angela did not quite believe that, but she seemed to enjoy seeing the space hardware. She clicked away with her little camera, the bursts of its flash quickly lost in the immensity of the cavernous VAB.

If Angie was still bothered by her experience in the VR game at school she showed no signs of it. She talked with her father on the way over to Cape Canaveral about Mrs. O'Connell, her teacher, and the other kids in class and whether or not they could put up a Christmas tree next month even though Florida didn't look very Christmassy with no snow and even the pine trees along the highway didn't look like the kind of trees you could use for a Christmas tree. She never even mentioned the VR games, not once all during the drive to the Cape.

It was his conversation with Dr Appleton that kept preying on Dan's mind as he drove his sleeping daughter home. He had brought Angela to the communications center at Patrick Air Force Base, a pastel pink case full of magazines and hand-sized video games under her arm, and asked the officer of the day if there was someone who could take care of the twelve-year-old while he conducted his videophone call. The lieutenant's gold bars looked shining new on her shoulders. She had smiled and assured Dan that she would set up Angela at her own desk and personally keep an eye on her.

The video conference room was small and stuffy. Dan was surprised to see that its windowless walls were covered with faded photographs of Air Force planes and rocket launchings. He had expected wall-sized display screens, as Muncrief had installed at the lab. Instead there was a bank of ordinary television monitors lining one wall and a row of scruffy student-type chairs with writing arms attached to them facing the TV screens.

Dan slid into the chair that the tech sergeant pointed out for him, feeling as uneasy as if he had suddenly been thrown back into school. The screen in front of him brightened and then broke into a swirling pattern of colors that weaved and flickered nauseatingly. It took more than fifteen minutes for the link to Dayton to be descrambled so that Dan could see Dr Appleton's face.

The older man looked serious, almost grim. He was in his shirtsleeves, tie loosened from his collar as usual. Dan remembered that deep blue tie; he and Susan had given it to Doc many Christmases ago. But Appleton seemed much older than Dan remembered him: what was left of his receding hair was very gray and there were lines in his long narrow face that Dan had never noticed before.

"Good morning, Dan," said Appleton.

Inadvertently Dan glanced down at his wristwatch before replying, "Good morning, Doc." It was eleven twenty-two.

"I'm sorry to disrupt your weekend," Appleton said, "but we have a problem here and I need your help."

"What is it?"

Appleton hesitated a heartbeat, then, "Do you remember Jerry Adair?"

"Adair?"

"Fighter jock. A captain. Real towhead; his hair looked almost white."

Dan nodded. "Yes, I think so. What about him?"

The reluctance showed on Appleton's face. Dan saw that it was more than reluctance. Doc looked absolutely miserable.

"He's dead," Appleton blurted at last. "Died while flying the F-22 simulation."

Dan almost said, So what? But his mind worked fast enough to stop the words before they were spoken. Doc's telling me a fighter jock died while flying our simulation.

"You think that something in the simulation affected him physically?"

"We don't know," said Appleton.

"The simulation might have killed him? Our simulation?"

A shrug of the older man's bony shoulders.

"That's not possible, Doc. You know that. It's only a simulation. We couldn't even put in the g-forces that the pilot would feel in actual flight. The guy just sits in the cockpit and reacts to the program. How could that hurt anybody?

"We've gone through the program a hundred times in the two months since it's happened," Appleton said. "There doesn't seem to be anything unusual about it."

"Has anybody else been affected? Physically, I mean."

"Nobody's used it since Adair's death. We've spent the past two months checking and re-checking it."

"What'd he die of?"

"A stroke."

Dan snorted disdainfully. "Come on, Doc! The damned simulation couldn't give anybody a stroke—except maybe the poor slobs who have to program it."

Strangely, Appleton smiled. "You still feel possessive about it, don't you? Like a father feels about his child."

"That simulation couldn't hurt anybody," Dan insisted.

"Martinez wants to fly it himself, check it out."

"Ralph? I thought he was redlined."

Appleton nodded. "But flying the simulation isn't the same as flying for real. You said so yourself: the simulation can't hurt anybody."

"He's still got the blood pressure problem?" Dan asked.

"Yes."

Dan fell silent, telling himself that just because one pilot happened to die while flying the simulation doesn't mean a goddamned thing and there's nothing to worry about having Ralph fly it, high blood pressure notwithstanding.

But he heard himself asking, "The guy died of a stroke?"

"That's right."

"It
can't
be the simulation," he said again. "It must have been a coincidence."

"I was wondering," Appleton said slowly, "if you could find the time to come up here—maybe next weekend—look the program over, make sure we haven't missed anything."

Dan's heart sank. Inwardly he had feared that his old boss would ask for a favor like that.

"Doc, I really can't. I would if I could but the workload here is so tremendous I hardly get to see my kids anymore. We're under tremendous pressure . . ." His voice trailed off.

Appleton nodded grimly. "I should have guessed. I'm sorry, Dan. I didn't mean to lay this on you."

But you did it just the same
, Dan replied silently.

"It's not your responsibility," Appleton said, and Dan heard his real meaning, just the opposite. He and Jace had created the F-22 sim, but for almost a whole year after Jace had left for ParaReality, Dan had worked on it alone, improving it, putting in new wrinkles while Ralph Martinez constantly prodded him to make it tougher, more realistic.

"I had to bring Angie here with me just so I'd have a chance to be with her," Dan said.

"I could send an Air Force jet down there to get you. Fly up here Friday night and be back by Sunday night."

Dan realized he was gripping the little desk extension to his chair with both hands hard enough to hurt. "I can't, Doc. I just can't."

"Okay," said Appleton, his grim expression unchanged. "I understand."

"There's just too much in my lap right now. Maybe after April things'll ease off."

"Ralph wants to fly the simulation this coming week."

"Maybe that's the best thing to do. If he flies it and nothing happens then you'll know the other guy's death was just a freak accident."

Appleton's shoulders moved and then he brought his blackened old pipe to his mouth. Teeth clamped hard on its well-bitten stem, he asked, "How's Jace doing?"

"Up to his armpits in snakes, as usual."

Appleton made a wry smile. "And could you do me one favor?"

"Sure! What is it?"

"Talk over this situation here with Jace. See if he has any ideas that might help us."

"Yeah, okay. I can do that."

"I'd appreciate it."

"Sure. No sweat."

"Maybe you can give me a call early in the week, before Ralph gets into the simulator."

"Yeah. Right."

"Thanks, Dan. "

"Look, Doc—I'm really sorry I can't come up there like you want me to."

"It's all right. I understand."

"It's not that I don't want to help you."

Appleton took the pipe from his mouth. "I understand, Dan. And you're probably right, the simulation is probably perfectly okay. I'm just a worry-wart."

"I'll talk to Jace and call you Monday."

"Good. Thanks."

The blast of an air horn jolted Dan out of his reverie. Goddamned semi rig was inches away from his rear bumper; crawling right up his back. Dan flicked a glance at his speedometer: sixty-eight. He was in the right lane.

Why doesn't the sonofabitch pass me?

He pushed down on the accelerator and watched the speedometer's needle crawl past seventy. Another huge double trailer roared past him on the left and then the rig behind him pulled out and passed, shaking the Honda so hard that Dan almost went onto the shoulder of the road.

Those fighter jocks ought to try driving around here, he said to himself. If they don't get a stroke here they'll never have to worry about flying jets in combat.

CHAPTER 16

Indian summer in Ohio. The trees were bare, the gold and red and auburn leaves of autumn long since raked up and carted away. On the suburban Dayton street where the Martinezes lived only the gnarled old oaks on a few of the front lawns still bore some of their withered brown leaves. But the sky was deep blue, the sun warm. Indian summer: the last good weather before the gray cold of winter.

The Martinez house looked perfectly ordinary, a white saltbox with charcoal shutters and trim. A middle American home, it might have belonged to a junior corporate executive or a skilled factory worker, as did the houses on either side of it. Ralph Martinez was reclining on a folding lounge chair on the wooden deck he had built behind his house, wearing ragged cutoff shorts and a dark blue sweat shirt, but he was far from relaxed. The Cleveland Browns were on the screen of the portable TV he had brought outside with him; getting trounced by the Philadelphia Eagles. In one hand he gripped the remote control box for the little electric lawn mower that was faithfully humming up and down the still-green back lawn. His other held the portable phone to his ear.