Death Dream (21 page)

"I didn't think you'd get any help from him," Martinez was saying into the phone.

Dr Appleton's voice replied, "Don't be so sure, Ralph. Dan takes a while, but he generally gets there. He'll think this over and call me back in a few days, you wait and see."

"A phone call won't solve our problem."

"Maybe he'll get Jace to think about it," Appleton said hopefully.

"That flake! He doesn't give a shit about anything but himself. He's not going to help us."

"I wouldn't write him off altogether."

"He's a jerkoff. We can't sit around waiting for him. Or for Dan, either."

"You really want to fly the simulation yourself, then?"

Cleveland's quarterback disappeared under a ferocious green tide of Eagles linemen. Martinez winced. "Yeah," he said into the phone. "I want to get the equipment cranked up tomorrow morning."

"It'll take a few days to run through everything, check it all out."

"I want to be in the cockpit no later than Wednesday."

"Why the rush?"

Martinez knew that if he said Wednesday, maybe by the end of the week the simulator would be ready for him. But he said to Appleton, "Every day we wait is a day lost. That simulator was built to train fighter pilots, not sit idle and soak up tax money."

He heard Appleton chuckle softly. "All right. All right. We'll have it ready for you by Wednesday even if we have to work overtime."

"Good," said the colonel. "Do it."

"Have a nice weekend. What's left of it."

"You too, Doc."

As he put the phone down on the wooden planking, Dorothy pushed the back door open, carrying a tray of snacks and two bottles of beer.

"How's the game going?"

"Don't ask."

"That bad?"

"Worse."

She put the tray down on the table at her husband's elbow and pulled up the other recliner. Dorothy Aguilera had been the prettiest secretary in the lab when Martinez had first arrived at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, a smoldering raven-haired Latin beauty with big flashing eyes and a warm sparkling smile. Every man on the base was after her, even many of the married men tried to chase her down. Now, more than a dozen years later, she was still a feast for the eyes in suede jeans and a scoop-necked cotton tee shirt that clung to her deliciously. She dressed to please her husband and she was very successful at it.

"The mower's heading for my flower bed," she said as she handed him one of the beers.

"It'll turn around in time," said Martinez. "I checked the program this morning."

Dorothy looked doubtful. When Ralph had first brought the little robot home it had thoroughly chewed up the beds of impatiens and marigolds that edged the front lawn.

"Who was on the phone?" She asked.

"Doc."

"Did I hear you say you were going to fly the simulation yourself?"

"Yeah." He turned away from her and watched the lawn mower. It stopped short of the flower bed, executed a precise ninety-degree turn, and began cutting the grass along the edge of the bed, just as he had programmed it to do.

But Dorothy was no longer worried about her flowers. "Why do you have to fly it? Why can't—"

"It's just a simulator. It's on the ground. I won't really be flying."

"Jerry was killed in it, wasn't he?"

Martinez tried to concentrate on the football game. The Eagles had fumbled the ball away; a break for Cleveland, at last.

"Wasn't he?" Dorothy insisted, her voice rising.

Martinez turned back toward his wife. Her eyes were fiery.

"Look," he said. "I'm supposed to be the leader of this group. We've got a problem and it's up to me to find the answer. That's my job. That's what I get paid to do."

She reached out and touched his arm, stroking it gently as she said, "
Querido
, there must be dozens of pilots who can fly the simulator."

He tried to control his temper. I shouldn't get angry at her, he told himself. She loves me. She's just trying to protect me. But dammit, she doesn't understand! After all these years she still doesn't understand anything at all.

"There isn't any real danger," he mumbled.

"Then let one of the others do it."

"No!" he snapped. "It's my responsibility. I'll do it myself."

Dorothy knew her husband's limits. She knew how angry he was that he'd been grounded by the medics.

She knew how worried he was that he would be passed over for promotion to full colonel and forced to retire from the Air Force.

"It's bad enough they won't let me fly until this damned blood pressure comes down," he said. "If it looks like I'm scared even to get into a goddamned simulator, what'll they think of me?"

She leaned across the distance between them and brought her lips close enough to kiss him. "Anyone," she whispered, "who thinks that my husband is afraid of anything is a damned idiot."

But she was afraid. And he could feel her trembling for him.

As he drove to work Monday morning, his mind churning over his phone conversation with Dr Appleton, Dan could not help but think back to his daughter's bad experience that first week of school. Angie seemed normal enough now. She had not had any more problems with the VR games. Yet she had fainted. And an Air Force pilot had died. In VR simulations.

There can't be anything in the simulation that would kill a pilot, he told himself. The worst physical stress we can put into the simulator is to tilt the cockpit and slew it around to give the guy inside a feeling of the plane's motion. We can't duplicate the g's he'd be pulling in a real flight.

But when he arrived at ParaReality he went straight to Jace's office. Miraculously, it had been cleaned up. Most of the papers that had littered the chairs and floor were gone. Dan could see that Jace had even cleared off his desk. He was bent over the keyboard of his computer terminal, long slim fingers flashing like a concert pianist's. They looked boneless, like snakes, they were moving so fast.

Dan sat wordlessly in one of the plastic chairs in front of the desk. Jace did not seem to notice him; his eyes were focused entirely on the computer screen.

After a few minutes, Dan said, "Jace?" Then louder, "Hey, Jace!"

"Not yet," Jace mumbled, still bent over his keyboard.

"Might as well get a cup of coffee," Dan said, and he started to get up from the chair.

"Don't go," said Jace, still without looking up. "Hang on a minute."

Dan let himself drop back into the chair. It squeaked. Then the only sound in the room was Jace's click-click-clicking on the computer keys.

"Right!" Jace said at last. "Got it!" He lifted his hands triumphantly and turned, grinning, toward Dan. "That oughtta do it."

"Do what?" Dan asked.

"Fill in the background details of the baseball simulation. Now all you've gotta do is get that time-sharing program from Frankel and we're ready to knock Muncrief's socks off."

Dan's gut tightened. "I phoned Frankel—"

"Yeah, yeah. He returned your call last night. Message is on your machine."

"Last night? Sunday?"

"He said to call him this morning at ten sharp. He'll be waiting for your call."

"Oh."

"So how'd you spend your weekend?" Jace leaned so far back in his chair Dan feared it would tip over. He locked his hands behind his head, planted his boots on the desktop and stretched so hard Dan could hear his vertebrae pop.

"Doc's got a problem."

"Appleton?"

"One of the fighter pilots died in our simulation," Dan said.

Jake's eyes narrowed. "Who? Martinez?"

"No. A guy named Adair."

"Never heard of him."

"Doc says he had a stroke while he was flying the simulator."

Jace shrugged. "Tough."

"Doc's worried that maybe something in the simulation affected him."

"Bullshit! How could anything in the simulation hurt anybody? Doc's going off the deep end without his snorkel."

"Still—"

Jace swung his legs off the desk and jumped to his feet. "Come on, we've got our own fish to fry. I wanna try this new background graphics before you call Frankel."

He pushed past Dan and went out the door, heading for their lab. Shaking his head, Dan got up and followed him.

The background was damned good, Dan saw. Better than good. He stood up close to the six-foot display screen and studied the details carefully. Yankee Stadium, crowded to the topmost tier. He could see individual people sitting in their seats, walking up and down the concrete steps between sections, munching hotdogs, making a wave.

"Damn, it looks great," he called to Jace, across the cluttered lab. "Details as crisp as they can be."

Jace was worming a data glove onto his left hand. "I'm gonna try it out on the system. You get back to your office and call Frankel. We need his time-sharing program!"

"What if he can't talk about it?" Dan asked.

"Then we'll have to get Muncrief to put the squeeze on him."

"Muncrief?"

"The big boss has lots of friends in high places. Frankel might not want to help me, the little shit, but Muncrief can get people in Washington to put pressure on him."

"I don't think so, Jace," said Dan. "After all, we're talking about programs that're probably classified."

"Classified, my ass! Haven't you heard, the Cold War is over. They got Russians working side-by-side with them in the Star Wars offices now. They got no right to keep anything from us. Not a simple little time-sharing program, at least."

Simple little time-sharing program
, Dan thought.
If it's so damned simple why don't we work it out for ourselves instead of begging Bob Frankel for help?

But he went back to his own office, fidgeted nervously for six minutes, and then at thirty seconds before ten he told his phone to get Frankel.

"Frankel here." His voice came from the phone's built-in speaker.

Dan picked up the handpiece. "Hello, Bob. It's Dan Santorini."

"Hello, Dan. Haven't heard from you in a long while., Frankel's voice sounded tight to Dan, not suspicious, exactly, but not brimming with good cheer either.

"I'm working at ParaReality now. In Orlando."

"With Jace, huh?"

"Yeah."

"How is the big jerk?"

"He's fine. We're doing some interesting things here."

"Yeah? Like what?"

As Dan described their work on the interactive games the tension between the two men began to ease. The personality clashes between Frankel and Jace faded into the distant background as the intrigue and excitement of technical challenges pushed it away.

"This is all proprietary stuff, by the way," Dan was saying. "I'm trusting you to keep it to yourself until the park opens."

"Who's the head of your outfit?"

"Kyle Muncrief."

"Never heard of him."

"He's not a technical guy. He's a businessman."

"Oh."

Dan had gone as far as he could. He had run out of chat. Frankel had not asked why he had called, so he had to bring up the subject himself.

Very reluctantly Dan said, "Bob, I wonder if you could help me with a problem we've run into."

"Me? Help you? You mean help the boy genius, don't you? The guy who wants to be God?"

"I know you and Jace didn't get along—"

"That's putting it mildly."

"But it's really me who needs the help."

"If you're working with Jace then he's the one who needs the help and he's too big of an asshole to ask me for it himself. He's using you as an errand boy."

Grimacing, Dan asked, "Don't you even want to hear what the problem is?"

A long silence from the other end of the connection, broken only by Frankel's breathing. Finally, "All right, what is it?"

Dan described his idea of splitting the computers" time between the foreground images and the background.

"Sure, we've done things like that here. Hell, we've got to keep track of the thousand objects at once, all of them flying at hypersonic speeds, all in real time. The only way to do it is with stuttering."

"Stuttering?"

"That's what it's called. Jumping the sensors from one object to another in nanosecond timeframes. Or less."

Stuttering.
"Is it classified?"

"The particular programs we use sure as hell are. But the technique isn't. It's been published in at least one of the math journals."

Bingo! Dan said to himself. Trying to keep his voice from showing too much excitement, he asked, "Do you remember which one?"

"Not offhand. And I'm not going to look it up for you, either. Find it for yourself. That's what NREN and CompuServe and all those other electronic databases are for."

"Okay, right. I'll look it up."

Another hesitation. Then, "I've got a paper coming out on the subject. It'll be in the
Journal of Applied Mathematics
in January or February."

"Gee, could you fax me a copy of it?"

"So you can help Jace get rich?"

The idea of money had never entered Dan's head. But he swiftly replied, "I think I could get Muncrief to hire you as a consultant. How does that strike you?"

Frankel actually laughed. "Have you forgotten everything they drummed into your skull when you worked for the Air Force? Remember the conflict of interest regulations?"

"Oh. Yeah."

"If this stuff about stuttering helps you, get me a lifetime pass to your Cyber World."

"Okay. Sure. I can do that."

"And tell Jace I still think he's a horse's ass. In spades. Tell him that."

CHAPTER 17

Victoria Kessel leaned back in her chintz-covered armchair and said to the speaker phone, "If you've used the game yourself, Sue, then you must have seen that there's nothing in it to cause any harm to anyone."

Coming over the phone's speaker, Susan Santorini's voice sounded strained and implacable. "But it's not just that one game. It's almost all of them! The games that Angela describes to me all seem to be tailor-made just for her. There are differences—"

"The differences are in your daughter's perception of her experience," Victoria said, trying to keep patient.

Susan could hear the growing edge in Vickie's voice. She was sitting in her kitchen alcove, her morning's work pushed aside as she tried to track down what was happening to Angela. Every time she asked her daughter about the VR games at school Angela told her how wonderful they were.