Total Recall (2 page)

A lesser man would have rappelled, passing the cable under his left thigh and over his right shoulder, using a double line that he allowed to lengthen slowly for the descent. Quaid didn’t bother; he simply handed himself down almost as if on a ladder. His feet jumped down the wall a yard at a time, keeping him away from it. Child’s play!

He paused a few yards down, looking up. The woman leaned over the rim. The upper portion of her body showed in silhouette, her head seeming to be lighted because of the translucence of the helmet. She looked like an angel on a painted ceiling. The full moon Phobos floated above her head, completing the halo.

She put her hand to her helmet, then flung it out, blowing him a kiss.

Quaid felt a surge of emotion. God, she was beautiful!

But he had business. He waved back, then resumed his downward progress. He realized that he didn’t have to use his hands; the reel could be set to pay out the cable at a steady rate. He adjusted it and let go.

Sure enough, he continued down at the same rate as before. This freed his hands for anything else they might be needed for. He relaxed and looked around.

Moonlight illuminated the pit, showing him details he had not been able to see from above. There were dozens of gigantic vertical pipes rising from the depths, reminding him vaguely of a monstrous calliope. Somehow he was sure they didn’t play music! But what
did
they do? They weren’t here as a work of Martian art!

There was a vibration at his waist. Something was going wrong with the reel! He grabbed for it, but his clumsy gloves either had no effect or made things worse. The cable uncoiled at a terrifying rate.

Quaid plunged into the bottomless abyss. He flailed wildly, trying to stop himself. His feet lost contact with the wall, and he spun around, seeing the wall, the pipes, and the space between them whirl dizzyingly as he fell.

“Doug!” It was the woman, calling in alarm from above.

He tried to answer, but was too disoriented even to do that. He kept falling, hurtling down into the void, out of control.

“Doug!” her voice came, despairingly, faint in the distance.

The abyss filled with bright white light. Quaid knew it was the end. Somehow he wasn’t frightened; all he could do was meet his destiny.

CHAPTER  2
Lori

Q
uaid woke, startled. He was in bed, on Earth, quite safe. The bedroom was bathed in morning light. As he reoriented and his heartbeat returned to normal, he realized that he should have known that his experience wasn’t real. He had never been to Mars, so how could he have found himself there, without even questioning it, without knowing how he had come? He had simply popped into existence on the barren surface, and met a girl, and gone into a cave or crevice in the side of a mountain shaped like a pyramid, and down into a huge hole. Did any of that make sense on any rational basis? In the dream he had accepted it, but that was the way of dreams.

Now his mind reviewed it, finding place after place where the scene broke down. All that light from that tiny moon? Well, maybe; how could he know, without being there? But that cable—why hadn’t he simply grabbed it and halted his fall? There was no question of his ability to do that; it was attached to him, so he could have circled it at its exit from the reel with his gloved hand, and clamped down, and held on. With his weight only a fraction of its Earth amount, and the power of his arms, it would have been like catching a huge turkey someone threw to him. A jolt, but not impossible. Only the ambience of the dream had made that fall seem inevitable.

Yet a trifling detail bothered him most.
Doug!
the woman had called. That meant she knew him, though he could not draw her name from his memory. Not Mr. Quaid, not Douglas, but Doug, cried out with feeling. That feeling summoned a return feeling from him, even now that he was out of the dream, back in reality. She was important to him, more than important; she—

Then the rest of it clicked into place.
How had he been able to hear her call
—there in the near-vacuum of Mars’ atmosphere? They had not spoken throughout the dream, but there at the end the verisimilitude, the semblance of truth, had broken down.

The bright light at the conclusion—that was
this
light, the light of day on Earth, more intense than that of Mars. Not the brilliance of Heaven or the inferno of Hell encountered at his death, but the ordinary brightness of ordinary day when he overslept. That was a relief!

Yet that voice still tugged at him. That woman . . .

There was someone with him. Quaid blinked and looked.

A beautiful creature was leaning over him. She wore a filmy nightgown that was falling open with a readiness that had to be intentional, to reveal portions of her splendid anatomy. She was not the girl of the dream; she was a stunning blond Amazon. His wife, Lori. How could he have forgotten!

“You were dreaming,” she said sympathetically as she reached forward to wipe the sweat from his brow.

He did not answer, distracted by the clear sight of her full breasts within the hanging nightgown. He had of course seen them many times before, but somehow he never got tired of looking. Talk of impressive architecture . . .

“Mars again?” she inquired solicitously. Her breasts moved as her arm did, as she completed cleaning his face.

He nodded, still upset by the experience, though he was rapidly coming to terms with the current situation. What did the woman of the dream have that Lori didn’t? Brown hair, maybe; nothing else. And Lori wasn’t exactly wearing a space suit.

Suddenly he realized that the Mars-woman’s voice had not been an error in the dream. They had been in space suits, and space suits had intercoms or whatever. He had heard her via his helmet system! It encouraged him to make that connection; it meant that his dream wasn’t quite as farfetched as he had thought.

Lori, mistaking his distraction, started to caress him. Her hand trailed down his neck, and she squeezed the muscle of his shoulder. She liked his muscles, and liked touching them; they were a turn-on for her, and he hardly objected to that.

“My poor baby,” she murmured, stroking his pectoral muscle. “Poor thing, with those bad dreams, those horrible nightmares.” She brought her head down, kissing the crotch of his neck and shoulder in a way that might have been comforting, but was becoming erotic. “Is that better?”

Her lips were moving across his chest, pausing in the region of the nipple. Her eyes angled up to sight on his face. He didn’t want her to stop. “Mm-hmm,” he said.

Lori resumed progress, working her way down toward his belly. She was trying to seduce him, he knew, to take his mind off the dream, and she was good at it. He was happy to let her continue. If only the woman of Mars hadn’t been in that space suit! He could imagine it was her . . .

“Was she there?” she asked nonchalantly.

Oh-oh. Did she have antennae to pick up his thoughts? He felt guilty, thinking of the other woman when it was manifest that Lori was all that any man could desire. But Lori’s interest in that other was amusing in its way.

He played dumb. “Who?”

“You know.” Lori lifted her head, making a contemplative moue. She was playing dumb too, pretending that she couldn’t quite remember or describe that other woman. “The girl with the . . .” She cupped her hands in the universal gesture for large breasts.

He smiled. “Oh, her.” As if Lori weren’t of that type.

But she refused to let it go. “Well, was she?”

He laughed. “Amazing! You’re jealous of a dream!” The thing was, this did intrigue him, perhaps because it lent some reality to a figure he knew existed only in his imagination.

Lori punched him in the stomach and twisted away. He tried to grab her, but she struggled to get out of the bed. They had always played rough, but not too rough; he never hit her back.

“It’s not funny, Doug,” she said, half off the bed. “Let met go!” Now gravity was helping her; if he let go, she would fall on the floor. “You’re on Mars every night now.”

All too true! “But I’m always back by morning,” he protested weakly. He realized that there was only so far this could go without turning ugly, because he really did have a secret passion for that nonexistent woman, and Lori was catching on.

He succeeded in pulling her back on the bed. Now Lori occupied his full attention, as surely had been her purpose. They wrestled, and she got her legs around him, squeezing him in a harmless but most interesting scissors grip. He pinned her arms to her sides and tried to kiss her. She turned her head from side to side to avoid his lips.

It was definitely going beyond the game stage. “Aw, Lori, don’t be like that!” he protested, wriggling within her scissors, nudging her where it didn’t show. “
You’re
the girl of my dreams!”

Lori abruptly stopped struggling. She looked up at him moonily. “You mean it?” Her scissors relaxed.

“Of course.” And now it was true. Their wrestling had completed what her comforting had started, and now he wanted her very much.

As well she knew. She was, after all, in contact with that region. She entwined him with her long athletic legs, this time not squeezing but embracing, and pulled him in to her. They kissed.

“You are so full of bull . . .” she breathed.

He laughed. “Well, you know what a bull does with a cow!”

“Cow!” she exclaimed with mock indignation. “You ever see a cow do this?” She sat up, bestriding him, riding his groin, and hauled off her nightgown. She had the world’s finest body, and knew it. “Or this?” She bounced, her breasts following their own courses while her thighs did special things to his midsection. “Or this?” She abruptly dropped her upper torso onto him and kissed him savagely. Her tresses slid down around his face and neck, silken smooth, tickling him delightfully.

“No,” he had to admit. “The cows I know just stand there and wait for it.”

She lifted her head, her eyes glinting with dangerous humor. “And just how many cows do you know?”

“Only one.” He felt her body tense warningly. “And she’s only a dream.”

Lori relaxed. She liked that analogy. He had called the dream-girl a cow, instead of the real one. She resumed her activity. It was certainly true that she didn’t just wait for it; she came more than halfway to get it. It was an attitude he liked very well. He put his hands on her buttocks, and felt them tensing alternately, teasing him, daring him to get more than his hands into action.

He rolled her over. She screamed as if being ravished, pausing only long enough to deep-kiss him as he proceeded to the culmination. She did a belly dance, but her abdomen didn’t move; it was all internal. Her tongue flicked into his mouth, coordinating with the hidden dance. Oh, yes, she was no cow—but he did feel like a bull, at the moment.

Even so, the picture of the woman of his dreams remained in his mind, and he wished she could be the one with him at this moment. He closed his eyes and tried to pretend that it was the Mars woman he was embracing. He wondered what the hell was wrong with him.

CHAPTER  3
Dream

I
t ended in due course, as all things did. Lori got up and headed for the shower; daintiness was always vital to her, and he had mussed her hair and smeared her lips and done a few other things in the course of having a spectacular time. Lori was Woman-Plus! How had an ordinary Joe like him managed to capture such a creature?

Quaid relaxed, then took his turn after Lori stepped from the shower, her body glistening. His own body felt good, as it always did after an outing with her, but his mind remained disturbed. That dream had been too real! He just couldn’t throw it off, however foolish it was.

He emerged, dried, and got dressed in his work clothes, his musing continuing. He was no Hi-Q professor or big-bucks executive, he was just a construction worker. He was very good at that, but it hardly made him a prize catch. Yet Lori had married him, her ardor unabated in all the years they had been together. There was no mystery about her appeal for him; she appealed to any man who ever lived. But what was his appeal for her? Oh, he had muscles, and she did like that, but she surely could have found and landed a man who had muscles
and
money or power. Why had she settled for half a loaf? And why was he, the luckiest of men, dreaming of a fantasy woman instead? That seemed perverse at best, and crazy at worst.

It was not the first time the question had occured to him. They came from such different worlds. He was a Construction Engineer, Site Preparation Specialist: longhand for the class of low-level laborers who broke up old artifacts to make way for new ones. In fact, he was a jackhammer jock, just like his dad. It was all he had ever wanted to be and he was proud to follow in his father’s footsteps. He was good at it, too, a veritable artist with his machine, working twice as fast as anyone else, but it hardly made him a prize catch for someone like Lori. Oh, he had muscles, and she did like that, but he was no Hi-Q professor or big-bucks executive, he was just a construction worker.

And Lori? Lori was the pampered daughter of an advertising executive. He recalled the day they met, eight years ago. He had been hard at work on the site of an old, glass and steel highrise which was being demolished to make way for a new, plasplex business center. The site was in the financial district, an area Quaid didn’t usually see much of, and he had enjoyed the passing parade of nattily attired men and woman, late model hovercars, and cleaning droids that kept every surface sparkling. It was an interesting change from his own dingy, decaying working-class neighborhood.

Then he had seen Lori. She had been standing across the street, gazing at him. Even at that distance, he had seen the glint of approval in her eyes as they lingered on his sweat-slicked torso. He had become accustomed to getting the once-over from pretty ladies in expensive dresses, but Lori’s look was bolder, and she followed through on it by crossing the street to say hello.

To his unending amazement, they were married three months later. He had insisted that they live on his income for the first few years, but Lori had gradually convinced him to accept her money as his own and they finally left his humble rooms for a spacious, modern conapt in one of the fancier tower blocks. Lori felt right at home, but he was having trouble making the transition. He had taken a lot of kidding about it at work, and he still felt out of place, a working stiff in the midst of society types.