Counterfeit World (12 page)

Heath disconnected and came over. “Now, Hall, you don’t have your hatchet any longer, do you? Even worse, you’re going to feel like hell after that laser spraying.” He paused and savored his triumph. “I’ll have Gadsen send you home.”

Neither Siskin nor Heath had been the Contact Unit. Whom would I try next? Frankly, I didn’t know. The Unit, I saw at last, could be
anyone
—even the most insignificant file clerk. And I was hopelessly convinced that long before my search was over I would find myself suddenly reeling under the head-splitting impact of the inevitable next empathy coupling. The Operator would then find out that I knew all about His Upper Reality.

Streams of liquid fire raced one another through my veins all during the night as the after-effects of the laser spraying ran their excruciating course. I might have hidden the pain beneath a tide of vindictive rancor for Heath. But I had long since lost the delusion that petty physical matters might still be of importance.

Shortly before midmorning, the guard whom Gadsen had detailed to my apartment helped me out of bed and led me into the kitchen. He had punched out a light breakfast from the autoserver. Nothing substantial. My stomach wouldn’t have been able to handle it.

After he left, I munched on a corner of equitoast and swallowed some coffee. Then I sat there wondering whether it would ever be possible to adjust to the knowledge Fuller had bequeathed me.

I was nothing—merely a package of vital simulectronic charges. Nevertheless I
had
to exist. Simple logic demanded no less. I think, therefore I am. But then I wasn’t the
first
person to be troubled by the possibility that nothing is real. How about the solipsists, the Berkeleians, the transcendentalists? Throughout the ages, objective reality had been held up to the closest scrutiny. Subjectivists were far from the exception in efforts to understand the true nature of existence. And even pure science had swung heavily to phenomenalism, with its principle of indeterminacy, its concept that the observed is inseparable from the observer.

Indeed, ontology was never lacking in its tribute to conceptualism. Plato saw ultimate reality existing only as pure ideas. For Aristotle, matter was a passive nonsubstance upon which thought acted to produce reality. In essence, the latter definition wasn’t too far removed from the concept of an ID unit’s subjective capacity, biasing and being biased by its simulectronic environment.

My newly acquired appreciation of fundamental reality required only one ultimate concession: Doomsday, when it came, wouldn’t be a physical phenomenon; it would be an all-inclusive erasure of simulectronic circuits.

And of all the metaphysical concepts that had cropped up during the long course of philosophy, mine was the only one open to final verification. It could be proved conclusively by merely finding the teleological agent—the hidden Contact Unit.

By noon, a hot shower and airblast rubdown had taken out the final kinks and I had returned to Reactions.

In the central corridor Chuck Whitney stepped from the function generating department and caught my arm. “Doug! What’s going on?” he asked. “Why is Heath installed in your office?”

“Let’s just say I locked horns with Siskin.”

“Well, if you don’t want to discuss it…” He stepped into function generation and beckoned for me to follow. “I’m supposed to show you where you’ll hang your hat from now on.”

He led me past the huge master data integrator and down a row of bulky input allocators, each squat cabinet standing like a somber sentry with hundreds of blinking eyes and whirling discs.

We reached the other end of the room and he indicated a glass-walled cubbyhole. “Make yourself at home.”

We went in and I spent a moment surveying my newly decreed austerity. Bare oak floor, unpolished. One desk with a fold-away vocascriber to handle my own correspondence. Two straight-back chairs. One filing cabinet.

Chuck straddled the extra chair. “Siskin was here this morning. Brought in two new assistants for Heath. As I understand it, he’s set on a public demonstration of the simulator as soon as possible.”

“Probably wants to nail down public sentiment with a big show.”

He said, “You’re on the way out, Doug. Why?”

I sank into the other chair. “Siskin has his own ideas about how the simulator should be used. I don’t agree with them.”

“If there’s anything I can do, just sound off.”

Whitney—the Contact Unit? Someone I’d known for years? My best friend? Well, why not? In our own simulator Phil Ashton had close acquaintances too. None of
them
suspected
his
true nature.

“Chuck,” I asked pensively, “how would you contrast the perceptual processes involved when we see, say, a chair, with those that take place when an ID unit sees the simulectronic equivalent of a chair?”

“This going to be a brain-twisting session?” He laughed.

“Seriously, what’s the difference?”

“Well, in our case a 2-D image of the chair is projected onto the retina. It’s scanned neurologically and broken down into a series of sensory impulses that are sent directly to the brain. Coded information. Linear transfer.”

“And with the ID unit?”

“The analog chair is actually a pattern of stored impulses. When the unit simulectronically comes into ‘visual’ contact with the chair, one of its perceptual circuits is biased by those impulses. That circuit in turn transmits them to the unit’s memory drums.”

“How efficient is the ID’s perceptual system?”

“Compares favorably with ours. Each of its drums stores over seven million bit!’ and completes a revolution in two-thousandths of a second. As a result, recognition and reaction times are roughly equivalent to ours.”

I leaned back, watching his face carefully, wondering whether he suspected I was leading him down a forbidden lane. “And what happens when an ID unit goes off the deep end?”

“Goes irrational?” He hunched his shoulders. “An allocator gets out of phase. The ID’s perceptual circuits receive conflicting impulses. Something that isn’t supposed to be there crops up—or vanishes. Suspicious, operating under faulty modulation, he begins to notice the chinks in his simulated environment.”

Suddenly emboldened, I suggested, “Such as stumbling upon a road, a sweep of countryside, and half a galaxy that aren’t there?”

“Sure. Something like that.”

He said it without even twitching an eyelid. As far as I was concerned, he had passed the test.

On the other hand, wouldn’t a Contact Unit, conditioned by the Upper Reality Operator, be just that efficient?

Then, as I stared out through the glass partition into the function generating department, I tensed with the realization that at that very moment I was looking at one of the “environmental chinks.”

Seeing my expression, Whitney cast a puzzled glance out into the room. “What is it?”

Immediately I recognized the opportunity for a second test, to establish more fully that he was not the Contact Unit. I laughed. “I just noticed something odd about our master data integrator.”

He studied it momentarily. “I don’t see anything.”

“The cabinet is a single, welded unit. I think I can call off its dimensions. Five and a half by twelve. A little over ten feet high. You remember when we installed it?”

“Ought to. I directed the crew.”

“But, Chuck, there isn’t a door or window in this room large enough for something that size to pass through!”

He was confused for a second. Then he laughed and pointed. “Unless it would be that rear door opening on the parking lot.”

I kept a straight face as I turned and looked. There
was
a door there—large enough to have admitted the integrator. But it hadn’t been there a moment ago!

Chuck’s perplexed reaction had triggered an automatic adjustment circuit. That only I was able to remember the time when the door had
not
been there was evidence of the fact that I was still, for some reason, exempt from reorientation.

The intercom sounded. I flicked it on and Dorothy Ford’s tense face lighted the screen. She glanced uneasily at Chuck.

“Got some work to do,” he said accommodatingly and left.

I watched Dorothy wage a pitched battle with distress. Her eyes moistened and her fingers entwined nervously. “Would it help any if I said I was sorry?” she asked.

“You told Siskin I planned to cross him up?”

She nodded ashamedly. “Yes, Doug. I had to.”

And I knew, from the sincerity in her voice, that betraying me was the last thing she had wanted to do.

She went on soberly. “I warned you, didn’t I? I made it clear I had to look out for Siskin’s interest.”

“You rate an E for efficiency.”

“Yes, I suppose I do. But I’m not proud of my performance.”

So she had admitted exposing me to Siskin. Would she also eventually own up to selling me out to a Power far greater?

I laughed. “We’re not going to let it drop there, are we?”

She frowned in puzzlement.

“Well,” I went on, “you once said we both had our jobs but that there was no reason why we couldn’t have fun at the same time.”

She only lowered her head, apparently in sudden disappointment.

“Oh, I see.” I feigned bitterness. “The set-up isn’t the same. Now that you’ve achieved your objective, I’m no longer fair game.”

“No. That’s not it, Doug.”

“But certainly you’ve discharged your obligation commendably and you don’t have to keep an eye on me from now on.”

“No, I don’t. Siskin is well satisfied.”

Pretending impatience, I started to snap off the intercom.

She leaned forward anxiously. “No, wait!”

Merely a girl who was disillusioned because the supposedly modest fellow for whom she had made a play in her line of duty had decided to take her up on it? Or a Contact Unit in fear of losing her direct line of communication with the subject under surveillance?

“All right,” she said unenthusiastically. “We can have fun.”

“When?”

She hesitated. “Whenever you say.”

At the moment, I couldn’t imagine a more likely suspect in my search for the Contact Unit. This one I would check out properly. “Tonight,” I suggested. “At your place.”

Dorothy Ford’s apartment was one of those soft, opulent sanctums that have traditionally been associated with the libertine privileges of wealthy businessmen. Letting me come here, I saw from the beginning, was but another humiliation for the girl.

Tri-D animated murals, each with its own background music, flaunted suggestive scenery. Pan piped and kicked up his cloven hoofs while uninhibited maidens ringed him in with their sensuous dance of abandon. Aphrodite embraced Adonis between a pair of marble columns festooned with climbing roses and framing a glistening Aegean Sea in the distance. Cleopatra, dark hair radiant with the soft caress of moonlight reflecting off the Nile, raised a jeweled goblet to toast Mark Antonym, then leaned back against the railing of her barge.

Overseeing all was a huge tri-D portrait of Horace P. Siskin. I stared up at the painting, recognizing now a facet of the man’s character of which I hadn’t been aware. His eyes, as they bored into the Aphrodite-Adonis mural, were vivid in lecherous intent. His entire expression added up to only one inescapable impression: satyriasis.

The euphonious enchantment of the room was shattered as Dorothy punched the order button on the autotender. Receiving her drink, she swilled half of it, then stared abstractedly into her glass, as though trying to find something she had lost long ago. She wore paste! blue lounging pajamas, trimmed in ermine. Her hair, upswept and aglitter with sparkle-spray, was like a soft crown of Stardust that somehow imparted a fresh, innocent appearance to her chiseled face. But there was calm determination in her features. She had committed herself to a bargain. And now she was going to carry out her end.

Strolling over, she gestured toward Siskin’s portrait. “I can draw the drapes and cut him off. I often do.”

“Cut him off from all these things that belong to him?”

She winced. “He’s no longer interested. Once they meant something. But, then, vitality isn’t a permanent thing.”

“You sound regretful.”

“God, no.”

She went over and dialed herself another bracer, leaving me standing there perplexed. Would a Contact Unit allow herself to become involved in unconventional complications?

She drained the fresh drink, waited for another, then returned. The alcohol was beginning to have its effects. Her spirit seemed somewhat higher, although a certain trace of sullenness remained.

“Here’s to the Great Little One.” She raised her glass, sipped from it, then stepped back and hurled it at the portrait.

It shattered against Siskin’s left cheek, leaving a gash in the canvas that continued the wry slit of his mouth. The liquid content of the glass appeared to be pouring from both.

“Now I didn’t want to do that, Doug.” She laughed dryly. “You’ll think I’m not a good sport.”

“Why did you let me come here?”

She shrugged and lied. “For the atmosphere. You won’t find a more appropriate setting anywhere in the city. Siskin’s taste, such as it is, can’t be beat.”

When she headed back for the bar I caught her arm. She turned, swayed slightly and stared piercingly into my eyes.

“I gave you a warning once before when I wasn’t supposed to,” she said. “Have another on the house. You don’t want to have anything to do with me. I brought you up here so you’d realize that for yourself.”

Despite my own compelling purpose for calling on her, I found myself being drawn involuntarily into the enigma of Dorothy Ford. And, with a sense of pity, I wondered what strange requirement of special programming was responsible for her character.

“When was Siskin here last?” I asked.

“Two years ago.”

“And you’re disappointed?”

Indignation flared in her eyes and she snapped my head aside with a stinging slap. She went over to the
chaise contour
and buried her face in its cushioned depths.

I followed. “I’m sorry, Dorothy.”

“Don’t be. I went in with my eyes open.”

“No you didn’t. That’s obvious. What happened?”

She looked up and stared through the Antony-Cleopatra mural. “I often imagine I have no more power of self-determination than one of the characters in your machine. There are times when I
feel
like one of them. I even have horrible dreams about Siskin sitting in front of Simulacron-3 and making me perform like a puppet.”

I knew then that Dorothy Ford
couldn’t
be the Contact Unit. The last thing such an agent would do would be to hint, however remotely, at the true circumstances of reality. Instead, she had hit the nail almost on the head.

“No,” she went on distantly. “I’m no nymphomaniac. There’s been only Siskin. You see, my father is one of the corporate directors of the Establishment. And Dad will continue to be the financial genius he imagines he is only as long as I hop through Siskin’s hoop.”