Death Dream (38 page)

Appleton nodded and tucked his unlit pipe into his jacket pocket. "Jace jury-rigged a system for Ralph," he said, practically in a whisper.

"Jace?" Dan yelped with surprise. "For Ralph?"

"It was surplus equipment," Appleton said, as if justifying himself. "He was always fooling around with the bits and pieces that we were going to junk anyway, you know that."

"But Jace hated Ralph's guts. Why would he—"

"You remember the fight the two of them had?"

Nodding, Dan answered, "I was just thinking about it wasn't much of a fight. Ralph hit Jace and Jace hit the floor. That was it."

Appleton fished the pipe from his pocket again. "Jace set up the system for Ralph right after that. Said it was his way of apologizing."

"Apologizing? Jace?"

"He didn't want anyone to know about it. You know Jace."

"He sure didn't let
me
in on it."

"According to Jace, Ralph misunderstood what he was saying when the fight broke out. Jace said he was trying to show Ralph how to keep Dorothy from getting lonely while he was away on flight maneuvers."

Dan plopped down on the bench that ran the length of the row of lockers. "So he set up a VR system . . . ?"

Appleton looked flustered. "Apparently he did."

"That's what Dorothy meant," Dan muttered.

"What?"

"She said she was with Ralph." Dan felt as if he had been dropped into the middle of the ocean, drifting without a landmark in sight. "She's using a VR program."

Appleton's face was turning redder and redder.

"But that means," Dan reasoned out loud, "that Jace would have had to get Ralph on tape. . . ."

"On tape?" Appleton sat down beside Dan.

"Tape or disk, whatever," Dan said.

"You mean—in the act?"

Dan looked at the Doc.
He's been involved with VR systems this long and he still doesn't understand what you can do with them!

"Not in the act," he said slowly. "But he'd need a full-body video scan and all Ralph's medical records. God knows what else. He'd have to store all Ralph's parameters in a computer file. Then you can reproduce him whenever you want."

"Jace did all that with surplus equipment?" Doc wondered. "Outdated junk?"

"I'll bet he got Ralph to buy a first-rate microcomputer. The simulation may be pretty crude," Dan mused, "but you can use your imagination."

Doc coughed and clamped the pipe in his teeth.

"Touch is a lot more important than vision when you're making love, anyway."

"By all the saints," Appleton murmured. "VR system for making love. Who would have thought?"

"Jace would," said Dan. "And he did."

Appleton shook his head as if clearing away evil thoughts. He got to his feet. "Well," he said, his voice firm and clear once more, "let's not keep the crew waiting any longer."

Dan nodded and got up from the bench. The equipment they had loaded on him felt almost ludicrously heavy.

What the hell am I doing impersonating a fighter pilot?
he asked himself.

CHAPTER 28

"You're working with Jace now?" Vickie was startled.

Smith nodded tightly. It was clear that he did not like the situation. "I've got no choice, really."

Vickie had spent most of the morning waiting for Smith to show up so she could talk to him. She had provided him with his own office, one of the nice carpeted ones up m the front of the building, across the hall from her own office so she could keep an eye on him. When lunch time came and he still had not appeared she went looking for him. And found him in Jace's lab, all the way at the rear of the building.

It took some talking to get him to leave Jace's side long enough to come to the cafeteria for lunch.

"Does Kyle know about this?" Vickie asked as they pushed through the double doors into the crowded cafeteria. Half the company was there, moving through the food line, sitting at tables, voices echoing off the tiled walls, tableware clattering. The aroma of steamed foods and sizzling deep-fat fryers made Vickie's nostrils twitch.

"Yeah. I don't think he's too happy about it, though," Smith said.

The food line stretched almost to the doors. Smith frowned. "Look, I don't want to leave him alone."

"Jace?"

"Jace."

"He'll be all right."

"Maybe. I just don't trust him by himself."

Vickie felt another jolt of surprise.
He knows Jace better than I thought.

"But you've got to eat something," she said.

"I'll get a candy bar from the machine. That'll hold me until dinner time."

"Can I take you to dinner, then?" she blurted.

He blinked at that. "You take me?"

"We can go dutch if you're worried about your machismo."

Smith laughed, a good-natured boyish laugh. "Okay, okay. You can take me to dinner. I'll let you."

"I have some important things I need to talk to you about," Vickie said, totally serious. "I need your help."

He became instantly serious too. "I don't know when the big genius packs it in for the day, though."

"Phone me when you're ready to go," Vickie said. "My office phone will forward your call if I'm at home or in my car."

"Okay," he said. Then he stepped out of the line and left the cafeteria. Vickie waited a moment, then she went out into the hallway too. She saw Smith pulling a bag of low-cholesterol trail mix from one of the vending machines along the wall. He headed back toward Jace's lab without seeing her. She nodded to herself and went back to her office. She seldom ate lunch, and even more rarely at the cafeteria. At the moment she had no appetite whatsoever.

As she headed back toward her office, Vickie thought that it might actually be fun for her to get close to Quentin Smith. Okay, she told herself, so he's young enough to be—well, your kid brother. So what? He's the connection to power in Washington. Kyle's scared of him, but there's no reason why you should be. Especially if he's stuck here in Orlando over the holiday weekend all by himself.

As she entered her office, Vickie asked herself, How much does Smith know about Kyle's problems? How much does Jace know, for that matter? And how can I use the information?

Dan pulled the helmet on, keeping the visor up. The oxygen mask covered his lower face like a smothering hand. The helmet felt a bit loose as he fastened the chin strap; he was afraid that if he waggled his head it would slip sideways or maybe fall off altogether. It was a reminder that he was out of his element, an intruder in someone else's realm. But the technicians bustling around him as he sat in the simulator's cockpit did not seem to notice the helmet's poor fit. Or maybe they don't care, Dan thought. Maybe they think this is all a farce, a make-believe run of a make-believe flight.

He pulled on the data gloves, then wiggled his fingers inside them as the two techs checked all the connections between his equipment and the cockpit: gloves and helmet lines, electricity for his g-suit and heater, oxygen, radio. They worked silently, as efficient and mechanical as robots, Dan thought. The only thing that would make them react like humans would be if they found something wrong. Then they'd snap back to human emotions and speech.

The female tech gave him a grinning thumbs-up. "All plugged in, sir."

Dan nodded. "Okay. Thanks." He grinned back at her inside the mask. All of a sudden he felt like a kid playing with a big, wonderful new toy. All the years I worked here, he said to himself, and I never tried e-flight before.

The technicians clambered down to the hangar floor.Doc Appleton stood by the control consoles, gray and tweedy, unlit pipe in his teeth, looking like a father watching his son take the family car for the first time. The chief technician, sitting at the main console, touched the button on his keyboard that remotely closed the simulator's canopy. Dan heard the electrical motor whine and the plastic teardrop settled over the cockpit, closing him into a gray featureless world. He felt his pulse racing in his ears.

Dan sat with his gloved hands in his lap while the technicians put the simulator through the engine start-up and the taxi to the runway. Oxygen began to flow through the mask, cold and metallic-tasting. His ears popped. The simulator's sound effects and vibrations seemed thoroughly realistic to Dan. In his earphones he heard the crackling instructions of the traffic controllers.

He watched as the flap control lever moved by itself and the throttles pushed forward to full take-off power. The simulator roared and shook nicely. Dan suppressed an urge to giggle; it would be picked up by his helmet mike and put on tape for everyone to hear.

Instead he pulled the helmet visor down in front of his eyes and saw the runway stretching out ahead of him.

"Flight oh-oh-one," said the flight controller's prerecorded voice, "cleared for take-off."

"Roger," Dan managed to say.

The controls moved by themselves, slaved to the program tape from Ralph's last flight. The runway slid past and Dan saw the ground fall away below him as the F-22 pointed skyward.

This was a daylight mission. In the stereo display on his visor Dan could see checkered farmland rolling away far below, green hills and fuzzy patches that were supposed to represent groves of trees. Roads were light brown lines drawn across the cartoon landscape; railroad lines were crosshatched in red. Dan realized how far he and Jace had come in making simulations look truly realistic in their baseball program.

We never needed such realistic graphics for the fighter pilots, he told himself, so we never bothered with it. He felt pleased with the progress they had made at ParaReality. And once I get back and put the stuttering technique into the program nobody will be able to tell the difference between the sim and reality. No difference at all.

There would be enemy fighters meeting him, Dan knew. He swallowed hard in anticipation. It's only a simulation, he reminded himself. No matter what happens in here, this can't hurt you any more than a bad dream could.

Oh yeah? jeered an inner voice. Then what happened to Ralph and that other pilot?

"How do you feel?" Doc's voice in his earphones startled Dan, forced him to remember that he was sitting in a hangar on the ground.

"Okay so far," he said, his own voice sounding unnaturally loud.

"The sensor net is working fine. All your parameters are in the green."

Doc's trying to reassure me, Dan realized. "I feel fine, no trouble at all," he said. But the oxygen mask felt tight on his face, suffocating.

"The enemy fighters will be coming up in a few moments."

"Yeah. Okay."

Sure enough, a little girl's voice said in his earphones, "A pair of bandits, Daddy. Five o'clock high." Dan knew it was a synthesis of Jerry Adair's daughter's voice. Yet it sounded vaguely like Angela's. Nonsense! He snapped at himself. You're identifying with the stimulus, just like the psychologists said a pilot would. And then he wondered, Is that what happened to Angie when she saw me in her game at school?

But he had no time to think about that. The pistol-grip side stick was pulling back and he felt the plane tilt upward into a steep climb. Dan's arms felt heavy in his lap as the plane nosed upward, as if he were experiencing real g-forces that an actual maneuver would put him through. His g-suit was hissing away, air pressure squeezing against his midsection and thighs. His chest felt heavy, as if an asthma attack was starting.

This isn't supposed to be happening! Dan knew it was all wrong. A simulator sitting on the cement floor of a hangar could not produce the gut-wrenching strains he was feeling. It's impossible. We couldn't figure out how to get that into the program!

Yet he felt as if his arms weighed tons, and his chest was so heavy he could barely breathe. He heard himself wheezing, the noise sounding awful inside the helmet, and he realized that the medical sensors were not programmed to shut down the simulation because of an asthma attack.

Dan felt himself being pushed deeper into his padded seat from the increasing acceleration. His neck, his back, even his legs were feeling the g-forces now; the helmet felt like an anvil on his head. And he could not breathe; he tried to fight down the panic that the asthma always kindled, but he could not get his breath.

The helmet visor lit up to show his own fighter as a bright swept-wing symbol in the center of the universe, its aimed at the sky, with a pair of red symbols moving in swiftly after him.

The g-suit was squeezing his guts. He could not move his arms. His chest was flaming raw now, as if somebody was burning it with red-hot sandpaper from the inside. The oxygen mask was suffocating him and he could not lift his arms to take it off. He could not breathe, he could not even speak. When he tried to tell the controllers to terminate the program nothing came out but an agonized wheezing cough.

Everything went black.

It wasn't until he felt the technicians lifting the helmet off his head that he realized what had happened. Doc, or the chief tech, somebody had cut the program. He sat in the simulator's cockpit soaking wet with perspiration, chest heaving, mouth gulping for air like a boated fish, eyes so teary that it took him several moments to recognize Doc leaning into the cockpit. "I'm sorry, son. God, I'm sorry. I didn't think." Doc was almost babbling. "I forgot all about your asthma. Are you all right?"

Pointing weakly toward the locker room, Dan gasped, "In . . . halator."

Doc sent the corporal dashing to the lockers. It seemed to take hours of wheezing before he came back with the brittle plastic bottle and pressed it into Dan's hands.

Dan fumbled with the inhalator, then got it up to his mouth and squeezed twice. A fine mist of epinephrine filled his mouth, acrid, biting yet delicious. As best as he could manage Dan sucked it down into his lungs. It hurt. He waited a couple more moments, then squirted another dose of the aerosol into his mouth. He took a deep shuddering breath and the fire inside his lungs began to fade away.

"Glad . . ." he panted, "I brought . . . it."

"Are you all right?" Doc asked.

Dan nodded. "Yeah. I'll be okay. Give me a minute." His chest still felt raw, but the symptoms were receding quickly. They weren't altogether gone, Dan knew. Not altogether. Never. They would always be there, lurking inside him, waiting to knock him down whenever he tried to do something that he shouldn't. Whenever he tried to reach too far. But for now he was okay.