“Oh, God!” he cried. “I don’t want it that way! I don’t want
not
to know! But I don’t want to
know
either!”
I forced him back onto the couch. But he sprang up again.
“Up here,” he shouted, “I’m a step closer to the
real
reality! You’ve got to let me go on and find the material world!”
“What do you mean?” I asked, trying to humor him. If I didn’t steer him carefully through this experience, he might go completely irrational and have to be wiped out of the simulator.
He laughed hysterically. “You utter, damned fool! You’re worse off than I am. I
know
what the score is. You don’t!”
I shook him. “Snap out of it, Ashton!”
“No.
You’re
the one who has to snap out of it!
You’re
the one who has to wake up out of your complacent little dream of reality! I lied. I
did
talk with Cau No before you wiped him out of the system. But I didn’t say anything because I was afraid you might go berserk and destroy your simulator.”
I tensed. “What did No say?”
“You don’t know how he found out his world was only a counterfeit, do you?” Ashton was laughing in fanatical triumph. “It was because your Dr. Fuller
told
him. Oh, not directly. He only planted the data in Cau No’s subconscious, where he hoped you’d find it. But it didn’t stay on No’s secondary drums. It leaked out. And No applied the information to his own world.”
“What information?” I demanded, shaking him again.
“That
your world too
doesn’t exist! It’s just a complex of variable charges in a simulator—nothing more than a reflection of a greater simulectronic process!”
He sobbed and laughed and I only stood there paralyzed.
“Nothing! Nothing!” he raved. “We’re nothing, you and I. Only triumphs of electronic wizardry, simulectronic shadows!”
Then he was on his feet again. “Don’t send me back down there! Let’s work together. Maybe we’ll eventually break through into the bottom of absolute’ reality! I came one step up, didn’t I?”
I slugged him again. Not because he was uncontrollable. Only because of the abject mockery of what he had said. Then, as my eyes bored unseeing through the still form of Chuck Whitney on the carpet, a calm sense of reason shouted within me that it was true.
Everything was exactly as Ashton had represented it.
I, all about me, every breath of air, every molecule in my universe—nothing but counterfeit reality. A simulated environment designed by some vaster world of absolute existence.
The awful concept battered the very foundations of reason. Every person and object, the walls about me, the ground underfoot, each star out to the farthest infinity—all nothing but ingenious contrivances. An analog environment. A simulectronic creation. A world of intangible illusion. A balanced interplay of electronic charges racing off tapes and drums, leaping from cathodes to anodes, picking up the stimuli of biasing grids.
Cringing before a suddenly horrible, hostile universe, I watched without feeling as Whitney’s assistants dragged his unconscious, Ashton-possessed body away. I stood by as though paralyzed while they successfully completed the re-transfer operation.
I fought my way back to the office through a fog of stupefying concepts. Fuller and I had built an analog creation so nearly perfect that our subjective reaction units would never know theirs wasn’t a valid, material universe. And all the while
our
entire universe was merely the simulectronic product of a Higher World!
That
was the basic discovery Fuller had stumbled upon. As a result, he had been eliminated. But he had left behind the Achilles-tortoise sketch and had somehow conveyed the information to Lynch.
And everything that had happened since then had been the result of the Operator’s reprogramming to cover up Fuller’s discovery!
Now
I could understand Jinx’s behavior. She had learned the true nature of our reality from her father’s notes, which she later destroyed. But she realized her only hope for safety lay in hiding her knowledge. Along with every other ID unit, however, she had been stripped of all recollection of Morton Lynch.
Then, sometime yesterday, They had discovered she
knew.
And They had temporarily yanked her. They had deactivated her circuit during the night to administer special reorientation!
That
was why she had been so casual, so untroubled on the videophone this morning! She was no longer terrified over the prospect of being permanently deprogrammed.
But, I asked myself desperately, why had They skipped over
me
in the general reorientation following Lynch’s disappearance?
I brushed straggling hair off my forehead and gazed out on my counterfeit world. It screamed back at me that what assailed my eyes was only a subjective, simulectronic illusion. I cast about for something that would blunt the impact of that staggering realization.
Even if it
were
a physical, material world, wouldn’t it
still
be but nothing? Billions of light years out to the remotest star in the farthest galaxy extended a vast, almost completely empty sea, strewn here and there with infinitesimal specks of something called “matter.” But even matter itself was as intangible as the endless void between the far-flung stars and planets and island universes. It was composed, in the final analysis, of “subatomic” particles, which were actually only immaterial “charges.” Was that concept so untenably alien to the one discovered by Dr. Fuller—that matter and motion were but reflections of electronic charges in a simulator?
I spun around as the door from the staff section opened.
Collingsworth stood staring at me. “I watched you earlier this afternoon when they were rescuing Chuck from Simulacron-3.”
Earlier this afternoon? I looked outside. It
was
getting dark. I had spent hours wrestling with my foundering thoughts.
He crossed the room and drew up solicitously before me. “Doug, you’ve been having more trouble, haven’t you?”
Unconsciously, I nodded. Perhaps I was reaching out for whatever slim reassurance he might offer, as he had done once before. But then I caught myself. God, I couldn’t tell him! If I did, he might be the next candidate for a disappearance act or an accident.
“No!” I almost shouted. “Everything’s fine! Leave me alone.”
“All right, we’ll do it my way.” He pulled up a chair. “When we spoke in my study that night I took off on the assumption you were suffering from a guilt complex-compunction over manipulating reactional units who imagine they are real. Since then I’ve done some thinking on how that complex might further express itself.”
The light played upon his thick, white hair, giving him a benign appearance. “I deduced what sort of obsession would result—has probably already resulted—from those circumstances.”
“Yes?” I looked up, only remotely interested.
“The next development would be for you to start believing that, just as
you
are manipulating
your
ID units, there is a
greater simulectronicist
in a greater world manipulating
you
—
all of us.
”
I leaped up. “You know! How did you find out?”
But he only smiled complacently. “The point, Doug, is—how did
you
find out?”
Even though I realized the knowledge would endanger Avery too, I told him exactly what Ashton had said on bursting into my office in the person of Chuck Whitney. I had to tell someone.
When I had finished, he squinted. “Most ingenious. I couldn’t have conceived of a better device for self-deception.”
“You mean Ashton didn’t say this world is an illusion?”
“Do you have any witness to prove he
did!
” He paused. “Isn’t it odd that the one common denominator in all your experiences is that none of them can be substantiated?”
Why was he trying to knock down every structure of reason I had erected? Had he, too, had access to Fuller’s “basic discovery”? Was he steering me back to safety in ignorance?
More important, if both he and Jinx had somehow come into possession of the fatal information, why had she been purged of it while he had been allowed to remain unreprogrammed?
Then I saw through the woods: Collingsworth was merely
aware
of my suspicions about the true nature of our world. He did not
believe
them. And therein lay his apparent immunity to being yanked.
Still, I hadn’t rejected that lethal knowledge. Yet here I sat—unyanked, unreoriented, unreprogrammed. Why?
Collingsworth placed one splayed set of fingers thoughtfully against the other. “Your rationalization processes are slow, Doug. Right now I’m even going to add another building block to your structure of pseudoparanoid obsession.”
I glanced up. “What’s that?”
“You overlooked rationalizing your blackouts into the pattern.”
I thought of the several times I had fought off sudden seizures of near unconsciousness. “What about them?”
He shrugged. “If I were trying to weave your web of fantasy, I would say that the blackouts were the side effects of an upper world simulectronic operator establishing empathic coupling with me. A faulty coupling. You’ve seen it happen in your own simulator. The ID unit becomes aware
something
is going on.”
I gaped. “That’s it, Avery! That’s exactly it! That’s the one thing that explains why I haven’t been yanked yet!”
He grinned, a superior there-didn’t-I-tell-you-so expression. Patiently, he said, “Yes, Doug? Go on.”
“It makes everything simple! The last time I had a near blackout was just last night. Do you know what I was thinking then? I was utterly convinced that everything that had happened to me had been a hallucination, just as you suggested!”
Collingsworth nodded, but not without conveying his sarcasm. “The Great Simulectronicist realized then that He didn’t have to worry about reprogramming you any longer?”
“Exactly! I had reprogrammed myself with my own skepticism.”
“And what’s the next reasonable deduction in that chain of spurious logic, Doug?”
I thought a moment, then said grimly, “That I’ll be safe until He decides to make another spot check and see whether I’ve gone back to my former convictions!”
He slapped his thigh triumphantly. “There. And you should suspect by now that that’s just the still-rational part of Douglas Hall admitting he’d better get a grip on himself before those obsessions become uncontrollable.”
“I know what I saw!” I protested. “I know what I heard!”
He didn’t try to hide his pity. “Have it your own way. This is something I can’t do for you.”
I walked to the window and stared out into the night sky, ablaze with summer’s canopy of familiar stars arrayed in their eons-old constellations.
Even now I was glancing hundreds of light years into space, billions upon billions of miles. Yet suppose I could pace off the absolute dimensions of my universe, as it actually existed within the bounds of the simulectronic apparatus that supported it. Would I find that all creation was compressed into an Upper Reality building that was only, say, two hundred feet long by a hundred feet in depth, as measured by the yardstick of that Higher World?
There—Ursa Major. If I could see through the illusion, would I be staring instead at nothing more than a function generator? And over there—Cassiopeia? Or actually a bulky data processor, standing next to its allocator, Andromeda?
Collingsworth’s hand descended gently on my shoulder. “You can still fight it, Doug. All you have to do is make yourself see how impossible your obsessions are.”
He was right, of course. I had simply to convince myself that I had only imagined Phil Ashton’s mocking recital, his scornful insistence that my own world was but a simulectronic counterfeit.
“I can’t do it, Avery,” I said finally. “It all fits together too neatly. Ashton
did
tell me that. And it
was
the information Fuller had hidden deep in his own simulator.”
“Very well, son.” His shoulders fell. “If I can’t stop you, then I’m going to help you put yourself through the complete works as quickly as possible.”
When I only stared back nonplussed, he continued, “It’s not difficult to reason what you’re going to do now. But, since it’ll take you three or four days to conceive of that next step, I’m going to save you the time. Eventually you’ll push the analogy another notch. If this is a simulectronic creation, you’ll tell yourself, then there must be someone with total knowledge of the setup working on the inside.”
“The same way we have Ashton serving as a Contact Unit!”
“Right. And you’ll realize sooner or later that flushing out
this
world’s Phil Ashton will be the final measure of the validity of your suspicions.”
I immediately saw what he was suggesting. The Upper Reality would have to have a special ID unit down here to keep an eye on developments that might not otherwise come to Their attention until some output collator was periodically checked. If I could find the Contact Unit, I might get a final, positive admission from him.
But then what? Was I to leave him to his devices afterward? Let him go free to report, on his next contact with the Upper World Operator, what I knew? I saw instantly that tracking him down was only half the job. The moment I identified him, I would have to kill him in order to protect myself.
“So,” Collingsworth said soberly, “go on off in search of your Contact Unit. And good hunting, son.”
“But it could be
anybody!
”
“Of course. However, if there is such a person, he would have to be close to you, wouldn’t he? Why? Because all the effects you claim to have experienced apply exclusively to you.”
It could be one of
many
persons. Siskin? Dorothy Ford? She had been right there when Lynch had vanished! And she had moved in to post close watch over me just as matters had become critical! Chuck Whitney? Why not? Hadn’t he admittedly been the only one around when the thermite charge had gone off in the modulator? Or Marcus Heath, who was to supplant me in REIN? Or even Wayne Hartson? They had both shown up at a convenient time, during a period when the Upper Reality would have found it necessary to keep me under closer surveillance.
Jinx? Of course not. It was clear she had gone through the same routine They were putting me through.
But what about
Avery Collingsworth?
As I glanced suspiciously at him, he must have surmised my thoughts.
“Yes, Doug,” he said. “Even me. By all means, you must include me, if your research is going to be thorough.”
Was he sincere? Had he actually foreseen my paranoid reactions? Or was he merely being cunning for some undecipherable purpose? Was he steering me into a certain channel of action?
“Even you,” I repeated profoundly.
He turned to leave but paused in the doorway. “Of course, it’ll occur to you that your search will have to be made under a guise of total normalcy. You can’t go about accusing people of being a Contact Unit. Because if you
are
right, it won’t be long before you
will
be yanked. Correct?”
I only stared back as he closed the door behind him. But he was right. I could expect immunity at least until the next time the Operator decided to run another empathy-coupling check on me—but only if I didn’t attract His attention
before
then.
Outside, I was oblivious to the slight chill of night as I made my way past the late-shift reaction monitor pickets and headed for the parking lot. There was little within me that was either calm or rational. These buildings, the stars above. Just the flick of a switch would cancel them all out in an abrupt neutralization of electrical charges. And myself along with everything else.
As I continued on toward the nearest company car I thought contemptuously of all the petty human values and intricacies, ambitions, hopes, devices. Of Siskin reaching for the world and not knowing it was as tenuous as the air around him. Of the Association of Reaction Monitors, fighting Siskin’s simulator to the death, not even aware that they enjoyed no greater degree of physical being than the reactional units in that machine.
But I thought mainly of the Master Simulectronicist, that metempirical Omnipotent Being who sat arrogant and secure in the immense data-processing department of His Super Simulator, allocating and integrating stimuli and putting His analog creatures through their paces.
Deus ex machina.
All was sham. All was utterly hopeless and inconsequential against the backdrop of unsuspected illusion.
“Doug!”
I drew back cautiously, squinting at the air car from which the voice had come.