I tightened my grip on the laserifle. The deer in this lower world might be simple props, existing only as shadows cast against the illusive background to add to the appearance of reality. Exit, then again, they might enjoy as much pseudo-physiological validity, in a limited sense, as the ID units themselves.
If the latter were the case, there was no reason why a doe couldn’t be conveniently programmed to wander into a clearing before a lakeside cabin and, through empathy coupling, monitor what was going on in the vicinity!
The animal turned its head toward the cabin, ears perking at the still brightening sky and nose twitching.
“What is it?” Jinx asked.
“Nothing,” I said, concealing my anxiety. “If you feel up to it, you might dial us a couple of cups of coffee.”
I watched her stagger toward the kitchen, then eased the window open, just wide enough to accommodate the linear intensifier of the weapon. I choked down a bit on the spread.
Eventually the doe turned away, heading for the garage.
I hit the firing stud and sprayed the animal for a full ten seconds, concentrating on its head as it lay motionless.
At the hissing sound of the discharge, Jinx was back in the kitchen doorway. “Doug! It’s not—”
“No. Just a deer. I dropped it for a couple of hours. It was about to get into your car.”
We sipped coffee silently, across the bar from each other in the kitchen. Her face was drawn, stripped of its cosmetic propriety, tense. An errant tress of dark hair hung down to eclipse part of an eye. But her appearance could not be described as haggard. For in the absence of the sheen of sophistication, the charm of her youth came through, unpretentious, unspoiled.
She glanced at her watch, for the second time since accepting the cups from the slot, and reached across the bar to take both my hands. “What are we going to do, darling?”
I lied with profound intensity. “I only have to stay hidden for a day or two. Then everything will work itself out.” I paused to improvise further. “You see, Whitney can prove I didn’t kill Collingsworth. He’s probably doing that right now.”
She didn’t appear relieved. She only looked down at her watch again.
“That’s why you’re going to get in that car and cushion off just as soon as you feel strong enough,” I continued. “If you turn up missing too, that may double their chance of finding me. They might even think of looking out here.”
Stubbornly, she said, “I’m staying with you.”
Not feeling like arguing the point at the moment, I trusted in my ability to persuade her later on. “Hold down the fort. I’m going to shave while I still have the chance.”
When I had finished ten minutes later, I stepped back into the trophy room and found the front door open. Jinx was out there bending over the stunned doe. She glanced back at the cabin and continued casually across the clearing.
I watched her disappear into the forest, carrying herself with the graceful, flowing motions of a nymph. Even though I was determined she would leave as soon as possible, I was glad she had come.
Then a laserbeam of mocking realization exploded against my consciousness:
How had she known I was at the cabin?
I had never told her about this place.
I grabbed my rifle and started after her. Sprinting across the clearing, I plunged into the woods. Among the giant, swaying pines, I paused and strained for the sound of feet crunching on fallen needles to determine which way she had gone.
Then I heard what I was listening for and charged off in that direction. I broke through underbrush into a small clearing and pulled up—face to face with a startled ten-point buck.
Beyond, far beyond, I saw Jinx poised in a slanted shaft of early sunlight. But inconsistency sounded an alarm and I stared back at the buck. Though startled, it hadn’t bolted.
Abruptly, the instant, fierce pressures of faulty empathic coupling burst upon my senses. Stunned from the impact of roaring noise and vertiginous disorientation, I dropped my rifle.
Through the inner bedlam, I was again aware of what sounded like savage laughter flowing along the simulectronic bond that now joined all my faculties with those of the Operator.
Rearing up, the buck clawed air with its fore hoofs, then dropped back down. It lowered its head and charged.
I staggered under the ordeal of dissonant coupling, but managed to pull myself partly out of the way of the on-rushing deer.
An antler ripped my shirt sleeve and sliced through my forearm like a wire-thin laserbeam. And I imagined that, in response, the laughter of the Operator rose to an almost hysterical pitch.
Again the buck reared and I tried to twist out from under descending hoofs. I almost made it. But the full force of the animal’s weight pounded down upon my shoulder and sent me sprawling.
When I rolled over and came up again, however, it was with the rifle in my hand. I cut the deer down in the middle of its next charge. And, almost in the same moment, I was freed from coupling.
Up ahead, Jinx was still standing in the shaft of sunlight, unaware of what had happened behind her.
But even as I watched, she glanced upward expectantly, then vanished.
For an eternity, I stood frozen in the clearing, the stunned buck at my feet, my eyes locked on the spot where Jinx had disappeared.
Now I knew
she
was the Contact Unit. I had been so wrong in my interpretation of her actions. I had thought she had learned, as Fuller’s daughter, the details of his “basic discovery” but had been trying to hide them from me so that I wouldn’t be deprogrammed.
Upon her disappearance from her house, I had imagined she had been temporarily yanked in order to have the forbidden knowledge stricken from her circuits. I had been certain, later, that erasure of that data had allowed her love for me to find full expression.
But it hadn’t been that way at all.
She had acted odd, before her first disappearance, because she and the Simulectronicist Up There had been concerned. They were worried that I would learn Fuller’s secret.
Then Collingsworth, programmed to dissuade me from my forbidden convictions, succeeded in making me believe I had been suffering such an unlikely thing as “pseudoparanoia.” That belief was uppermost in my thoughts the night I had been empathy-coupled while in the restaurant with Jinx.
The Operator assumed then that I had been thrown off the track. And Jinx, as a Contact Unit, had begun playing the role of ardent lover in order to lure me further from my suspicions.
That was the way things had rocked along until yesterday, when the Operator had learned from Collingsworth that not only I, but Avery too, stubbornly doubted that our world was real.
And Jinx had come here last night for only one purpose: to keep me under her thumb until arrangements could be made for my “natural” death. Maybe she was going to “kill” me herself!
Eventually I was aware of warm blood from the wound dripping off my fingertips. I tore the shirt sleeve off and wrapped it tightly about my gored forearm. Then I started back for the cabin.
I tried again, but couldn’t budge the inconsistencies. For instance, how could Jinx—just disappear? None of the ID characters in Fuller’s simulator could do that, unless—
But, of course! Whenever I withdrew after projecting myself down into Simulacron-3 on a direct surveillance circuit, I did
just
that!
Jinx, then, was neither a Contact Unit nor a reactional entity.
She was a projection of some physical person in that Upper Reality!
But still there were inconsistencies. Why hadn’t
I
simply been reoriented, as had other ID units, to the alternate fact that Lynch had never existed?
Moreover, the Operator must have frequently coupled Himself empathically with Collingsworth in order to program him in the campaign to destroy Fuller’s simulator. Why, then, had He not learned from Avery, earlier than yesterday, that I could not be shaken from my convictions on the true nature of reality?
The swishing, crackling sound of a falling tree jolted me from my thoughts. Startled, I glanced up.
A huge pine was toppling right overhead!
I tried frantically to get out of the way, but it hit the ground with jarring impact, its upper foliage lashing out at me. Bowled over, I was hurled against another trunk.
Confounded, I rose and backed off, fingering the raw furrow one of the branches had raked in my cheek. Then suddenly my head was reverberating again with the derisive, sickening effects of faulty coupling.
I raced for the cabin, desperately trying to suppress the relentless pain of dissonant empathy. I reached the edge of the clearing, head pounding, vision dazed. And I drew up sharply.
A massive black bear was sniffing Jinx’s car. It sensed my presence and turned. But I wasn’t going to take any chances. I killed it with a pencil-thin laser beam.
That must have deprived the Operator of an eagerly anticipated bonus of sadistic appreciation. For, as the animal dropped, the bond of empathy broke and I was relieved of its fierce pressure.
But it was clear now that I had to get away from the forest. Here there were too many elements of nature that could be manipulated against me. If I had any chance at all, it would be back in the city, where the Operator might not be as free to program my counterfeit environment against me.
In the cabin, I lost no time dressing my arm wound and applying balm to the stinging laceration that ran from my temple to my jaw.
Through the fog of fear and desperation, however, I was somehow able to think about Jinx. Had there ever actually been a Jinx Fuller in my world? Or had she all along been but a projection?
I reached for my coat, tasting at last the bitter irony of having fallen in love with her. I, but a ripple of illusion; she, a real, tangible person. I could imagine her mocking laughter, joining exuberantly with that of the Operator.
Suddenly doubtful, I paused in the doorway. Back to the city? Where Siskin’s police were out to shoot me down? Where, even if I should elude them, they had a sadistic Ally Up There all too eager to program them in the right direction?
There was a blur of movement in the corner of my vision and I ducked reflexively under a flurry of wings and a raucous
caw-caw.
But the crow had not purposely aimed itself at me. Confounded, I turned and watched it bank and fly straight in the kitchen. Curiosity exceeded apprehension and I went back inside. The bird had landed on the floor and was pecking at the stud on the door of the packaged power unit compartment.
I thought of the exposed leads within. And, for a horrifying moment of indecision, I was rooted in the cabin.
Then I charged outside, racing halfway across the clearing before I hurled myself to the ground. The cabin went up in a shattering roar, spewing debris over an acre of forest and taking the garage along with it.
Fortunately, none of the hurtling stone and timber struck either me or Jinx’s car in the center of the clearing—a development of which I should have been immediately suspicious.
Surveying the wreckage, I was convinced at last that I would have to take my chances in the city.
At two thousand feet over the forest, the main power supply failed. I switched to emergency and the vanes began spinning again. But the engine coughed spasmodically and with each sputter the car plunged another hundred feet.
I fought the wheel frantically to retain some degree of control. Finally I managed to kick the craft around toward the lake, hoping there would be a final burst of power to cushion the impact.
Just then the Operator cut in once more on my perceptive faculties. The torment of faulty coupling was less unbearable this time, however. It could only be that my plight was providing Him with sufficient delight in itself.
Abruptly a strong headwind began churning the surface of the lake into a frothing mantle and my angle of descent became more precipitous. I was going to crash into the trees before I broke over the shore line!
But an unexpected burst of power boosted me over the hump and another cushioned the car just five feet above the lashing waves.
Knuckles whitened by my fierce grip on the wheel, I sat there trembling and perspiring, as the vehicle climbed back into the sky.
I could sense the Operator’s ecstatic reaction. And I knew, from the intensity of His emotional response, that I was not going to be let off that easily. Bracing myself, I waited for whatever would come next as the car, still gaining altitude, continued on toward the city.
With Fuller’s simulator, I remembered, coupling could be modified to permit reciprocal empathy. That device would be used, for instance, whenever I wanted to communicate with Phil Ashton without having to project myself into his world.
So I tried to reach back across the empathic bond, realizing all the while that He would be aware of my intention. But I could perceive nothing through His senses. It was a one-way coupling. Yet I could almost sense His presence. It was as though I could get the “feel” of Him. And vivid was the impression I received of malicious, twisted purpose.
Then I frowned, perplexed. There was the profound suggestion that the bond existing between us was one of more than just empathy. There seemed to be the obscure hint of a certain similarity between the two of us. Physical? In character? Or was it merely reflective of our analogous circumstances—each a simulectronicist in his own world?
Without further interference from the Operator, I leveled off at six thousand feet. Then I tilted the car’s nose down, exchanging lift for thrust, and sped for the city. The concrete-glass hulk of the metropolis spread out before me, only a few miles away.
Would I make it? Then I sank despondently back in the seat. Did I
want
to make it? Out there in the forest, alone with the Operator and all His hostile nature, I had little chance of survival. On the other hand, in the city there would be no animals available for attack programming. But what about the
inanimate
things? The lashing belt of a suddenly snapped high-speed pedistrip? A falling cornice? An air car out of control?
Anxiously, I stared through the plexidome at a small, gray cloud that bisected the horizon. It grew alarmingly as the car carried me directly toward it. I tried to steer clear, but too late.
In the next instant I was in a swirling, darting flight of—red-winged blackbirds? At
six thousand
feet? They thudded against the car, spattering its plexidome. They were sucked in by the hundreds through the dorsal intakes. The vanes groaned and chugged against the almost solid mass, taking a terrific pounding. The powerplant coughed and wheezed, froze, then freed itself—only to repeat the ominous cycle.
Plunging down, I winced as the Operator switched in anew on my senses. Again, the empathic coupling was bearable. And once more I labored under the incongruous impression that the person who was battening on my desperation and fear bore a certain incomprehensible similarity to me.
The battered vanes, trying valiantly to check the drop, began vibrating. The shudder intensified and presently it seemed that the craft was going to shake itself apart. Then the dome cracked, shattered, and went flying past my head. I glanced outside to see how far I was from the ground. And, ironically, I perceived that I was plunging almost straight toward the low, broad building that was Reactions, Inc.
I had so little altitude now that I could even see the troops. And I wondered whether the Operator, in a brilliant stroke of strategy, was going to send me crashing into the building to wipe out both myself and Fuller’s machine at the same time.
If that had been his plan, however, he had forgotten about the emergency net protecting the city. For, with the car scarcely two hundred feet above the building, three intensely yellow beams leaped up from the surface and converged on the helpless craft.
They absorbed its momentum. Pivoting slowly and in perfect coordination, they moved me along several hundred feet above the surface toward the nearest emergency receiving station.
But the Upper Simulectronicist wasn’t going to be deprived of yet another brutal flourish. The car’s powerplant burst into flames filling the cab with fierce heat. I had no choice. Still a hundred feet above the receiving area, I dived from the craft.
By then the Operator had broken empathy. Otherwise, he might easily have arranged for me to slip out of the receiving beam. But as it was, I stayed safely within the brilliant cone and was lowered to the apron several seconds ahead of the car.
I didn’t waste any time there—not with traffic police and firemen spilling out of the station. Leaping from the apron, I hurdled the staticstrip and landed upon the slowest pedibelt. Within a moment I had worked my way to the highspeed conveyor.
Two blocks away, I returned to the staticstrip and walked as casually as I could into the nearest hotel.
In the lobby, an automatic news vendor was headlining the day’s developments in an impersonal, soft voice:
“Siskin Schedules Public Demonstration of Simulacron-3 Tomorrow Morning! Machine to Solve First Problem in Human Relations!”
But Siskin’s strategy held little interest for me as I took the belt to the rear of the lobby and found an obscure pair of chairs half concealed by a huge wax plant. Haggard and insensitive, I dropped into the nearer of the two.
“Doug! Oh, Doug—wake up!”
Somehow, exhaustion must have brought sleep. But I swam wearily back toward consciousness, aware first of the tingling numbness in my spent legs. Then I opened my eyes and saw Jinx seated in the adjacent chair. I started and she placed her hand on my arm.
Wincing, I sprang up and tried to bolt back toward the crowded part of the lobby. But my legs buckled and I almost fell. I stood there swaying and trembling, trying frantically to place one foot in front of the other.
She rose and shoved me back into the chair. Confounded, I glanced down at my legs.
“Yes, Doug,” she said. “I sprayed them—so you wouldn’t be able to run from me.”
Now I could see the bulge of the small laser gun in her purse.
“I know—everything,” I blurted out. “You’re not one of us! You’re not even an ID unit!”
There was no surprise on her face, only a pained uneasiness.
“That’s right,” she said softly. “And now I’m aware of how much you know. But I wasn’t an hour ago, when we were back there at the cabin. That’s why I withdrew in the forest. I had to find out how much you had figured out for yourself—or how much he had
let
you figure out”
“He? Who?”
“The Operator.”
“There
is
an Operator, then? This
is
a simulectronic world?”
She didn’t say anything.
“And you’re just a—a projection?” I asked.
“Just a projection.” She dropped back into the chair.
I think I would have felt less despondent if she had denied it. However, she only sat there grim-faced, offering no hope, giving me time to realize fully that I
was
merely a reactional unit. Whereas she was a real, material person whom I could perceive only in an ingenious reflection of her true self.
She leaned toward me. “But you’re wrong, Doug! I’m
not
trying to trick you. I only want to help.”