I refused the clipboard he offered. “That won’t be necessary. I haven’t questioned your judgment thus far.”
“I could slip up, you know.” He smiled.
“You won’t.”
He hesitated and I tried to break away without letting him think I was uneasy over what had happened at the smoke-easy.
He touched my arm solicitously. “You feeling all right now?”
“Sure.” I forced a casual laugh. “About last night at Limpy’s—I guess I just had a few too many while waiting for you.”
He flashed a relieved grin, then continued down the hall.
Outside Whitney’s department, I pulled up sharply and slumped against the wall. There it was again—seas roaring in my ears, pulse pounding against my temples. But I fought off unconsciousness. Finally the walls steadied and I stood there tense and fearful. Scanning the corridor to see whether anyone had witnessed the seizure, I continued on to the function generating room.
Chuck Whitney, emerging from a maintenance recess, was elated. “All forty-seven ID units successfully integrated!” he exclaimed.
“They took it in stride?”
“Not a single shock withdrawal. Current simulator population: nine thousand one hundred and thirty-six.”
We took the lift to one of the ID “wards” on the second floor. I walked down the nearest row of reactor storage units. At the beginning of the stretch containing the newly-added entities, I paused, quietly impressed.
Each console gave confident assurance, through a whisper of whirring memory drums, a clatter of synaptic relays, the rhythms of its servo mechanisms, that the counterfeit life within was vigorous and orderly, that cognitive circuits were being properly stimulated.
I watched the myriad function-positive lights blinking on two of the panels. Corresponding bulbs seemed to be flicking on and off in perfect harmony. And I could imagine that pair of reaction units in analogous contact. A young man and woman, maybe. Being borne arm-in-arm on a pedistrip. Perhaps even thinking related thoughts as they built their own structure of optional experience upon the foundation of reality we had given them.
I understood, without reservation now, how Fuller had been moved to speak of the characters in his simulator as “my little people.”
Chuck interrupted my thoughts. “I can cut you in on either a direct empathy or personal surveillance circuit,” he suggested, “if you’d care to run a spot check.”
But the wall speaker hummed abruptly with Dorothy Ford’s voice. “Mr. Hall, there’s a Police Captain Farnstock here to see you. He’s waiting in the function room.”
We took the lift down and Farnstock, extending his credentials, came forward to meet us.
“Hall?” he asked, staring at Whitney.
“No,” Chuck corrected, “I’m Whitney. This is Hall.”
I tensed, but only momentarily, at his failure to recognize me. After all, hadn’t Lieutenant McBain, only an hour earlier, also acted as though he had never heard of me before?
Chuck went out of the room and the captain said, “I’d like to ask a few questions about Dr. Fuller’s death.”
“Why?” I lifted a curious eyebrow. “The coroner said it was accidental, didn’t he?”
The captain’s impassive, thickset face sagged patronizingly. “We never let it go at that. I’ll be frank, Mr. Hall. It’s possible that what happened to Fuller
wasn’t
accidental. I understand you were on leave at the time.”
I started mentally. Not because I was being questioned in connection with what the police
now
thought was a murder. Rather because it seemed to me that some of the pieces might be falling together in a totally unanticipated manner.
Fuller was dead; Lynch, gone. Forgotten too. All because of some “basic” information whose nature I was now trying to learn. In the process I had almost been killed. Now this—a suddenly revitalized police investigation. Was it a tactful maneuver to get me out of the way? But how? And who could be responsible?
“Well?” Farnstock coaxed.
“I told you. I was at my cabin on the lake.”
“What do you mean, you told me?”
I swallowed. “Nothing. I was at my cabin.”
“Anybody with you?”
“No.”
“Then you don’t have any way of proving you were elsewhere when Fuller died. Or that you were ever at your cabin at all.”
“Why should I prove anything? Fuller was my best friend.”
He smiled insincerely. “Like a father?”
He glanced around, as though to tyke in the entire building, not just the function generating room. “You’re doing all right now, aren’t you? Technical director. A chance for part ownership in one of the hottest enterprises of the twenty-first century.”
Calmly, I said “There’s a supply post half a mile from the cabin where I picked up the things I needed—on a day-to-day basis almost. The account tapes will show how often and when things were charged to my particular biocapacitance.”
“We’ll see,” he said warily. “In the meantime, don’t be where we wouldn’t think of looking for you.”
It was another couple of days before I could find time to run a spot check on Simulacron-3. Besides being shackled with work, I had to appease Siskin by jotting down a few preliminary plans for converting the simulectronic complex to a politically-oriented base.
Meanwhile, I could only flounder in speculation over the renewed police investigation. Was it an independent development? Or was Siskin merely pulling strings to demonstrate what might happen if I should decide not to go along with him and the party?
At one point, during a videophone conversation with Siskin, I even broached the matter of Captain Farnstock’s visit. And I felt that my suspicion was vindicated when he showed little surprise over the sudden police interest in Fuller’s death.
Making it subtly clear that it would be to my advantage to remain in his favor, he said, “If they start breathing down your neck, just let me know.”
I decided then to test him on yet another point. “You can hardly blame the police for sticking with it,” I said guardedly. “After all, Lynch kept suggesting Fuller’s death wasn’t accidental.”
“Lynch? Lynch?”
I pushed ahead boldly but ambiguously. “Morton Lynch. The man who did a fade-out at your party.”
“Lynch? Fade-out? What
are
you talking about, son?”
His reaction was sincere. And it suggested that Siskin, like everybody else except me, had lost all memory of the man who had vanished from his roof garden. Or he was a damned good actor.
“Lynch,” I lied expediently, “was some character who kept kidding me about knocking off Fuller to get his job.”
When I finally found time for the spot simulator check Whitney had suggested, I was surprised to find myself approaching the experience with more than casual anticipation.
Chuck accompanied me into the “peephole” room and led me to the nearest reclining couch.
“What kind of look-see will you have?” he asked, grinning. “Surveillance circuit?”
“No. Just a plain empathic coupling.”
“Any particular ID unit?”
“You pick him.”
Obviously he already had. “How about ‘D. Thompson’—IDU-7412?”
“Suits me. What’s his line?”
“Van pilot. We’ll pick him up on a delivery job. Okay?”
“Shoot.”
He lowered the transfer helmet on my head, then joked, “Give me any trouble and I’ll arrange a shot of surge voltage.”
I didn’t laugh. Fuller had theorized that runaway gain in the modulator
could
kick back with a reciprocal transfer. Just as the observer’s ego was temporarily planted within the ID’s storage unit, so might the latter’s sweep up and impress itself upon the brain of the observer in a violent, instant exchange.
It wasn’t that the reciprocal transfer couldn’t be reversed later. But if something should happen to the
image
of the ID unit meanwhile, it would theoretically be curtains for the trapped observer.
Relaxing against the leather padding, I watched Chuck cross over to the transfer panel, make a few final adjustments, then reach for the activator switch.
There was a brief, sharp twisting of all my senses—a kaleidoscopic flare of light, a screeching blast of sound, a sudden assault of impossible tastes and smells and tactile sensations.
Then I was through, on the other side. And there was that fleeting moment of fear and confusion as my conceptual processes readjusted to the perceptual faculties of D. Thompson—IDU-7412.
I sat at the controls of an air van leisurely watching the analog city slip by below. I was sensitive even to the steady rise and fall of my (Thompson’s) chest and the warmth of the sun that blazed through the plexidome.
But it was a passive association. I could only look, listen, feel. I had no motor authority. Nor was there any way the subjective unit could be aware of the empathic coupling.
I slipped down to the lower, subvocal level and encountered his flow of conscious thought:
I was annoyed that I had fallen behind schedule. But, what the hell, I (IDU-7412) didn’t give a damn. Why, I could draw down twice as much with any other vanning firm.
Satisfied with the completeness of the coupling, I (Doug Hall) pulled back from total to perceptive empathy and saw through Thompson’s eyes as he glanced at the man in the other seat.
And I wondered whether his helper was a valid ID unit, or merely one of the “props.” Of the latter we had supplied hundreds of thousands in order to pad out the simulated environment.
Impatiently, I waited for Chuck to feed in the test stimulus. I was looking forward to getting away early that afternoon, since I had a date with Jinx at her home for dinner and a glance at Dr. Fuller’s notes.
The stimulus finally came. Thompson had been staring at it for fully ten seconds before I recognized it for what it was.
On the roof of one of the tall buildings below, a horizontal billboard’s high-intensity xenon vapor lights were repeatedly blinking:
It was a gimmick for prodding our subjective units into expressing opinion. Thompson, who had been exposed to the simulectronic equivalent of Soropman’s Scotch over what, to him, had appeared to be a number of years, reacted reflexively.
Damned rotgut!
I (IDU-7412) thought.
It might not be too bad if it was aged enough to take out the sting. But Scotch in a bottle shaped like a bowling ball?
Meanwhile, all other visual advertising media throughout the analog city were flashing the same message.
And reactions of thousands of ID entities were being sifted out, analyzed, herded into the master output-register. There they would be sorted, stored and indexed. Merely the flick of a switch would produce complete categorical breakdowns by age, sex, occupation, political affiliation and the like.
In the space of but a few seconds, Fuller’s total environment simulator had accomplished what otherwise would have required a month-long effort by an army of certified reaction monitors.
What happened next took me completely off guard and it was fortunate that the empathy coupling was a one-way arrangement. Or D. Thompson would have known he was not alone in his astonishment.
A fierce streak of lightning crashed down out of the clear sky. Three huge fireballs blazed high overhead. Clouds appeared from nowhere, expanding explosively until they blotted out almost all of the daylight, and unleashed lashing torrents of hail. Spontaneous flames enveloped two lesser buildings below.
Perplexed, I rejected the possibility that Chuck was clowning with the background props. Although something like this could, without prohibitive strain, be shrugged off by the ID units as a “freak of nature,” Whitney wouldn’t take the chance of disturbing the equilibrium of our delicately balanced analog community.
There was only one other possibility: Something had gone wrong with the simulectronic complex! Imbalance, breakdown, faulty generation, even a simple short—all would be automatically rationalized by the system as more or less “natural” equivalents of errant electronic forces. There had been a foul-up somewhere along the line, but Chuck hadn’t retrieved me because withdrawal from a look-see coupling had to be either voluntary or at the end of the programmed interval. Otherwise a major portion of the subject’s ego might be irretrievably lost.
Then Thompson’s eyes swept across the horizontal billboard and I sensed his puzzled reaction to the anomalous message that was now being flashed out by the xenon lights:
Instantly, I broke the empathic coupling and swam up through wrenching transition to my own subjective orientation. The peephole department was a bedlam of scurrying figures, shouting voices, stifling heat, pungent smells of burning insulation.
Chuck, working desperately with a fire extinguisher at the control console, glanced toward my couch.
“You’re back!” he shouted. “Thank God! We might have gotten a current surge at any minute!”
Then he snapped off the master switch. The crackling sound of electrical arcing stopped abruptly, as though someone had closed a door on it. But fierce, blazing light continued to pour out of the console’s ventilation louvers.
I cast the helmet aside. “What happened?”
“Somebody planted a thermite charge in the modulator!”
“Just now?”
“I don’t know. I stepped out after I plugged you in. If I hadn’t come back in time, you might have been cremated!”
Siskin accepted the thermite charge episode with surprising composure—too calmly, I thought. Within minutes, it seemed, he was at Reactions, surveying the damage and nodding over our assurance that we wouldn’t be delayed more than a day or two.
As to who had been responsible for the treachery, he had his answer ready and emphasized it by ramming his fist into his palm. “Those damned reaction monitors! One of them managed to get in here!”
Joe Gadsen vigorously denied that possibility. “Our security measures are foolproof, Mr. Siskin.”
Siskin glowered. “Then it was done
on the inside! I
want everybody double-screened all over again!”
Back in my office, I paced in front of the window, watching the once-again orderly scene outside. Only pollster pickets. No more surging mobs. But how long would it stay that way? And what was the common denominator underlying the reaction monitors, the thermite attack and all the other impossible things that had happened?
Somehow I was certain there had to be a fundamental relationship among all the bizarre occurrences of the past week or so—Fuller’s death, Lynch’s disappearance, Lynch’s “total erasure” from the whole web of former experience, Fuller’s bequest of a now nonexistent Achilles sketch, an altered plaque on a trophy behind Limpy’s bar, the off-and-on-again police investigation.
Take the thermite bombing: It had ostensibly been an aggressive action by the Association of Reaction Monitors against the institution that was threatening that group’s continued existence. But
was
it that? Or had it been intended, instead,
for me?
Who
was behind it? Certainly not Siskin. For even though he might conceivably want me removed, he already had the means of achieving that through the police investigation which he was manipulating.
Then, as I paused to stare out the window, a novel possibility suggested itself: many of the perplexing effects might have been aimed indirectly
at the environment simulator itself!
Fuller’s death, Lynch’s disappearance, the thermite charge, my near-accidents—a planned campaign to eliminate the only two simulectronicists capable of insuring REIN’s success?
The finger pointed back at the Association of Reaction Monitors. But, again, logic shouted it couldn’t be ARM. It had to be some agency with either extraphysical powers or a convincing means of simulating them.
I couldn’t shake the succession of enigmas out of my mind, not even while sharing a quiet and thoughtful meal with Jinx that evening.
We had eaten in silence for fully ten minutes when I was drawn from my own reflections by the realization that there was no reason for
her
to be so deep in thought.
“Jinx.”
She started and dropped her fork. It clattered on her plate and she smiled awkwardly, then laughed. “You frightened me.”
But I had hardly whispered her name. “Anything wrong?”
She wore a shimmering, cream-colored frock that retreated far below her shoulders. In so doing, it presented a considerable expanse of tanned skin as a backdrop for her long, dark hair.
“I’m all right,” she said. “I was thinking about Dad.”
She glanced toward the study and her hands came up to hide her face. I went around the table to offer condolence, but only stood there, confused over the realization that something was not quite right. I could understand her bereavement, since she and her father had had only each other. But this display of emotion was a striking throwback to the mid-twentieth century.
Things had been different before enlightenment had modified the attitude toward death and swept away the vicious cruelty of the funeral convention. In those days, proof of death had to be established on a practical plane. Those who attended wakes and funeral services saw and believed. And they went away convinced that the loved one was actually beyond this life and that there would be no complications arising from a supposedly dead person showing up again. That the close ones also went away nursing traumatic wounds made little difference.
As soon as technology asserted itself, however, proof of death was abundantly available even in such crude techniques as fingerprinting, biocapacitance indexing, and cortical resonance checks. And the deepest wound the family suffered was that of being told there had been a death and the body had been disposed of.
What I’m trying to point out is that since I had known Jinx to be a normal girl, her present extreme desolation was far out of character.
And as she led me into the study a moment later, I wondered abruptly whether she was merely letting me
believe
her bereavement had been responsible for the tearful outburst. Was she concealing a far more profound cause of distress?
She gestured toward Fuller’s desk. “Help yourself while I go resurface my face.”
Pensively, I watched her weave from the room, tall and graceful and lovely even despite inflamed eyes.
She stayed away long enough for me to go through Fuller’s scant professional effects. But only two things caught my attention. First, in the surprisingly few notes that had been spread out across the desk and stored in two of its drawers, some of the memoranda were missing. How did I know? Well, Fuller had told me on several occasions that he was working at home on the consequences of simulectronics in terms of human understanding. There was not a word to be found on that subject.
Second, one drawer of the desk—the one in which he had kept his important notations—had been forced open.
As for the notes themselves, there was nothing to attract my interest. Not that I had really expected to find anything.
Jinx returned and sat tensely, unsmiling, on the edge of the couch, slender hands cupped around her knees. Her face had recaptured its freshness. But there seemed to be a certain guarded determination in the firm, smooth lines of her mouth.