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She nodded, more of a dismissal than an agreement.

  "And—" He felt himself bite his lower lip. "And, I'm sorry about Ralph. I feel like hell about it. I can't help thinking that maybe it's my fault."

  It was all that Dorothy could do to keep herself from inviting him in. He looked so forlorn, so guilt-ridden.

  "It isn't your fault, Dan," she said. "What happened to Ralph was not your doing."

  He nodded unhappily and said goodnight and went back to his rented Chevy in the driveway. He opened the car's door, then looked back at the house. One by one the lights went off as Dorothy went from the foyer through the living room and down the hallway to her bedroom. The bedroom light dimmed but did not go off altogether.

  He got into the car and backed out of the driveway, his mind in a whirling turmoil. She was wearing a data glove! And she said Ralph was with her? Is that what she said?

  CHAPTER 27

  Quentin Smith was clearly unhappy as he tooled his rented black BMW sedan into ParaReality's parking lot and stepped out into the hot afternoon sunshine. Kyle Muncrief could see the displeasure on his face even through the heavily tinted window of his office. Smith clipped his ParaReality ID badge to the lapel of his suit jacket as he brushed past good-natured Joe Rucker without so much as a smile and strode toward the building's front door. With his gray suit and dark sunglasses he looked like an FBI agent stalking down a student protestor.

  Which is probably what he is, Muncrief thought. He leaned back in his big padded swivel chair and ran a finger around his collar. He knew where Smith was heading.

  "The guy who's supposed to be working on my program hasn't been in here for more than a week," Smith began the instant he barged into Muncrief's office, without even taking off his shades.

  "You just figured that out?"

  "I've been making the rounds of the amusement parks waiting for him to come back and get to work. Where the hell is he?"

  "He had to go to Dayton."

  "And you let him?"

  "He didn't ask me about it; he just went."

  Smith strode to Muncrief's desk. "You mean he just took off and went to Dayton and left his work here? Without your permission?"

  "Hey, I just pay his blasted salary. I don't own him."

  "Well you damned well better get him back here, and right away!"

  "His wife says he's coming back tonight."

  "He'd better."

  Or else, Muncrief added silently. Or else what? He studied Smith's square, blocky face. Even behind the sunglasses he could see that the man was taut with anger. What can he do? Snatch Santorini out of the Air Force base? Send a squad of FBI goons to grab him? Have Dan arrested on some trumped-up charge? I wouldn't put it past him.

  "Look," Muncrief said, spreading his hands in a conciliatory gesture, "you don't want him back here any more than I do. I've got millions tied up in his hands, nearly a hundred million. The whole future of the company—"

  "You've got no future at all, Muncrief, unless you deliver my program to me by February first." Smith leaned his fists on the desk top and loomed over Muncrief. "Understand that? No goddamned future at all!"

  "Hey, you're scaring the hired help."

  Muncrief looked past Smith, who whirled around like a man about to reach for his gun. Jace Lowrey stood in the open doorway of Muncrief's office, leaning against the jamb, a knowing grin on his lantern-jawed face.

  "You guys want to have a screaming match, at least close the door." Jace stepped into the office and shut the door with exaggerated tenderness. His tee-shirt was black, with a spiral galaxy in white and a You Are Here notice pointing to one end of the spiral

  "This is a private matter, Jace," said Muncrief.

  "Not any more." His grin widening, Jace pulled up one of the chairs from the conference table and straddled it backwards in the middle of the office, resting his forearms on the chair back, his chin on his arms.

  "Get out," Smith growled.

  "You want your program by February first, don't you?"

  Whipping off his sunglasses, Smith stared hard at Jace. "Where did you hear that?"

  "You don't have to be Albert Einstein to know that," Jace replied easily

  Turning back to Muncrief, Smith snapped, "You told me Santorini could be trusted."

  "Listen," said Jace. "You got a problem, I can solve it for you."

  Muncrief said, "What do you mean?"

  With a lazy shrug, Jace replied, "Dan's supposed to be working on your program, right? But he's run off to Wright-Patterson because our old boss has some kind of problem he can't handle for himself. Okay, I'm sitting here with practically nothing to do 'cause Dan's off at Wright-Patt. You're steaming up the place 'cause your program's not getting done. So I'll do your program for you. Simple, huh?"

  Smith glowered at him.

  "And I'll do it better and faster than poor old Dan could ever do it, y'know. February first'll be no sweat, guaranteed."

  "You're supposed to be getting the baseball game into shape," said Muncrief.

  Another big shrug. "My end of it's all done. We need somebody to plug the stuttering program into it and get it all de-bugged. Charlie Chan or one of the other slobs can handle it if Dan's not around. I've got plenty time on my hands."

  "If I had wanted you working on this program," Smith said sharply, "I would have asked for you in the first place."

  "Sure. So you got good ol' reliable Dan Santorini instead of flaky me. And good ol' reliable Dan's off in the woods someplace. Smart move you made, buddy."

  Smith bristled. Muncrief huffed. Jace sat there and grinned at them, obviously enjoying their discomfort.

  Then Smith said, "You mean to tell me that you know what this program is all about?"

  "I peeked at Dan's work, yeah. It's pretty simple, really. I can show you ways to make it a lot better."

  "You can, eh?"

  "Sure. And I know why you need it by February first, too." Jace's grin became enormous. "Dan'll never get it done in time, y'know. I'm the only chance you've got."

  Smith turned back to face Muncrief, who sank back in his chair and wished that he had never even heard of Quentin Smith. Or Jason Lowrey, for that matter.

  "All right," Smith said at last. "You're on. But I'm going to stick to you like flypaper, Lowrey. You're not even going to be able to take a piss without my knowing it."

  "Hey, you can come in and hold it for me if that kind of stuff turns you on," Jace said, laughing.

  "Wait a minute," Muncrief snapped. "Don't I get to say anything about the way my own blasted company is run?"

  Smith looked at him with his cold hard eyes. "I think Lowrey's the man for the job—as long as I can stand watch over him."

  Jace said, "Don't get yourself all clanked up, Kyle. I'll do this job for our bright boy here and I'll still work out that special job I've been tinkering with for you."

  Muncrief raised his hands as if in surrender. Lord, he thought, if Jace starts talking to Smith about that—

  But Jace smiled as if he knew what Muncrief was thinking. "Don't worry, boss. Everything's going to work out just fine."

  He got up and headed for the door. With a glance over his bony shoulder he said to Smith, "Come on, bright boy. I'm going to the men's room and I know you wanna watch." Then he winked broadly at Muncrief and left the office.

  Smith hurried after him.

  "You know I don't like this one little bit," said Dr Appleton.

  Dan was sitting on the locker room bench, stripped to his skivvies, while two technicians—both male—draped the sensor net over his bare skin and began taping the individual sensors to his flesh.

  "I don't either," said Dan, trying to hide his nervousness. "But I can't see anything else we can do."

  "We can drop the program for good," Appleton said through teeth clenched on his unlit pipe. "Go back to the earlier programs that never harmed anybody."

  "And then we'll never know what happened, will we?" Dan countered. "And if we don't find out what happene
d we'll never be able to make any advances in VR simulations."

  "That's better than killing people."

  "It's my sim, Doc," said Dan. "Years and years of my work. I've got to find out what happened. I've got to know."

  "I still think we should shut it down for good and call it quits."

  "It would mean the end of your career, Doc."

  Appleton took the pipe out of his mouth. "That might not be such a bad idea. I can go out on an early retirement pension. I can make ends meet on that."

  Dan looked into his former boss's pale blue eyes, magnified by the old-fashioned glasses he wore. He saw fear in Doc's eyes. And defeat. The old man was ready to call it quits, to give up everything he had worked for all these years, rather than face another failure. And Dan knew he couldn't allow that. Not to Doc. Not to the man who had picked him out the tool room, literally, and taught him everything he knew. I owe Doc my whole life, Dan told himself. He's been more to me than my real father.

  "We're not going to let this beat us," Dan said softly.

  "I don't want anybody else hurt. Especially you."

  "I won't get hurt," he said. "As soon as the sensors show any trouble the run will abort automatically. Right?"

  Appleton nodded tightly and stuck the pipe back in his mouth. "Dan—" he hesitated, swallowed hard. "You mean a lot to me, you know."

  Dan nodded, unable to say a word. He just nodded, feeling embarrassed in front of the technicians. Doc looked flustered, too, almost teary-eyed.

  The technicians finished with the sensor net. Now came the flight coveralls, and after that the g-suit and all the other paraphernalia. Dan remembered seeing a documentary about bullfighters, ages ago. They had teams of men dressing them in their outfits. What did they call them? "Suit of lights." That was it. And here I am getting myself rigged into a suit of lights, kind of. The sensor net worked on light pulses from minuscule diode lasers carried through a spider web of cladded glass optical fibers ten times finer than a human hair.

  But all that merely flickered through Dan's mind and disappeared as quickly as a laser pulse. There were other matters at hand.

  "Doc?" he asked as he stepped into the flight coveralls and zippered up their front. "Did you know that Dorothy has some kind of VR system at her home?"

  Appleton's eyes flashed, more in guilt than surprise, Dan thought.

  "I went over there last night. She had a data glove on one hand. I'm certain of it."

  "No, you must be mistaken," Appleton said flatly, mechanically. And he jabbed the stem of his pipe in the general direction of the two technicians, who were bringing the g-suit and equipment vest to Dan.

  "Better get your boots on and make certain they're laced up tight," Appleton said. "We can talk about that later on."

  Meaning when the technicians have gone, Dan understood. He nodded and bent over to pull on the flight boots.

  Dorothy alone, without Ralph. But with a VR system. Who the hell could rig up a VR system for her? Nobody around here would even know where to start, except Jace. And Jace hated Ralph's guts, especially after their fight.

  Dan remembered the fight. It had happened when Ralph had just gotten his silver oak leaves.

  "Lieutenant colonel," Jace had grumbled. "Our flyboy's coming up in the world."

  Jace and Ralph had never gotten along. It was like expecting a cobra and a mongoose to coexist peacefully. Martinez was all Air Force, hard-driving, demanding the best out of everyone in his laboratory command. He was on his way to the Pentagon, that was common knowledge. He would be a general some day.

  "One more promotion and he's out of our hair," Jace said. "Once he makes chicken colonel they'll move him to Washington. I hope."

  Dan had grinned at his partner. "I'll bet Ralph will be more than glad to get out of your hair." He reached over and roughed up Jace's wild tangle.

  To keep up his proficiency as a fighter pilot, Martinez took part in a two-week exercise in Nevada each summer.

  "Bottom gun," Jace called it.

  "Better not let him hear you say that," Dan warned.

  "Him? I'm not afraid of him."

  "Or earthquakes," said Dan.

  "Listen," Jace said, "with him gone for two weeks you've got a chance to shack up with Dorothy again."

  Dan felt his jaw drop. "Are you crazy? That was finished years ago. Before she married Ralph."

  Jace shrugged. "She dropped you for the flyboy. Now's your chance to get even with him."

  Dan took it as a joke. Jace's weird sense of humor.

  But later that same day, when they went to the hangar where the simulator stood, Jace took one look at Martinez snapping orders to his scurrying technicians and broke into a malicious grin.

  "Hey there, Ralphie-boy," he drawled, sauntering up to the colonel, "I hear you're gonna be off in the boondocks for two weeks."

  Even with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled up, Ralph Martinez was in proper uniform. His tie was correctly knotted and precisely tucked into his shirt; his collar was buttoned at the throat despite the summer sun beating down on the hangar's metal roof.

  He gave Jace a flinty stare. "That's right," he said crisply.

  "Defending us from the cactus?" Jace asked. "Gonna pop a few coyotes, come back with a coupla trophies?"

  Dan wanted to stop Jace but did not quite know how. The technicians, all Air Force noncoms, edged away like barroom bystanders clearing out before the shooting starts.

  "Maybe you don't think this country needs defending," Martinez said, his balled fists on his hips.

  "What's to defend?" Jace mumbled, turning away from the colonel. But Martinez heard him. "You don't think this country deserves defending?"

  "Like I said, what's to defend?"

  Dan stepped between them. "Jace, stop baiting him."

  "I'm not baiting him! He's going off to shoot up the countryside. Big deal. If I had a good-looking wife with hot blood I sure as hell wouldn't leave her to sleep by herself."

  Martinez pushed past Dan and grabbed Jace by his loose-hanging tee shirt. "What the hell do you mean by that?"

  Jace was half a foot taller than Martinez but the colonel was clearly the bigger man, stronger, more powerful than the skinny scarecrow he held by one fist.

  "She's hot stuff, man. And you're gonna be away for two weeks. You think she's gonna stay in bed all by herself—"

  Martinez's punch spun Jace completely around, arms flailing. His knees buckled and he went down to the concrete floor of the hangar. The technicians rushed toward the colonel as Dan found himself standing squarely in front of Ralph, his hands on the colonel's blue-shirted shoulders, pushing him away from Jace. There was murder in Martinez's blazing eyes.

  The technicians pulled at his arms and moved him away. Dan turned and saw Jace sitting on the concrete, knees poking up, one hand rubbing his jaw. Dan knelt beside his partner.

  "You all right?"

  Jace gave him a slow grin. "I thought he could punch a helluva lot harder than that."

  Dan snapped out of his reverie as Dr Appleton handed him a scuffed Air Force blue plastic helmet decorated with red and gold lightning bolts across its sides.

  "All right," he said to the two technicians who had dressed Dan. "Give us a few minutes by ourselves."

  They cleared out of the locker room, leaving Dan feeling like a football quarterback about to get a pep talk from his coach.

  "You said Dorothy has a VR system in her house?" Appleton asked, his voice low.

  Fingering the helmet in his hands, feeling the weight of the flight equipment he was wearing, Dan replied, "She was wearing a data glove, that much I saw for myself."

  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 an
yway, 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."