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  "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 littl
e 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.

  He climbed out of the cockpit and clambered down to the hangar floor, shaky but on his own.

  "The medical subprogram wasn't keyed to asthma, was it?" Dan asked rhetorically.

  "I heard you gasping in there," Doc said as they started for the locker room. "It sounded like you were strangling. That's why I terminated the program."

  "I don't think an asthma attack would've killed me," said Dan. "But it sure made me useless in there."

  "Did you get far enough into the mission to find out anything?

  Dan opened the locker room door and turned to face Appleton. "I found out what happened to Ralph, I think. And the other pilot. Only, it doesn't make any sense."

  An hour later Dan still felt puzzled. He and Appleton had gone to the cafeteria. The day before the long Thanksgiving weekend the base was half-deserted. The cafeteria, huge and hard-used, usually rang with the clattering of trays and silverware and dishes echoing off the brick walls and stainless steel counters.

  Now it was hushed and nearly empty. One cashier perched on a stool glumly; barely a trickle of people came through the line.

  Dan was ravenous; he stacked his tray with chili, the first sandwich he could find (insides unidentifiable), a large styrofoam cup of coffee, and a slab of pumpkin pie. Appleton took a salad and a lemonade.

  Doc steered them to the farthest corner of the quiet cafeteria, where there was a virtual sea of empty tables between them and the nearest diners.

  "What you're telling me, then," said Doc as they sat down, "is that physiological inputs have been built into the program?"

  "I felt the g-forces, Doc," said Dan, nodding. "And it wasn't in my head. I couldn't lift my damned hands out of my lap!"

  "But that's impossible."

  "Is it?" Dan took a spoonful of the chili and winced. It was bland and tasteless, but steaming hot enough to burn his tongue.

  "You know it's impossible," Appleton said.

  Wishing he had taken an iced drink instead of the hot coffee, Dan answered, "Doc, there's two kinds of impossibilities here: one, it's impossible to make the VR system put physical stresses into your body; and, two, it's impossible that somebody rigged the simulation to include physical stresses."

  Appleton nodded.

  "Which impossible are you talking about?" Dan asked.

  "Both."

  "You're saying it's impossible to make a VR system that gives the user physical stresses?"

  "I'm saying it's impossible to make that system, the one out in the hangar, do that." Hunching closer over the tray-covered table, Appleton said, "There's no sensory input devices for the kinds of physical stresses you're talking about, Dan! The system has visual inputs, yes. Audio inputs. But that's it. Not even the data gloves put sensory inputs into the user. They're one-way, outgoing. You move your hands and fingers and the system reads the motions as commands to the computer. you know that."

  "I know what I felt," Dan insisted.

  "It was psychological. It had to be psychological."

  "You think psychological stress gave Ralph a stroke? And killed Adair?"

  Appleton fell silent.

  "Suppose it's not impossible," Dan said, his lunch and his hunger utterly forgotten. "Just suppose, for the sake of discussion, that it could be done."

  "All right." Reluctantly.

  "Who could have done it?"

  "No one could have done it, Dan. you know that. It's just not possible.

  "But suppose it is possible," Dan insisted, hunching closer to Doc.

  Appleton hesitated. "Ralph thought it might have been Yuri Yevshenko."

  "The Russian exchange guy? Dan shook his head. "No. He didn't have the smarts for something like this."

  With a beleaguered sigh, Doc said, "Then that leaves nobody but you and Jace."

  "It wasn't me."

  "Then it has to be Jace."

  "But it couldn't have been Jace. He wasn't here for the past year. I was the only one working on the sim after Jace left."

  Doc looked lost, bewildered.

  "Besides," Dan went on, "why would Jace louse up the sim? He put as many years into it as I did. Even if somehow he could have done it, why would he try to screw things up?"

  "Ask him," said Doc.

  "But we worked side by side for all those years. Would he
want to ruin his own work? And mine? Chrissakes, Doc, he's my friend! The closest friend got. He's your friend too."

  Appleton's pale eyes went cold. "He's not my friend or yours, Dan."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Jason Lowrey is nobody's friend," Doc said. "I don't think he's capable of friendship."

  "No, Doc, you're wrong."

  "Face the facts, Dan. Jace would crucify his own mother if he thought it would make an interesting VR simulation."

  CHAPTER 29

  It was only three o'clock but as she walked up the corridor toward Muncrief's office Vickie could see that the lab was emptying out. A steady trickle of people passed her heading toward the back door and the employee parking lot. The day before a holiday, Vickie thought. With all the work we've got to get done in order to open Cyber World on time they still slink out of here like kids sneaking out of school.

  Most of them looked embarrassed as they passed her. Man or woman, they each put on the same shitty little smile and wished her a happy holiday.

  "Happy Thanksgiving," Vickie sang back cheerily at each of them. "See you Monday, bright and early."

  Maybe I'm being too hard on them, she thought. A lot of them will be back in here Friday and through the weekend. Still, she bristled inwardly that they were leaving before the official quitting time.

  Muncrief was at his desk, phone clamped to his ear. There's no Thanksgiving weekend coming up in Tokyo, Vickie knew. Nor in Switzerland. And I'll bet Max Glass is in his office in New York, too.

  "Okay, Dan," she heard Muncrief say as she took one of the cushioned chairs in front of his desk. "Thanks for calling."

  "Dan?" Vickie asked as Muncrief hung up.

  Kyle looked haggard, as if he had not slept in days. His eyes were rimmed with red, dark bags under them. pressure's really getting to him, Vickie told herself.

  "He's coming back tonight," Muncrief said wearily. "The Air Force is flying him into Kissimmee."

  "Well that's something, at least."