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  Dan waited patiently for Lowrey in the cramped narrow control booth of the simulations lab, his blazer hanging from his arm, his conservatively striped rep tie pulled loose from his collar. The two technicians who had been monitoring Jace's run in the chamber got up and left, mumbling their greetings to the new employee.

  "I'll leave you two guys alone," said Gary Chan.

  Before Dan could object he too slipped out into the hallway and let the door click shut behind him. Dan got the feeling that Chan was afraid of Jace, or at least fearful that Jace would be pissed about Dan's calling him out of the simulation.

  The solid metal door to the simulations chamber opened and Lowrey stepped through. Dan saw the motto on Jace's tee shirt: Reality is a crutch for the unimaginative.

  For a moment the two men simply stood facing each other. Then Jace burst into a huge smile and flung his skinny arms around Dan's neck.

  "You're here! You're here!" he sang, prancing around in the narrow control booth as if he were dancing with Dan.

  "I'm here," Dan said, grinning at his partner. "It's really me, not a simulation."

  "It's great! Why the hell didn't you call me out earlier? You said you've been waiting a friggin' hour?"

  "Well, you were busy and the technicians—"

  "They should've called me out of the sim. You coulda come in with me. Those fart-brains!"

  Jace brushed past Dan and leaned over one consoles, pecking at its keyboard.

  "We're gonna do great things here, Danno. Terrific things. These dumb games are just the beginning."

  "That's what I'm here for," said Dan.

  "We got a lotta work to do, though," Jace muttered, typing with two lean fingers. "Nothing around here works right. Got the best friggin' equipment money can buy but still it's not doing the job."

  His words had an edge to them that Dan did not recall from earlier days. Jace's voice had always been rasping, almost hoarse. He could be nasty, biting. But never with Dan. Now he seemed wired, clanked up.

  "What's wrong?" Dan asked.

  "Every frigging thing. That's why I told Muncrief I had to have you here. Just like at Dayton: I dream up the programs and you make 'em work. Right? Right!"

  Dan shrugged resignedly. Jace's attitude had not changed much in the year since he had last seen him. He was a precocious brat who had never grown up. Working with Jace was like trying to work with Mozart: frustrating, exasperating, and—every now and then—exalting beyond words.

  "Come on in," Jace said, jerking a thumb toward the chamber door. "Lemme show you what I've been doing."

  "Not now . . ."

  "Come on, come on, come on!" Jace tugged at Dan's shirtsleeve like a little boy urging his daddy to buy him candy. "Only a coupla minutes. You gotta see this you gotta!"

  "I just spent half an hour playing space pilot."

  "Charlie Chan's game? Kid stuff! What'll you see what fun doing here!"

  With a mixture of reluctance and anticipation Dan draped his blazer on the back of a chair and took off his tie altogether while Jace paged his technicians over the phone on the console desk top. The two techs showed up. Chan did not. Within minutes Dan was outfitted with a helmet and gloves. He followed Jace through the metal hatch into the simulation chamber.

  "I haven't even sat down in my own office yet," he complained.

  "We'll just play one inning. You pitch, I'll bat."

  "We play against one another?"

  "Yep." Jace's grin was smug. "I call 'em conflict games. Nothing like it anywhere. You'll see."

  Jace walked over to the far corner of the chamber in long-legged strides. Dan closed the heavy metal door firmly, then started connecting his helmet and gloves to the color coded hair-thin optical fibers that plugged into the electronics. He saw that Jace had already finished his connections and was waiting impatiently for him, arms crossed over his narrow chest. Dan nodded an apology and pulled down the visor of his helmet. Utter darkness. Like being blind.

  "Okay you guys," he heard Jace's impatient voice in the helmet earphones. "We're waiting. Make it pronto, Tonto."

  Lights flickered before Dan's eyes and swiftly coalesced into a recognizable scene. Dan saw he was in a baseball stadium, three tiers packed with a restlessly murmuring crowd, bright blue sky above. The crowd was flat, lacking detail, but he could hear the bullfrog voice of a vendor hawking peanuts.

  He was standing on the pitching mound, wearing a regular baseball uniform, complete down to his spiked shoes. Jace stood in the batter's box, batting left-handed, grinning at him with those big yellow teeth of his from under the bill of an Oakland A's cap. The catcher was flashing signals, the umpire crouching behind him. Dan felt the baseball in his right hand. He looked down at it: real to the tiniest detail, even the signature of the league president. The stitches felt slightly rough in his hand. The ball had the proper weight and solidity. Great stuff, he said to himself.

  Jace was waving his bat, waiting for the pitch. He's probably loaded the game in his favor, Dan thought, knowing Jace. He doesn't like to lose. Well, what the hell, Dan thought. It's only a game. Taking a deep breath, Dan swung his arms over his head, kicked his left leg high, and threw as hard as he could.

  The crack of the bat sounded like a pistol shot. The ball rifled past Dan's ear, a solid hit into center field. Jace pulled up grinning at first base as the fielders got the ball back to Dan. And another Jace came up to the plate, bat in hand, an identical toothy grin on his long angular face.

  After four Jaces had batted, three hits and a long fly ball that resulted in two runs scored, Dan let the ball drop out of his hand.

  "That's enough," he called down to Jace.

  "Don't you want a turn at bat?"

  "At this rate I won't get to bat until Christmas!"

  "Okay, okay! You bat, I'll pitch."

  Dan envisioned Jace pitching against him, saw himself striking out ignominiously. He felt the slightest tendril of an asthmatic wheeze in his chest, as if somebody had run a sheet of sandpaper along the inside of his lungs.

  "I've had enough," he said.

  "Come on," Jace called from the batter's box. "We're just getting started."

  "I'm having trouble breathing," Dan half-lied. "My damned asthma's starting up." It was an excuse and he hated it but he also knew it always worked.

  Jace scowled, narrow-eyed, but said, "Terminate."

  Dan lifted his helmet visor. They were standing in the bare chamber again.

  "You just don't have the competitive instinct, do you?" Jace said.

  Dan shrugged. "You've got enough for both of us." They returned the helmets and gloves back into the control booth.

  "You can see what I'm up against," Jace said as he squeezed past the technicians in the narrow booth and opened the door to the hallway outside. "If I get good definition on the players, the background goes flat. Try to sharpen up the background and the players get fuzzy."

  Following him, Dan asked, "What're you using?"

  "Got a pair of Cray Y-XMPs and a brand new Toshiba Seventy-seven Hundred that's supposed to put the Crays to shame. But I think you gotta talk Japanese to the friggin' Toshiba to get it to do what you want."

  "That was a Toshiba I saw in the computer center?"

  "They're not in the pit," Jace snapped. "I've got 'em in my lab, out back. I don't share my machines with the rest of the slobs."

  "Oh."

  "We don't lack for equipment, Danno. It's not like the friggin' Air Force. Muncrief bitches and complains about the cost but he comes through for me. Anything I want, just about. That's how I got you, pal. But he's been getting antsy lately. Keeps moaning about the money."

  Dan had worked with Jace for nearly ten years at the Air Force laboratory in Dayton, the quiet guy in the shadow of Jace's brilliance. No one noticed Dan, except their boss, Dr Appleton. Dan had been just another electronics technician, a civilian working for government pay, when Appleton had teamed him with the wildly eccentric Jason Lowrey. Their task: to make fli
ght simulations as realistic as actual combat missions. To train fighter pilots to fly and fight under brutally vivid lifelike conditions—in the safety of a laboratory on the ground.

  The answer was virtual reality: simulations that are as utterly lifelike as human ingenuity and high technology can make them.

  "I wanna create worlds where you can't tell the difference from reality," Jason Lowrey had proclaimed to anyone who would listen. "I wanna build whole universes of nothing more than electrical impulses fed into your nervous system. I wanna be God!"

  Jace didn't look much like God, Dan thought as he followed his old buddy down the corridor to his cubbyhole of an office. Didn't smell much like God, either.

  "Jace, when's the last time you took a shower?"

  Lowrey interrupted his monologue of problems to look down at Dan. He frowned, then quickly broke into a sheepish grin.

  "That's another reason I wanted you here," he said. "You guys were a mother hen to me."

  His office was a certified disaster area. It looked as if a tornado had struck a library: papers strewn everywhere. Dan could make out the shape of a small desk and a pair of cheap plastic chairs beneath snowdrifts of loose papers. Bookshelves on every wall stuffed with reports and journals. No decorations of any kind; or if there were, they were buried beneath the papers. One window, which Jace had painted black. Dan saw that Jace must have painted it over himself; the paint was streaked and lumpy, the work of a man who had no time or interest in careful workmanship.

  "Lemme tell you, Danno," said Jace as he pushed papers off his desk chair and plopped down on it, "We got the chance here to do great stuff. Really great stuff."

  "That's what you told me in Dayton, That's why I came down here."

  "As if he hadn't heard Dan, Jace went on. "Muncrief's got the kind of vision I need, pal. Thinks big. We're gonna put Disney out of business, you watch."

  Dan grinned at his partner and tossed his rumpled blazer onto one of the paper piles. "Good. Maybe I can work the glitches out of my symphony orchestra program."

  "The conflict games are the quantum leap, Danno," Jace rattled on as if he had not heard Dan. "Get two people to share a simulation, share a world together. This baseball stuff is just the beginning, pal. Just the beginning."

  "I'd still like to develop the symphony orchestra program," Dan said, raising his voice slightly.

  Jace glared at him. "Don't start that again! Let me do the creative stuff; you handle the details."

  "I can do it on my own time," Dan said. "It won't get in the way."

  But Jace was already off on another tangent. "Two people sharing the same dream, that's gonna be powerful, man. You can fight duels, settle court cases—and sex! Better than real life! Better than anything you ever imagined!"

  Same old Jace, thought Dan. His mind races ahead of everybody else and he leaves me to make his ideas work. But inwardly he was grinning with anticipation.

  "Hey," he said, interrupting Jace's monologue. "Why don't you come over for dinner?"

  "Huh?" Jace blinked at him like a man suddenly awakened from a nap. "When?"

  "Tonight. Now."

  Jace had been such a frequent dinner guest back in Dayton that Susan had called him "my oldest child."

  "Uh . . . I don't know . . ." Jace hesitated.

  "Come on. Sue hasn't seen you in more than a year. And you haven't seen Phil yet, have you? And Angie! You wouldn't recognize her, she's grown so tall."

  "Angie," said Jace, his eyes shifting away from Dan's. "Angie. Yeah."

  CHAPTER 6

  The heavy traffic surprised Dan. Glancing at the dashboard digital clock, he complained to Jace, "Jeez, look at all these cars."

  Jace shrugged. "Orlando's a big city, pal."

  Then Dan remembered that he had driven to work in the middle of the afternoon. Still, it was damned near eight o'clock and the broad, palm-lined avenues were choked with cars inching along from one stop light to the next. He saw a highway overpass where the traffic was zooming by at a good clip, but there were huge semi-trailer rigs roaring by up there, spurting black diesel smoke and running up the back of anyone doing less than seventy.

  "Does the highway go past Pine Lake Gardens?" he asked Jace.

  "Damned if I know. I'm on the other side of town."

  Dan was stuck with the crowded streets. I'll have to find the best route, he told himself. Must be side streets and cutoffs I can use, once I get to know the area.

  It was hot. He had rolled all the Honda's windows down, but inching along like this brought no cooling wind. A sleek red hatchback pulled up beside him, radio blaring raucous rock music with a bass thumping so loud Dan could feel his sinuses spasming. He glanced over. A pretty young blonde wearing wraparound sunglasses and lipstick the same fire-engine red as her car. Her windows were up, her air-conditioning on, and still her radio was giving him a headache.

  "Hope she doesn't live on my block," Dan said. Dan jerked a thumb toward the hatchback.

  Jace looked, then turned back to Dan with a puzzled look. "Why not?"

  Grinning, Dan said, "Forget it."

  The traffic crawled along. Dan stared absently at the big Buick in front of him with a driver so tiny her wispy white hair barely came up to the steering wheel. The car bore a bumper sticker, Welcome to Florida. Now go home!

  Jace was strangely silent. Moody. He got that way sometimes, Dan remembered. Most of the time you couldn't shut him up, he talked nonstop and brooked no interruptions. But then he would go quiet and you could hardly get two words out of him. Usually when he had a problem to solve or he was working on some new idea that hadn't gelled yet.

  "You've really made a lot of progress in one year," said Dan.

  "Yeah, but we got a long way to go, kiddo."

  "That baseball game—it's going to be a dream come true for every guy who ever went to a game or bought a baseball card. All those couch potatoes who never got picked when the kids chose up teams. They'll all be able to play with Reggie Jackson and Roger Clemens."

  Jake's lantern-jawed face broke into a wide toothy grin. "And that's just the beginning, Danno. Just the beginning. I been thinkin' about these conflict sims. Got a lot of ideas about 'em."

  That was all it took to break Jace out of his daydream, whatever it was. He started spouting ideas and concepts while Dan laughed inwardly and told himself, it's going to be like old times. It really is. Just like old times.

  Yet a faint tendril of worry nagged at the back of his mind. Jace had to make me play against him. why did he do that? It's as if he had to show me he's the top dog. As if I cared. Damned games are only games. Must be important to him, though. I guess he needs to feel that he can beat me, beat anybody. He needs to feel he's king of the hill.

  He's right about one thing, though. These games are only the beginning. We can do great things with VR.

  "I'll do my symphony orchestra simulation," Dan said.

  Jace huffed at him. "Yeah, sure. There's lots of applications for teaching. Muncrief's had me working on games for the local school half the time."

  "The school Angie's going to?"

  "Watch your driving," Jace said.

  Dan was hardly doing any driving, just inching along the crowded street from one stop sign to the next.

  "What else have you been thinking about?" Dan asked.

  "Besides teaching?" Jace frowned in concentration. "What about microsurgery? We can put the surgeon inside the patient's body and let him see and feel what's going on in there while he's operating."

  "Yeah."

  "And entertainment. we can make a guy dance like—what the hell's that guy's name?"

  "Fred Astaire?"

  "Yeah, the one from those old videos:"

  Dan almost missed the turn onto his own street. He was unfamiliar with the neighborhood and all the bright new houses looked virtually alike to him. But finally he drove the dark blue Honda up onto the driveway and into the cool shadows of the garage. I've got to watch out for rust, he thought
as he got out of the car. In this humidity she'll rust out fast if I let it go.

  Susan was in the kitchen, red hair tied up in a bandanna, wearing shorts and a blouse that hung loosely about her hips. Two pots were on the stove, one of them steaming.

  "Jace!" she said, putting down the spoon she was holding to fling her arms around his neck. "How's my oldest child?"

  Jace grinned and hugged her.

  "How about your lord and master?" Dan demanded.

  "Hello, darling." Susan pecked at his lips. "How was your first day?"

  "Not bad," said Dan.

  Glancing up at the wall clock, Susan asked, "It takes forty minutes to get home from the lab?"

  Dan had phoned her just before he left, the way he always had in Dayton. "Traffic's pretty heavy," he said. "I'll have to find some short cuts."

  "I got the stove working," Susan said proudly. "Tonight we eat spaghetti a la Susan."

  "Great," said Jace.

  "Sauce from a jar, though. Haven't had time to make it from scratch. And I couldn't carry that much from the. supermarket, on foot. "

  "Uncle Jace!"

  A blonde blur whizzed into the kitchen and threw herself into Jace's arms.

  Dan smiled, thinking of Dorothy and the Scarecrow. Jace hauled Angela off her feet and swung her around, nearly knocking her feet into the pots on the stove.

  "My gosh, Angie," he said as he put her down, "you've grown a foot! Here it is on top of your head!" And he mussed her hair with his knuckles.

  "You're silly;" Angela laughed. Jace scooped her up again and carried her, giggling and wriggling, into the living room.

  Dan followed them into the living room, and then went out to the master bedroom. He tossed his blazer on the bed. It was wrinkled and limp; just the way he himself suddenly felt. Tired. A little disappointed. The excitement of seeing Jace again was wearing off. Like a kid who waited all year for his birthday party and now it's over. Back on the job. It all came flooding back to him, all the memories of the old days at Wright-Patterson With Jace. It was as if the two of them had never been separated. Jace was happy to see him again, sure, but he just took it for granted that Dan would be there when he wanted him. As if he had just been off on vacation or sick leave for a while. This wasn't a new start for Dan, it was just a continuation of his life as Jace's partner.