“Is everything just like Dr. Fuller left it?” I asked.
“Nothing’s been touched.”
“There are some notes missing,” I said, watching carefully for her reactions.
Her eyes widened. “How do you know?”
“He told me about something he was working on. I can’t find any mention of it.”
She glanced away—uneasily?—then back at me. “Oh, he disposed of a lot of papers, just last week.”
“Where?”
“He incinerated them.”
I indicated the forced drawer. “And what about this?”
“I—” Then she smiled and came over to the desk. “Is this a sort of inquisition?”
Relaxing, I said, “I’m just trying to pick up the pieces of some research odds and ends.”
“It can’t be that important, can it?” But before I could answer, she suggested impulsively, “Let’s go for a drive, Doug.”
I took her back to the couch and we sat side by side. “Just a few more questions. That broken lock?”
“Dad lost his key. That was about three weeks ago. He pried the drawer open with a knife.”
That, I knew, was a lie. A year earlier I had helped Fuller install a biocapacitance trigger on the lock so he could open the drawer without his key, which he had often misplaced.
She rose. “If we’re going to take that drive, I’ll get a wrap.”
“About that sketch your father drew—”
“Sketch?”
“The drawing of Achilles and the tortoise, in red ink—at his office. You didn’t take it, did you?”
“I didn’t even see it.”
Not only had she noticed the sketch, but I had stood behind her watching her study it for some time.
I decided to toss a shocker at her, just to see what sort of effect it might have. “Jinx, what I’m trying to find out is whether your father
really
died accidentally.”
Her mouth fell open and she stepped back. “Oh, Doug, you’re not
serious!
You mean somebody might have—killed him?”
“I think so. I also thought there might be something in his notes indicating who and why.”
“But nobody would have wanted to do anything like that!” She was silent a moment. “And if you’re right, you could be in danger yourself! Oh, Doug, you’ve got to forget about it!”
“Don’t you want to see the guilty person exposed?”
“I don’t know.” She hesitated. “I’m frightened. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
I noticed with interest that she hadn’t suggested going to the police. “Why do you think anything’s going to happen to me?”
“I—oh, Doug, I’m confused and afraid.”
A brilliant lunar disk transformed the car’s plexidome into a shimmering silver cupola that splashed soft radiance on the figure of the girl seated beside me.
Reticent and distant, eyes boring ahead as the road unfolded before the car’s air cushion, she seemed like a fragile Dresden that might crumble beneath the feathery assault of moonlight.
She was withdrawn in thought now, but she had not been only a few minutes earlier. Then she had pleaded with me, almost desperately, to forget that her father might have been murdered.
And I was only all the more confounded. It was almost as though she were standing as a shield between me and whatever had befallen her father. And I couldn’t avoid the impression that she was extending a protective cloak over whoever had been responsible.
I laid my hand upon hers. “Jinx, are you in trouble?”
Her normal reaction would have been to ask whatever had given me that idea. But she only said, “No, of course not.”
The words were a calm resolution, a dedication to the course she had elected. And I knew I could push no further along that avenue. I would have to look elsewhere, even though Jinx represented a direct route to my objective.
Then I retreated into my own shell of thought, switching onto automatic and letting the car guide
itself
along the unfamiliar, deserted country road. There were only two possible explanations that would cover all the incongruous circumstances. One: Some vast, malevolent agency of a capacity both fierce and unguessable was pursuing an unfathomable course. Two: Nothing at all of an extraordinary nature had occurred—except in my mind.
But I couldn’t shake off the insidious notion that some brutish, mystical force was determined to discourage me from pinning down the cause of Fuller’s death, while it held out the implied promise at the same time that if I quit flouting its authority, as both it and Jinx seemed to want me to, everything would be all right.
I
wanted
things to go right. Glancing over at the girl, I realized how feverishly I longed for normality. She was beautiful in the moonlight, like a warm beacon inviting me to cast off my distress and accept the ordinary things.
But she wasn’t ordinary. She was something very special.
Seeming to sense my thoughts, she moved next to me, took my arm in hers, and laid her head on my shoulder.
“There’s
so
much in life, isn’t there, Doug?” she said with a strange mixture of melancholy and hope in her voice.
“As much as you want to find in it,” I answered.
“And what do
you
want to find?”
I thought of her, exploding into my existence at a time, when I so critically needed someone like her.
“While I was away I never stopped thinking of you,” she said. “I felt like a silly, frustrated child all along. But I never stopped.”
I waited for the silken flow of words to resume, but heard only the sound of deep breathing. She was asleep. And on her cheeks twin rivers of quicksilver spangled in the moonlight.
She was running away from something, just as I was. But I knew then that even though we perhaps shared the same despair, there was no way we could communicate it to each other, because, for some incomprehensible reason, that was the way she wanted it.
The car headed up a hillside, bathing the slope with its lights and revealing a section of the country I had never seen before.
We topped the hill and a blast of icy terror tore at my chest. I hit the braking stud and we came smoothly, swiftly to a halt.
Jinx stirred but didn’t awaken.
I sat there for an eternity, staring incredulously ahead.
The road ended a hundred feet away.
On each side of the strip, the very earth itself dropped off into an impenetrable barrier of stygian blackness.
Out there were no stars, no moonlight—only the nothingness within nothingness that might be found beyond the darkest infinity.
Later, I realized I should have awakened Jinx at the climax of that reason-shattering drive into the country. Then, by her reaction, I would have known whether half of all creation had blinked out of existence or whether I had merely imagined that effect. But I only sat there fighting off another partial lapse of consciousness. When I finally overcame the seizure and managed to look up again, the road was there, stretching normally into the distance, flanked by serene fields and rolling hills which stood out sharply in the moonlight.
There it was again—the redeeming circumstance. The road had disappeared. But it
couldn’t
have, because there it was. Similarly, Lynch had vanished. But all evidence indicated he had never existed. There was no way I could prove I had seen a sketch of Achilles and the tortoise. But the compensating possibility was that it had never been drawn in the first place.
It wasn’t until the following afternoon that Chuck Whitney came up with a sufficiently challenging simulectronic problem to rescue my thoughts from their treadmill of unreason.
He entered my office through the private staff door, dropped into a chair, and swung his heels up on the desk. “Well, we finally got the look-see modulator back in operation.”
I turned from the window, where I had been staring out at the reaction monitor pickets.
“You don’t seem very happy about it.”
“We lost two whole days.”
“We’ll make it up.”
“Of course we will.” He smiled wearily. “But that environmental breakdown scared hell out of our Contact Unit down there. For a while I thought P. Ashton would go irrational and have to be yanked.”
I glanced uncomfortably at the floor. “Ashton is the only weak link in Fuller’s system. No analog mentality can stand up against the knowledge that he’s merely a complex of electrical charges in a simulated reality.”
“I don’t like it either. But Fuller was right. We’ve
got
to have a dependable observer down there. So many things could start going wrong without our finding out about it for days.”
It was a problem that had mired my thoughts for weeks, eventually driving me to take that month’s leave so I could come to grips with my dissatisfaction. Somehow I couldn’t shake off the conviction that permitting a Contact Unit to know he is nothing more than an electronically simulated entity was the height of ruthlessness.
Suddenly decided, I said, “Chuck, we’re going to junk that system as soon as possible. Instead we’ll set up surveillance staff. We’ll do all our observing through the medium of direct projection into the simulator. No more P. Ashtons.”
His expression shifted into a relieved grin. “I’ll start setting up the staff. Meanwhile, we have just one more problem. We’re going to lose Cau No.”
“Who?”
“Cau No. He’s the ‘average immigrant’ in our population. A Burmese. IDU-4313. Ashton reported half an hour ago that he attempted suicide.”
“Why?”
“As best I could get it, astrological considerations required as much. That upheaval in the environment convinced him doomsday was imminent.”
“That’s easily taken care of. Remotivate him. If he’s developed a suicide urge, just program it out.”
Chuck rose and went to the window. “It’s not that simple. Ranting and raving about the meteors and the storm and fires, he attracted quite a crowd. Sold them on the idea that all those freaks of nature couldn’t happen at the same time. Ashton says a whole slew of ID entities are wondering about the upheaval.”
“Oh. That’s bad.”
He shrugged. “By itself it would probably wash off. But if something else like that should happen, we may have a lot of irrational reaction units running around. Best thing to do is shut down Simulacron-3 for another couple of days and wipe off the storm and fires completely. Cau No is going to have to go too. His ‘obsession’ is too deep.”
After he had gone, I settled down at the desk and, without realizing it, soon had my pen in hand. Absently, I tried to duplicate Fuller’s drawing of the Grecian warrior and the turtle.
But I soon tossed the pen aside, irritated over the defiant incomprehensibility of the sketch. My description of the drawing had suggested something to Avery Collingsworth, I remembered: Zeno’s Paradox. But I was certain that Fuller’s sketch had been meant to imply neither the paradox nor its resultant proposition that motion is impossible.
Attentively, I turned over on my tongue the phrase “All motion is an illusion.”
Then I realized there was
one
frame of reference in which all motion
is
an illusion—
in the
simulator
itself!
The subjective units fancy themselves operating within a physical environment. Yet as they move around they actually go nowhere. All that happens when a reactional entity such as Cau No “walks” from one building to another, for instance, is that simulectronic currents bias a grid and transducers feed the illusive “experiences” onto a memory drum.
Had Fuller wanted me to recognize
that
principle in the drawing? But what had he been trying to say?
Then I lurched from the chair.
Cau No!
Cau No was the key!
It shone through in stark clarity now. The sketch was meant simply to suggest the word “Zeno”!
In referring to the characters in our simulator, the Reactions staff had adopted the informal practice of identifying them by their last names and first initials.
Thus, Cau No became “C. No”—almost the phonetic equivalent of “Zeno”!
Of course! Fuller had had vital information to pass on to me. And he had employed the most secretive way of doing it. He had impressed it on a reactional unit’s storage drum. And he had left a coded message identifying the unit!
I sprinted through the reception room, leaving a curious Dorothy Ford staring after me, frozen in the motions of restoring body to the sweep of her pageboy.
I went bounding up the stairs, berating myself for not knowing which ID ward housed Cau No’s storage console.
After scanning the wall indexes in two wards, I charged into a third—only to collide with Whitney and knock him over backwards. His tool box spilled its contents on the floor.
“The Cau No cabinet!” I demanded. “Where is it?”
He gestured over his shoulder. “Last one on the left. But it’s dead. I just wiped the circuits clean.”
Back in my office, I braced myself against the desk and cringed before another vertiginous assault. Head pounding, perspiration filming my face, the drone of a thousand wasps drumming in my ears, I tried to hold back unconsciousness. When the room finally stabilized itself, I fell into the chair, exhausted and despondent.
It was almost incredibly coincidental that Cau No should have been deprogrammed just minutes before I had solved the enigma of the drawing. For a moment it even seemed as though Chuck Whitney might be part of the general conspiracy.
Impulsively, I called him on the intercom. “Did you say our Contact Unit had spoken with C. No just before he attempted suicide?”
“Right. It was Ashton who stopped him. Say, what’s this all about?”
“Just an idea. I want you to arrange to drop me into the simulator on a surveillance circuit for a face-to-face with Phil Ashton.”
“Won’t be possible for a couple of days—not with all this reprogramming and reorientation.”
I sighed. “Put it on a double shift basis.”
I snapped off the 1C just as the door swung open to admit Horace P. Siskin, all trim and immaculate in a gray pinstripe and wearing the most cordial smile in his facial repertory.
He came around the desk. “Well, Doug, what did you think of him?”
“Who?”
“Wayne Hartson, of course. Quite a character. The party wouldn’t have its foot in the administrative door without him.”
“So I heard,” I said dryly. “But I didn’t quite jump up and click my heels over the privilege of meeting him.”
Siskin laughed—a high-pitched but still lusty outburst that left me regarding him quizzically. He commandeered my chair and swiveled around to face the window.
“Don’t think much of him myself, son. I doubt he’s a good influence on either the party or the country.”
That took me by surprise. “And I suppose you’re going to do something about it?”
He scanned the ceiling and said intensely, “I rather think I am—with your help, of course.”
He aimed a full minute’s worth of silence at me. When I didn’t react, he went on:
“Hall, I think you’re observant enough to know I’m a man of no small ambitions. And I’m proud of my drive and industry. How would you like to see those same qualities applied to the administrative affairs of this country?”
“Under a one-party system?” I asked cautiously.
“One party or ten parties—who gives a damn? What we want is the most capable national leadership available! Can you think of a bigger financial empire than the one I’ve created? Is there anyone more logically qualified to sit in the White House?”
When his expression questioned my patient smile, I explained, “I can’t picture you displacing characters like Hartson.”
“Won’t be difficult,” he assured. “Not with the simulator calling the shots. When we program our electromathematical community on a politically-oriented basis, one Horace P. Siskin is going to be a prominent ID unit. Not an exact replica, perhaps. Maybe we’ll brush up on the image a bit.”
He paused in reflection. “At any rate, I want it so that when we consult Simulacron-3 for political advice, the Siskin image will assert itself as the ideal candidate type.”
I only stared at him. He could do it. I saw that his plan would succeed if only because it was so bold—and logical. Now I was more thankful than ever that I had decided to string along with Reactions so I might be in position to do something about the alliance between Siskin and the party.
Dorothy Ford broke in over the intercom. “There are two men out here from the Association of Reaction Monitors who—”
The door opened as the CRMs, indignant and impatient, ushered themselves in.
“You Hall?” one of them demanded.
When I nodded, the other stormed, “Well, you can tell Siskin—”
“Tell him yourself.” I gestured toward the chair.
Siskin swiveled around to face them. “Yes?”
The pair were uniformly surprised.
“We represent ARM,” the first said. “And here it is, without trimmings: Either you stop work on this simulator thing or we’ll call a walkout by every reaction monitor in the city!”
Siskin started to brush off the threat with a laugh. But instead a grim cast claimed his face. It wasn’t difficult to guess why. One-fourth of all employment was accountable, in one way or another, to the opinion polling concerns. And maximum profit for the Establishment depended upon full employment. Siskin, of course, could withstand the assault by falling back on his reserves. But within a week’s time there wouldn’t be a businessman or housewife who wouldn’t be lined up solidly with ARM. Eventual destruction of the Association was, indeed, part of the Establishment’s strategy, but not until the financial empire had braced itself for the repercussions.
Not waiting for his answer, the pair strode out. “Well,” I said, somewhat amused, “what do we do now?”
Siskin smiled. “I don’t know what you’re going to do. But I’m going to find a handful of strings and start pulling them.”
Two days later I made myself comfortable on another couch in the peephole department and let Whitney lower a different type of transfer helmet on my head. There was no banter this time, since he had sensed my impatience.
I watched him throw the surveillance circuit switch.
The projection came off smoothly. One second I was reclining on leather upholstery, the next, I was standing in an analog videophone booth. Since it wasn’t an empathy coupling, I wasn’t imprisoned in the back of some ID unit’s mind. Instead,
I
was
there—
—in a pseudo-physical sense.
A tall, thin man stepped out of the next booth. He approached and I could see he was trembling. “Mr. Hall?” he asked uncertainly.
Nodding, I scanned the typical hotel lobby setting. “Is anything wrong?”
“No,” he said miserably. “Nothing
you
would appreciate.”
“What is it, Ashton?” I reached for his arm but he drew back shuddering.
Then he found words for his distress. “Suppose, in your world, a god dropped down and started talking with you.”
I could appreciate his humble, awed perspective. I seized him by the shoulder nevertheless. “Forget it. Right now I’m just like you—a sentient bundle of simulectronic charges.”
He turned half away. “Let’s get it over with. Then you can go back.” He jerked his head in an indefinite direction.
“I didn’t realize direct contact would be this difficult.”
“What did you expect?” he demanded scornfully. “A picnic?”
“Ashton, we’re going to work out something. Maybe we can relieve you of your duty as a Contact Unit.”
“Just yank me completely. Wipe me clean. I wouldn’t want to go on, knowing what I know.”
Ill at ease, I hurried to the point. “I wanted to talk with you about Cau No.”
“Lucky, deprogrammed devil,” he commented.
“You spoke with him just before he tried to kill himself?”
He nodded. “I’d had my eye on him for some time. I sensed he was going to crack up.”
I stared intensely into his face. “Phil, it wasn’t just the meteors and the storm that set him off, was it?”
He looked up sharply. “How did you know?”
“There
was
something else then?”
“Yes.” His shoulders fell. “I didn’t say anything about it. I was vindictive, spiteful. I wanted to let Cau No have full rein-wreck the whole damned setup. Then you’d have to wipe everything clean and make a second start.”
“What was it that set him off?”
The man hesitated, then blurted it out. “He knew. Somehow he found out what he was, what this whole rotten, make-believe city was. He knew it was only part of a counterfeit world, that his reality was nothing but a reflection of electronic processes.”
I sat up stiffly. Whatever information Fuller had consigned to the Cau No entity, it had had that terrific an impact—enough to alert him to the fact that he was merely an analog human being.