Death Dream (8 page)

"Muncrief doesn't seem to mind the sun," Dan muttered.

"He doesn't have two children to think of. And a wife with fair skin."

He turned toward her. "Fair? your skin's better than fair. I think your skin's terrific." Dan traced a finger along the curve of her jaw, then tapped the end of her pert nose. "Wouldn't want that cute little proboscis to get sunburned."

She heaved an exaggerated sigh. "I love it when you talk scientific."

He broke into a grin. Leaning closer he whispered into her ear, "Testosterone. Estrogen. Penis. Coitus."

Susan whispered back, "More! More!"

"Fellatio. Cunnilingus."

"Oh god!"

He scooped her up in his arms and marched off to the bedroom.

The first time they had made love Dan had surprised her with his fiercely single-minded intensity. Susan had known a soft-spoken, reserved, gentle man who had taken her to dinners and movies and picnics. Many nights they had talked for hours, usually in his car, often until the sun came up. Dan had told her all about his childhood in Youngstown, his work at Wright-Patterson, how much he owed to Dr Appleton. Susan had fallen in love with an earnest, shy, hard-working man who was almost a nerd in comparison to some of the men she had dated.

Yet there was something beneath the surface, a smoldering drive that she sensed from the very first. When at last she decided to go to bed with him, Susan found that she had been more right than she had dreamed. In bed Dan turned into a different person altogether. All the inhibitions, all the cautions and modesty and self-effacements disappeared once he had his hands on her naked flesh.

She saw the passion that he hid from everyone else, even from himself. It almost frightened her, at first, but then she realized that Dan was much more than the uptight engineer she had first imagined him to be. What she had taken to be shyness was actually something close to fear; Dan was not bashful so much as wary, always on guard, as if to protect himself against being hurt by the people around him. She began to see him as a coiled panther, every muscle tensed, every nerve straining against the dangers of the world.

Except in bed. There he was a fiery passionate Italian who swept away all her doubts and inhibitions. It was as if the rest of the world disappeared and there were only the two of them with Dan concentrating every facet of his attention, every molecule of his existence on her and her alone. God knew what fantasies might be boiling through his mind; she did not care and did not want to know. It did not matter to her. He never said a word while making love, he did not have to. His hands on her, his tongue on her, his body hot and eager, inflamed her more than any words he could have spoken.

Now, as they thrashed together on their creaking old springs and mattress in their new air-conditioned house, Susan remembered all over again how important sex was to Dan. It was his only release, his only moment to unleash all the tensions and angers and fears that he carried inside him. In a way it was a sadistic game they played: the more frustration and anger that built up in him during the day, the more passion he unleashed at night.

Only once had Susan forgotten how vital sex was to him and it had almost shattered their marriage. She had never made that mistake again. Susan loved Dan Santorini and she knew he loved her. But it had taken long years of careful, deliberate consideration, day by day, to rebuild the trust in each other that they had almost thrown away.

He could forget everything while making love; she could not. Even so he could excite her to a pitch of arousal that made her wish there was nothing to remember. He responded to her whispered urgings and she responded to his touch, his lips on her throat, her nipples, her clitoris until they both came and she had to turn her head away to bite her pillow so she would not scream and wake the children.

Then Susan lay on the bed, sheets twisted and sticky, body sweaty and shining in the faint red glow of the digital clock on the night table, panting as if she had just run ten miles. Dan lay beside her. She could tell him retreating into his shell again. He got embarrassed afterward and the more Susan told him how wonderful he had been the more flustered he became.

"Another triumph for modern science," she whispered, half giggling.

Dan's only reply was a grunt. Because he was ashamed. While making love to his wife a vision of Vickie Bessel's face had flashed through his imagination. And then he found himself fantasizing about Dorothy. After all these years he still thought about Dorothy.

He loathed himself for that.

CHAPTER 7

The door was always open so it was difficult to see the nameplate on it, which read: DR WILLIAM R. APPLETON—CHIEF, ADVANCED SIMULATIONS SYSTEMS.

Despite the hefty title the office was small, almost threadbare. Dr Appleton's desk was standard government issue steel, painted olive drab, scuffed and dented from years of use. The two chairs in front of the desk were also old, steel frames with olive drab plastic cushions that were so hard they felt like concrete. The only other furniture in the office were rickety metal bookshelves packed with reports and journals and folders that threatened to spill onto the floor any minute, and a small table behind the desk chair on which sat a personal computer and a small row of hardbound textbooks. There was one window, off to the side, the only wall space that was not covered with shelving. It looked out on a concrete building that was almost identical to the one in which this office stood.

Three men sat in Dr Appleton's office. Appleton himself was behind the desk on the creaking swivel chair, slim, slope-shouldered, paunchy, his receding hairline halfway up his scalp. He was in shirtsleeves, fiddling nervously with an unlit black briar pipe. His eyes were icy blue and behind the rimless glasses he wore they looked like a pair of pale moons gazing at the world.

Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Martinez was also in shirtsleeves, starched and ironed so crisply that their creases looked razor-sharp. His blue Air Force jacket hung neatly from the back of the chair on which he sat. Martinez was a fighter pilot, a veteran of air combat in the Middle East, a commander of men. He was built like a welterweight contender, compact and solid, with square shoulders and a flat midsection. His face was square too, the blunt plain swarthy face of a man whose ancestors had toiled in the sun for generations before him. His eyes were the rich brown of the earth, steady and reliable. His lips were set in a tight belligerent line. Yet there were lines around his eyes and mouth that showed he knew how to laugh.

The third man in the office was a physician and neurophysiologist, Chandra Narlikar: smaller in stature than Dr Appleton, darker of skin than Lt. Col. Martinez. He looked extremely uncomfortable. "But according to your own records, Chandra," Appleton was saying, "Jerry was in perfect health."

"Not perfect. I never said perfect. Not that."

Martinez said, "He was certified for flight duty, wasn't he?"

"Yes of course," Narlikar said hurriedly. "He had a slightly high blood pressure but it was not sufficient cause to ground him."

"And he died of a stroke." Appleton made it half a statement, half a question. His voice was soft, almost a whisper.

"Yes indeed. A massive cerebral hemorrhage. A stroke, poor fellow."

"And there was nothing to indicate that he was at risk?" Martinez asked impatiently. Almost angrily.

"Nothing at all," said Narlikar.

"His high blood pressure?" Appleton suggested.

The physician shrugged his slim shoulders. "It was well within normal range. Not as high as the colonel's here, in fact."

Martinez snorted. His blood pressure had led the medical staff to take him off active flight duty, a fact that infuriated him—and drove his pressure higher.

"So let me see if I can put all this together," Appleton said slowly, leaning his elbows on his cluttered desk top and steepling his fingers. "Jerry had no significant health problems. He flew the new simulation and suffered a stroke that might have happened to him anyway. Is that right?"

Narlikar nodded unhappily. "It could have happened in his home, at his desk, anywhere. Many stroke victims are felled early in the morning in their own homes. Nine a.m. is the time when strokes occur most frequently."

"You're saying the simulation had nothing to do with it."

Narlikar started to reply, then hesitated. At last he said, "I cannot rule out that factor. You must understand that there is a great difference between a diagnosis and an explanation for the causative factor. He suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage; that we know. What caused his stroke is unknown. We have no way of knowing."

Martinez looked at Appleton. "No way of knowing," he repeated, more than a hint of disgust in his voice.

Dr Appleton said, "I don't see what else we can do about this. There's nothing new to add to what's already been reported. Jerry Adair suffered a stroke while he was flying the new simulation and we have no idea if the simulation played a part in causing the stroke."

"It wasn't the simulation," Martinez insisted. "It couldn't have been. How the hell could a simulation give the guy a goddamned stroke?"

Appleton shrugged.

Turning to the physician so abruptly that Narlikar actually flinched, the colonel demanded, "Do you think that a simulation could scare a veteran pilot to death?"

"I— I am told it is a very realistic simulation," Narlikar said.

"But it's only a damned simulation!" Martinez insisted. "Jerry's flown real combat missions. He's been a test pilot, for chrissakes. He wouldn't be scared in lousy sim. He knew it wasn't real."

Appleton said mildly, "We tried to simulate all the physical stresses, remember. You insisted on that, Ralph."

"Yeah, yeah. So we made the g-suit squeeze and we tilted the simulator and rolled it around in response to the pilot's control forces. So what? We couldn't put in the real g-loads that you'd get in actual flight. The simulator doesn't give you the accelerations, doesn't punish you the way a real flight would."

"I doubt that the physical stresses of the simulation were sufficient to cause Captain Adair's stroke," said Narlikar, with the slightest of stresses on the word physical.

"Then what did?"

Silence. The physician had no answer. He stared at Lt. Col. Martinez for a moment with his big liquid brown eyes, then looked away.

Finally Dr Appleton got up from his chair and, leaning across his desk, extended a bony arm to Narlikar. "Thank you, Chandra. You've been very helpful."

Narlikar rose to his feet and took Appleton's hand gratefully. "I'm afraid I have been of very little help, actually. But stroke cases are often puzzling, you know."

"Thanks," Appleton repeated.

Martinez got up grudgingly and shook the physician's hand also. Once Narlikar had left the tiny office, the colonel stared at the closed door as he grumbled, "About as much help as a box of Kleenex."

Appleton sank back into his creaking swivel chair. "Oh, I don't know. In a situation like this, Ralph, a negative report can be almost as helpful as a positive one."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Martinez fished a cigarette pack from his shirt pocket as he sat down again.

Reaching for his pipe, Appleton said, "Safety regulations forced us to shut down the simulation until we come up with a definite reason for Jerry's death, right?"

"And after three weeks of investigation all that Narlikar and his needle-pushers can tell us is that Jerry died of a stroke. Which we knew two hours after it happened."

"Okay," said Appleton. "What Narlikar is telling us is that the simulation probably didn't have anything to do with Jerry's stroke."

"Probably."

"You've been over the tapes. Do you see anything that could've killed Jerry?"

"It was a rough mission," Martinez said, lighting his cigarette with a disposable Bic. "We piled it on him. We were trying to see how realistic we could make the sim, remember?"

Appleton looked into the colonel's steady brown eyes.
Not a flicker of remorse. If he feels any responsibility for making the simulation too realistic he certainly isn't showing it
, Appleton thought.

"Well then," he said aloud, "if we're both convinced that the simulation had nothing to do with Jerry's death, we can recommend to the safety board that we resume our program."

"Uh-huh."

"Do you see any reason to keep it shut down?"

Martinez hesitated. He had been a flier all his adult life. He had seen men killed in stupid accidents, killed by the weather and by enemy action. Flying always had some element of danger in it and military flying was the most dangerous of all. You had to be able to fly at night and in bad weather and in situations where a sane pilot would stay on the ground. You had to be able to face missiles and guns and enemy pilots who maybe were just as good as you were. Maybe. That was the biggest risk of all, and the biggest kick. Man to man, pilot to pilot, who's going to win? Who's going to die?

Appleton's a civilian, Martinez told himself. The doc's a good guy but he's a civilian. Not even a pilot. He flies a desk. He's a scientist. What does he know about how the adrenaline jolts through you when you see a bogie on your six? Maybe he can read numbers off a page, but he's never felt the real thing, the real blast that goes through you when you wax some bastard's tail and knock him out of the sky. How could he? The only flying he's ever done has been as a passenger.

For long moments the two men sat looking at each other, their thoughts spinning. Maybe I made the sim too tough, Martinez admitted silently. But dammit, it's got to be tough. I can't send kids out into combat situations without making their training as tough and as realistic as it can be. Civilians don't understand. Every time one of my kids climbs into a cockpit and straps that plane onto his back he's putting his life on the line. I want them to be ready, to know what it's like, to have as much experience as we can jam into their skulls. And that means the most realistic simulations we can get these scientists to produce.

Maybe it killed Jerry. Maybe it did. And maybe Jerry would have killed himself the next time he took a real plane up.