Deathworld

Chapter 3

Nick stood by the Lake of Boiling Blood, gazing idly across its blooping, heaving depths, and decided that it looked a lot like spaghetti sauce.

He sighed. All around him the scalded screeches of various media figures of past and present-movie stars, singers, reporters, producers, directors-could be heard as they noisily repented their various overindulgences and infractions against taste, style, and veracity, while various demons pushed the Damned back into the boiling blood as they tried to escape, or pulled them out again (to give them a chance to recover, so that throwing them in again later would hurt more). The lake in which all the ViolentAgainst-Truth were imprisoned had numerous little fjords, pools, and lakelets winding up among the towering dark cliffs that embraced it on all sides, and from these could be heard particularly piercing shrieks and howls of anger and pain. Nick had stopped reacting to these now, having made the rounds of all the "specialty" areas in his search for clues about the way down to the Seventh Circle. He had seen and spent hours in the worst of them all, the giant boiling-magma Jacuzzi in which former talk-show hosts and literary critics held one another under, tearing at each other whenever anyone managed to struggle to the surface, and from even that awful scene he had come away more or less unscathed. The other, lesser torments on this level held no more terrors for Nick now. Even the stink of the lake that boiled but never burned was beginning to become a commonplace, and he was busily trying to work out the details of where he should be heading next. The Seventh Circle was beckoning.

Over everything ran the savage rhythms of the new "unpublished" tracks from Forlorn Voices; right now it was "Slasher's Surprise" playing, with Joey Bane's voice unusually soft in the leadup to the second verse, almost as if enticing you to lean in close and have your brain fried when the chorus began screaming in your ears.

"It never seems to have occurred to you that if I cut you you would bleed…

but then it also never seems to have occurred that I might follow your own nasty lead:

Might get the strop out, might hone the edge down, might put the blade in deep:

maybe tonight's little pain will teach you to look before you leap!"

And then the shriek of sound, Cimiun singing out like both tormented and tormentor alternately, and Joey Bane's sardonic scream:

"Surprise, surprise, see the blood flow, Mister Do-unto-others-and-run!

Hey, what's the hurry, don't leave, don't go, I'm up for more of your kind of fun-"

spot he might have missed. He was getting ready to move on shortly, though, for he thought he had all the clues he needed. And Six was getting old, anyway. At first Six had seemed "seriously cool," to use his dad's ancient and hoary term. But now it had palled. In fact, at first Nick had been surprised to see how soon he had gotten used to it, how very soon it had all seemed slightly passe… and more, things had not happened in the order he had expected. He had thought that once he hit Six, the Keep of the Dark Artificer would be waiting for him. But when he reached the spot in the Ashen Plain where rumor said it was supposed to stand, he had found nothing but a big rough sign spray-painted on permanently smoldering plywood, and stuck in the ground: GONE FISHING ON LEVEL 8. SUCKER!

At first Nick had been absolutely outraged at this, and had turned to leave, infuriated at the waste of time and money. But then he thought again, distracted for the moment by the initial sight of the lake, and the smell of it-horrifying enough, to a nose not used to it, to strike almost anyone still, or sick. He had controlled his heaves, and his initial reaction, and then it occurred to him: Of course. It's a test. If everything stinks, why shouldn't everything stink here, too? Joey never said it would be otherwise.

So Nick had sighed, and coughed, and started hiking around the shallow lake, looking for clues as to what was the best way down to Eight. This took him a long while, since the only source of clues was those people trapped in the blood, being pushed into it or scrambling out again. You had to talk to them, find out who they were and what they were doing here, and try to draw them out on the subject… not that they would necessarily cooperate. Not all of them would stand near the edge of the lake and talk to you, either. There were big gaggles and parties of them out in the hotter part of the lake, and they would stand or float there, alternately screaming and looking back toward shore, scornfully, like people at a cocktail party who're in with the crowd that really matters and have no inclination to move around and meet anyone less important.

Nick had spent a long time wandering around the edges of the lake, trying to overhear something that would be useful to him. This had made him pretty annoyed after a little while. It feels like my life, he had thought. I'm supposed to be here escaping from reality, not getting stuck with more of the same!

But there was no choice, for the only other sources of clues were the other players-and they were a closemouthed bunch. None of them that Nick approached would talk to him, and finally he gave up trying. Probably they figure they've spent good money to find out what they know so far, Nick thought, and they're not going to give it away to anyone for free. Realizing this didn't make Nick feel any better, though, and eventually, after he had spent something like eight hours of "peak time" without any result, he had sat down with his back against a sullenly hot boulder and taken what he considered would be his last long look at the place.

Then-when he was off his guard, lost in his fury and unfocused-he saw the answer. He saw one of the game-players, not a demon, look over her shoulder as if concerned that she was being watched, and then after a moment of apparently seeing no one nearby, actually wade into the boiling blood and head out toward one particular group. And Nick's mouth dropped right open.

If she can do that, I can do that!

Nick got up and made for the edge of the lake. There for a moment he hesitated, for the stuff looked deadly. But she did it!

Gingerly he put a foot in. He didn't feel anything. Confused, Nick bent down and held his hand over the boiling blood. He could feel the heat, and it felt bad. But after a moment's hesitation he stuck his finger in

To his astonishment, it didn't particularly hurt. The "boiling blood" was only about as hot as a really hot bath. And he alternately laughed and cursed himself all the way across the lake as he got right in and waded or swam toward one of the big "get-togethers" in the middle of the lava, a whole bunch of scalded, burnt people-or former people, all of whom looked as if they had been guests at a particularly interactive barbecue-who were standing around and laughing more than they were screaming. Nick felt dumb, in retrospect. He knew perfectly well that you couldn't suffer pain in a Net-based experience, or at least not pain bad enough to hurt you. The implant embedded in you was designed specifically to filter that kind of thing out. And it didn't necessarily follow that what hurt the Damned would necessarily hurt you. After all, they were supposed to suffer here. It struck Nick as likely enough that even in a real Hell, the torments wouldn't hurt someone who wasn't entitled to them.

Possibly there's a message there somewhere. In any case, Nick had learned to stop taking the physical images of things here at face value, as he would have in the real world. Maybe that's the message, too. That nothing is what it seems. That nothing can really be trusted.

It was a message that sank in deep. Nick put it aside for that moment, though, and got busy talking to the people out in the lake. In between torments he found them a voluble enough bunch. In fact it was hard to get them to stop talking, especially about their favorite topic, themselves. What was harder still was to get them to say anything about Deathworld itself, its structure and the way around it. Not that they seemed to be inhibited against this, specifically. They were just so utterly self-centered that even the torment of the boiling blood served only as a momentary distraction from their recitations of the important things they'd done, all the books they'd written and the money they'd made, the millions of people they'd influenced, the trends they'd set. Nick started to find this very choice when he paired their endless effusions against the fact that he only knew who a few of them were, out of hundreds he talked to. That week he did get a very thorough grounding in the faded pop culture of the last fifty years, and an increasingly clear sense of how very little of human endeavor lasts for any real length of time, whether it's worthwhile or not.

Finally, though, Nick learned by observation that if you asked questions while the demons were actually torturing the Damned, or when they'd just been splashed by the boiling blood, you could get straight answers for a few seconds. The pain, it seemed, cleared their minds and turned them away from themselves, however briefly. Nick quickly established a short list of questions to fire at them while it wasn't in their power to give him anything but a straight answer. And after many hours of this, and a lot of slogging around, now Nick had the information he needed. The exit to Seven was actually down in that lake of blood itself, right down at the bottom of it-that being how the Power that ran this place kept the Damned from escaping it. For while wholly immersed in the lava-blood, then and only then were their minds cleared to the truth of how little difference they had made in the world when they were still breathing, and how in the present time, so soon after their deaths, they were either completely forgotten or about to be so. Indeed, it was an irony which hadn't escaped Nick's notice that only here, in this virtual torment, were any of these people still even slightly famous anymore. Only the users of Deathworld, working their way down through this level, were impelled to say, "Just who was that guy?"… and go check the history sources on the Net to find out. One of the very few exceptions to this rule, and a deeper irony still, was the image of the old, old newscaster who had been alive until very recently, but while still alive had as a joke privately given the Deathworld designers permission to place him here among so many of his lesser contemporaries. He did not deserve to be here, and as a result he sat in something of a place of honor, off in his own little hot tub full of the burning lava of Truth, looking like a wrinkled old Buddha with his mustache on fire, and refusing to say anything to anyone except, with a grin, "That's the way it is… "

Nick had been lost in admiration when he got the joke. This is a great place, Nick thought. Better than anyplace else on the Net. 1 don't care how long it takes, or how much it costs. I'm going to solve it. And indeed he had been in here every day, for every waking hour he could, for days now. It was a lot of use, he knew, a lot of time when he should have been doing other things, maybe. Schoolwork, or stuff around the house… But those images seemed to have less power than usual to bother him, which suited Nick fine. Because they're not important. They can wait. This matters more. And if anyone doesn't like it, well, the world stinks, doesn't it? Let them just get used to it…

From where Nick stood now, looking out over the lake and up at the cliffs, he saw something which he had missed in earlier visits, but which he had now learned to enjoy, since it never happened the same way twice. One of the demons, a little batwinged guy who reminded him strangely of his science teacher from seventh grade-a round, small, jolly man-materialized up at the top of the highest of the cliffs around the lake. It had a long, long projection of stone sticking out of it over the lake, that cliff, and sometimes this narrow fingerlike projection was almost completely hidden in the miasma of brown-black smoke that rose from the lake. For the moment it was clear, though, and the little dumpy figure walked out to the very end of that narrow pier of stone, held its arms out in front of it, yelled "Geronim0000000!" and jumped off. It twisted and turned any number of times as it fell through what seemed about a mile of air from that high promontory, tumbling, straightening again, spinning, finally tucking itself into a cannonball shape, then straightening out and hitting the surface in a perfect dive, striking into it like a spear and vanishing in a tremendous splash that threw burning, smoking liquid in every direction. All around, the Damned who were hit by the splash screamed in anguish. From the side of the lake a group of six demons who had been sitting and watching the dive now stood up and held up little pairs of cards with numbers on them, one card in each claw: 5.4, 5.2, 5.1, 5.2, 4.8, 5.9. Then five out of six of them dropped their cards to the ground and started whapping the demon who had given the diver a 4.8 over his head.

I really have to find out who the heck "Geronimo" is, Nick thought. It might be a clue.

He stood there for a moment more, and then thought, Okay. No use putting it off any longer. Let's put this to the test, and see if I'm right.

He looked over his shoulder to see if anyone real, any of the gameplayers, were nearby to see what he was doing. It was a relatively quiet time. Nobody was nearby. Nick stepped off the edge of the lakeshore and started wading through the lake.

The Damned drew away from Nick a little, and some of them stopped laughing, as they saw where he was headed-that deepest part, where none of them went by choice. "Surprise, surprise," he sang softly in chorus with the great cry of rage filling the air above him, "Never thought it'd happen, Never thought you'd be the one!

"Surprise, surprise, 'Cause here comes the moment, I'll shave you to the bone 'fore we're done! Surprise, surprise-"

Nick knew he was on the verge of the deepest place. He ducked under the lava-

And everything went black.

And in the darkness there burned nothing but two great words written in blazing red fire:

"WHAT?!" Nick screamed.

He blinked, blinked hard. There was light again, now, but it was just daylight, easing out of afternoon toward evening. It was the light that came through the translucence of the shades in the spare bedroom of the apartment where he lived with his folks, the room where the implant chair sat.

And his father standing there with the hand commlink in his hand. "Yes," he was saying. To someone at the other end. "Thanks, it just went on. Yeah. Thanks."

His father folded up the hand phone and looked at Nick with an expression too flat and controlled to bode well for anyone.

"Well?" he said.

"What's the matter?" Nick cried. "What happened? Call the provider, something's wrong with the Net link!"

"I've just been talking with the provider," Nick's father said, in a voice carefully kept as expressionless as his face, "and there's nothing wrong with the link… not that hasn't just been fixed, anyway."

"But it went off while I was in the middle of-" Uhoh. "-something important-"

His father held out an envelope for him to look at. It had their Net service provider's logo on it. In the spare room doorway his mother suddenly materialized, looking grim.

"I thought I told you," his father said, "to stay out of that Deathworld place."

Nick realized that this was not a time to attempt explanations. He said nothing.

"I thought we discussed it rationally," his father said. "You agreed to do as I said. Didn't you?"

"Dad, I-"

"Or I thought you had. I see now that I was mistaken. Eight hundred dollars"-the hand with the envelope in it was shaking now-"eight hundred dollars in prime-service charges in the last two weeks alone. Son, are you nuts? Did you seriously think I wouldn't find out about this? Didyou think it was just going to go away, or that it didn't matter? Do you know what this is going to do to household finances for the next month, while we pay this off out of money that was intended for other things? Like spending money for our summer vacation?"

Nick gulped and looked at the floor.

His father stopped, too angry to say anything else for the moment. "Nicky, half your spending money is going to be docked weekly until you pay back this last bill," Nick's mother said. "It would be real smart for you to see about getting yourself some kind of part-time job for the summer, so you can get it paid off in less time. As-regards any further Net access, you're grounded. If you want it, you can go down to the Square and rent a booth out of your own money, since you've proved you can't be trusted to use the Net responsibly at home. After the bill's paid off, we'll look at whether you're ready to have your own service restored."

Nick said nothing, just stood there with his ears burn- ing.

"And assuming we give you your service back some day, if you ever pull a stunt like this again, we're going to have the thing pulled out," his father said. "I don't care if you think you need it for school, or because all your friends have it, or whatever. You can get up off your butt and walk to the library to do your research, the way I did when dinosaurs walked the earth. It didn't kill me. It won't kill you, either. And what your friends think isn't important compared to pulling your weight in this family and behaving like the money we work hard for actually means something, instead of you throwing it out the window in handfuls."

His father handed him the envelope and turned and went out. His mother stood there and looked at him for a moment, her expression not softening in the slightest.

"I left you some supper in the 'vector,' " she said. "Dad and I have to go out and run a couple of errands. Have your dinner and then get your homework done on the laptop. I had the provider copy all your school files to it before they blocked your workspace."

"Mom-"

"Now's not the time, Nicky," she said, the anger showing in her voice for the first time. "You have a lot of apologies to make, but not now. It sounds too easy now. Maybe in the next couple of days your dad and I can take what you have to say more seriously."

She went out. A moment later Nick heard the apartment door shut.

He stood there with the envelope in his hands, trembling, first with embarrassment-Oh God, what will everybody say? What will they think? This is the end! — and then, with something more familiar, something peculiarly more bearable, more acceptable: rage.

This stinks.

But then everything stinks!

He was right. Joey was absolutely right!

The only question is-am I going to take this lying down… or am I going to let them see that I'm not going to just take what they dish out?

There was only one possible answer to the question, for someone who had been down as far as Seven in Death-world… only one possibly answer for a Banie.

" 'Surprise, surprise. " Nick sang softly, and headed out of the room to have his supper, and start laying his plans.

Charlie came down the stairs from his bedroom early that Friday morning, still rubbing his eyes a little despite having been showered and dressed for half an hour now. He'd been up late putting final touches on a physics paper that was due today, and he was pleased with his efforts, even if he did feel like he wanted to turn right around and go straight back up the stairs to bed.

Charlie headed for the coffeemaker and was astounded to find it empty. He opened the cupboard above it, got out another drip-pak, slapped it into the holder, filled the brewing reservoir again, and got the brew cycle started. The coffeemaker promptly began making the noise which both his father and mother referred to as "Cheyne-Stokes respirations," a horrific gurgling gasp followed by a long "breath" outward that sounded more like a death rattle than anything else.

"Urgh," Charlie said to the coffeemaker, "you sound like I feel."

He went back to the table and glanced at the paper, which his dad had left there still folded. Charlie hit the "go" corner and it started to unfold itself in the usual manner, and at that point his dad came down the stairs with his white doctor's overcoat on and his stethoscope doubled up around his neck. "Did you start the coffee?"

"Yup. Somebody drank it all."

"Speak to your mother." Charlie's dad sat down and looked the paper over, regarding the front page with his usual mild interest, then started paging through to the part that really mattered. Charlie watched this process, secretly amused that his dad was managing to stay away from the sports pages for even this long-and then paused, catching sight of a headline on the first of the local news pages.

Charlie leaned in closer over his dad's shoulder.

Arlington, May 7, 2025-Two families in the Arlington and Fairfax areas were grieving today for a son and a daughter who were found dead early Tuesday in what appeared to be a bizarre suicide pact. The bodies of Jeannine Metz, 18, and Malcolm Dwyer, 17, were discovered in a room in a hotel in Arlington, Virginia, last night, after relatives received timed e-mail messages from both teens. The messages contained slightly different versions of the same suicide note.

Police were called to the scene at 1:03 A. M. on Tuesday by hotel management at the Arlington Radisson-Hilton Towers, who opened the room after being alerted by Net messages from the pair's concerned parents. Shortly thereafter the police on scene notified staff from the county coroner's office and secured the room for investigation as a possible crime scene, but by morning the coroner said that there was no initial indication of murder or other "foul play" as a factor. Further statements, he said, would have to await the processing of initial tissue sample tests and a full autopsy. The coroner's office declined to comment on details of the suicide method.

Dwyer and Metz were taken to Arlington Hospital, where they were identified by their parents. "I can't understand it," Metz's mother, Quinne Ryan Metz said when interviewed Monday morning by local media. "She was such a normal girl, she did well at school, there weren't any family problems, we were very close… " Relatives of Malcolm Dwyer declined to speak to reporters.

Police investigating the suicides had no initial comment. They would not confirm or deny the suggestion that both teens had been regular users of the controversial "Deathworld" Net environment run by morbo-jazz star Joey Bane. Calls to Joey Bane Enterprises were not immediately returned Tuesday, but a Netted template press release from the firm's public relations department, issued to the media on Tuesday evening, stated that the managers of the Deathworld environment, because of privacy issues, do not comment on user information unless specifically required to by subpoena or other court order according to the guidelines established by the Protection of Personal Data Bill-

Charlie gulped. "Nothing," he said. "I gotta go get ready for school… "

He headed out, but not upstairs, where his books and the take-to-school computer were. He headed for the den and swung into the implant chair. He closed his eyes, twitched the implant awake. It lined up with the Net server and activated. Things went dark-

A moment later Charlie was in his workspace, down by the big worktable in the shining wooden-benched operating theater. The sun was already high there, pouring in the windows. It was noon in London.

"Nick?"

No answer. Charlie was a little surprised by that. He and Nick had for a long time maintained a "live shout" link between their two workspaces: when one of them said just the other's name by itself, while working, the computer would open up a portal between the two spaces without further fuss. If he was going to change that, he would have told me…

"Main routine," Charlie said.

"Here."

"Link to Nick Melchior's main Net address."

"Linking now."

Suddenly the air around him went bright, and a sign appeared in it, hanging in front of him: SERVICE SUSPENDED. Now, that's weird-Charlie thought, until abruptly that sign flickered, to be replaced by another: FORWARDING.

Has the family changed its master Net address or something? Charlie wondered. It did happen. People changed providers from time to time if they didn't like the service they were getting, but Nick hadn't mentioned anything like that-

There was another flicker, and then Charlie found himself looking at Nick, who was sitting in a bare, white space, in an Eames chair, reading his mail in the form of the usual various floating icons, little colored or flashing cubes and spheres and pyramids and other isometric threedimensional solids hovering around him in the air. "Nick?" Charlie said.

Nick looked up. "Oh, hi. Come on in."

"What's the blast?" Charlie looked around him with some bemusement. "Where's your workspace? You get tired of Castle Dracula?"

Nick grinned. "Mr. Tact. Nope, my folks pulled the plug on me. Sorry if it's a little bare in here… I haven't had time to refurnish yet. I was mostly occupied with getting the forwarding routine installed around the service block my folks had the provider put in."

Charlie's eyes went wide. "Well, at least you're still online."

"Yeah. It's just a public-terminal account at the twenty-four-hour printing and mailbox place down in the Square, though. I can't spend as much time as I would usually. I have to sneak out to use it. Listen," Nick said as Charlie opened his mouth to say something. "I can't be with you long, I have to get back into Deathworld soonest. I'm on the verge of going seventh-circle, but my last save didn't take and I'm having to re-create a lot of stuff in off-peak."

"I won't keep you," Charlie said. "But listen, did you hear about those two new suicides?"

"Yeah." Nick actually shrugged. "The usual. They got tired of it all. The world stank, and they ditched it. And who could blame them? Anyway, they got a little media exposure on the way out. And they're probably better off. I mean, they couldn't be worse off than to be alive in this world… "

This was so astonishing an assessment, and so utterly unlike anything Nick would normally say, that Charlie's mouth simply hung open for a moment. Finally he managed to say, "What about your folks? What happened to make them yank your boards?"

"My dad got the last Net bill a couple of days ago and pitched a real extinction-level fit," Nick said, and shrugged again. "You know me, though, I can't let it get me down. Got too much to do in the real world. I'm working my way down through the dark, down to the real stuff." He grinned. "You should hear some of the lifts I found down there! The best Bane stuff isn't out on open release, not by a long shot. He's been saving the best for his own people, for us Banies. You really should come down with me and have a listen for yourself."

"Uh, maybe over the weekend. Look, I gotta head out, it's school in an hour. Wanna have lunch?"

"Can't today… I've got to get off-campus and make the most of that access time-it's the only time of day when my folks don't really have a clue what I'm up to. Mornings and evenings, they may have their suspicions, but at lunch I'm free. Look, I gotta go, the system's ready for me."

"Yeah, okay, I-"

Nick's image vanished.

Charlie stood there for a moment and hardly knew what to think. It's like the pod people came to visit and took my buddy Nick. Who the heck was that??

For a moment more he stood there, irresolute. "Seven A. M." said the clock in the corner.

"Thanks," Charlie said. He was distracted, though. This is just too weird. But… Deathworld. And then… these two kids.

He started to worry.

After a moment he tried to be reasonable, to talk himself out of it. Nick was sensible, Nick was perfectly sane, Nick would never try anything like killing himself-

The normal Nick wouldn't, Charlie thought.

He stood there and sweated. Unlike most of his classmates at Bradford, Charlie knew what death looked like. There were some awful memories from his very early childhood that were not shadows. They were all too solid, and he did not access them willingly. But they were stirring now. And he didn't like the idea of possibly having that kind of memory about one of his best friends.

He's not suicidal, though!

Yet, said the skeptical part of his mind, the part that his Mom said was capable of "Olympic-level worrying." But what the frack can I do?

Charlie thought about that for a moment.

Then something occurred to him, an idea which he rejected, and then considered again.

"What time is it again?" he said.

"Seven oh two."

"Thanks." And now the question is… would he be in the office this early?

Well, I could always leave a message. Either way, it's worth a try…

"Main routine," Charlie said. "Address book." "What address, please?"

"James Winters, Net Force."

"Trying that commcode for you now."

Charlie swallowed. All Net Force Explorers had a comm-code for Winters, as their "head honcho" and liaison to the main organization. But relatively few of them ever used it-mostly because it was understood that, except in an emergency or a situation involving the safety or security of people using the Net, if anyone misused it, he or she would shortly be out of the Net Force Explorers on his or her ear. Charlie had been contacted by Winters once before, with no bad results. And he'd contacted Winters once before on his own recognizance, and hadn't gotten in trouble-but those calls had involved much more important business. Now, even as he waited, Charlie was beginning to have major reservations over whether Winters would consider this situation anywhere near as important. If he starts thinking I'm taking advantage or something-

Nonetheless, Charlie stood still and waited.

"Winters," said the voice almost before the virtuality settled in around Charlie. Winters's office, as it revealed itself a blink later, was relentlessly plain-a metal desk with neat piles of papers, printouts, and datascrips, a pen stand with a U. S. Marine insignia on it, a couple of file cabinets, one of which at least, Charlie suspected, was actually a Net data storage facility in disguise, dusty venetian blinds, and outside of them, a not-overly-inspiring view of a parking lot. The only soft touch about the place was the see-through bird feeder on the outside of the window, which was full of peanuts even though theoretically you were supposed to stop feeding birds after the first of April. The window, the walls, and the filing cabinets, maybe, were real. Everything else Charlie was seeing, he knew, was virtual, an expression of Winters's own workspace, or as much of it as he wanted you to see. Behind the desk sat the man himself: tall, lean, and hard-faced, with his trademark buzz cut looking even buzzier and shorter than usual. Winters must just have had a haircut. He did not look like someone whose time it would be smart to waste. But all the same, his gray eyes were friendly and interested, even at this hour of the morning.

"Charlie," said James Winters, and looked him up and down. "Been a while since we touched base. You're up early."

"Uh, so are you."

Winters shrugged. "Occupational hazard," he said. "One of the few times of the day when the link doesn't go off every five minutes."

"I wanted to catch you before I had to go out to class, if you have a few minutes," Charlie said.

"No problem at all. Come in, take a seat."

Charlie walked "in," sat down.

"How're your mother and father doing?" Winters said.

"Uh, they're fine. Dad's getting ready for some kind of in-service presentation on spinal surgery. Mom's doing a continuing education unit, something about the new nurse practitioner requirements."

"And you? You're coming up on end-of-term time," Winters said, leaning back in his chair. "How's the accelerated program coming along? Any problems?"

"Nothing serious," Charlie said. He did not feel this was the time to mention his personal feelings about calculus, or the fact that his accelerated program required that he take it, or the fact that he had never heard of any doctor needing it.

"'That's not what your calc instructor says," Winters said, casting an eye over a glowing-outlined "text window" hanging in the air near his desk. That window looked transparent to Charlie, but he was certain it didn't look that way to Winters.

"I passed the test the second time," Charlie said, instantly breaking out in a sweat.

"I see that. Aced it, too," Winters said, and produced a small smile. "Better than I did the second time. Or the third, or the fourth. Relax… you're doing okay." That window vanished. "But this doesn't have anything to do with school, I take it."

"Not exactly," Charlie said. "I'm following up on something I'm curious about."

"Oh?"

"Deathworld."

Winters's eyebrows went up, and he folded his arms. "Saw that in the news, did you."

"That last double suicide, yes," Charlie said.

"No connection has been established," Winters said, "between the suicides and the virtual operation."

"Net Force checked it out, I guess."

"Very completely, after the first two." His eyes rested thoughtfully on Charlie for a moment. "No reason for you not to be given a few details, I suppose. Computer? Insight investigations. Deathworld." Another window opened, and Winters glanced at it. Text scrolled down and through it, and though Charlie could see it this time, it was reversed.

"The first one was in April of 2023," he said. "A young man, aged eighteen, then a young woman aged sixteen, about three weeks later, in early May. While little notice was taken of the first suicide, the second one began to raise concerns that something untoward might be happen- ing. So an investigation was started. At about the same time the two sets of parents began to demand that Deathworld be shut down and Joey Bane be taken to court for reckless endangerment, corruption of youth, you name it. They felt sure that the site was feeding its users subliminal content of some kind, concealed messages that caused their children to kill themselves."

Winters raised his eyebrows. "Anyway, the investigation went forward. Six Net Force undercover operatives were dispatched to check out the Deathworld operation from the inside. Another four-overt agents examined the company's books, programming, and physical plant, and did a guided analysis of the virtual operation's code with the 'SysWatch' code sifter." He scanned down a little more of the text, shook his head, sat back again.

"And they didn't find anything," Charlie said.

"Nothing whatsoever. Clean bill of health," Winters said. "The place may look dysfunctional or even amoral to some people, but it's clean. Queasy-making, but clean."

"What did the kids' parents do?" Charlie said.

Winters sighed. "They continued to agitate for something to be done about the site-preferably to get it shut down. One of them, the mother of the first suicide, the boy, tried to get her senator and local congressman to put special bills through the House and Senate to that effect. That didn't come to anything, which is no surprise… the congressional calendar doesn't have time for all the things on it to start with. The other parents did the talk show circuit, gave a lot of interviews to the tabloid press, and they still send out periodic press releases to the various Netcasters and news agencies." He shook his head again. "Not that it's had much effect on Deathworld, or Joey Bane. If anything, it's publicity that increases usage. And truly, without any evidence to suggest that the site really is doing anything to unbalance people… "

Winters turned to look out for a moment at the morning sun beginning to come in through his blinds. Then he glanced back at Charlie. "What brings this up right now?" he said.

"I've got a friend who's all of a sudden interested in the place," Charlie said. "Real interested. In fact, lately he doesn't seem able to talk about much else."

"I take it this isn't normal for him."

"No," Charlie said. "And with these new suicides…"

Winters leaned forward with his elbows on his desk. "When you have the volume of people using Net-based facilities that we routinely have these days," he said, "the trouble is that almost any death, no matter how it looks, can genuinely be random." He touched a spot on his desk, and another window, a smaller one, opened itself in the air. It had nothing in it, as far as Charlie could see, but one long string of digits. "Here's today's bonus question," Winters said. "How many people are on the Net right now?"

Charlie tried to catch a glimpse of that long row of digits, but the problem was that almost all the numbers were changing so fast they were a blur. "Worldwide, or just nationally?"

Winters grinned. "Always the right question, with you. Worldwide."

Charlie tried to remember the last set of figures he'd heard. "A quarter of a billion?"

"Try five times that," Winters said, and flicked a finger at the window he'd been watching. It spun so that Charlie could read it. Most of the numbers were still bright blurs, but Charlie could see the numbers 1,263… and then two more sets of three digits each after that, all impossible to read.

"One point two billion and change," Winters said, "just at the moment. It's a function of the time of day. Australia's having its after-dinner entertainment, but most of Greater Asia is still at work. Europe and Africa and Russia are on their lunch breaks, mostly, but they'll be back to work shortly. And the East Coast is up checking the news before it heads in to the office."

He leaned back and looked at the numbers. "The 'tide' ebbs and flows as the Earth turns and the terminator moves," he said, "but the number where the wave 'crests,'

at the time of greatest usage, rarely drops below nine hundred million anymore. And it grows all the time as the Netted-in population grows. So, with this information in hand… a question. How many of those people are dying right now, while they're on the Net?"

Charlie opened his mouth and then closed it.

"You see the problem?" Winters said. "Let me whittle it down a little, since our viewpoint at the moment should probably stay strictly jurisdictional." The number in the window changed, grew smaller. "On this continent alone, there are a hundred and eighty million people using the Net right this moment. So, consider the statistics. Do you know how often someone dies in North America? Whether they're on the Net or not? From all causes."

"I'm not sure."

"Nineteen per minute," Winters said. "That's an average, of course. You get statistical clusters when there are a lot more deaths than that, and statistical 'dry spots' when there are many fewer. On the same average about fifteen children are born per minute… with the same kind of 'real-time' variation on the average. But considering that at peak times maybe half the total population might be on the Net, when their particular moment to die comes along-" He raised his eyebrows. "You can see how we get small clusters of numbers that seem to mean something, but don't necessarily. It tends to make us cautious about chasing patterns that almost inevitably turn out not to be patterns at all. And when you extend the statistical sampling to include the rest of the planet-you see how deceptive the numbers can become."

Charlie nodded.

Winters sighed and leaned back again. "We only have so big a budget," he said. "And there are a lot of people who watch very carefully how we use it. So Net Force has to be very careful of how we chase after data. Granted, we provide an important service. But no one likes a government agency that starts thinking itself too important to use its budget wisely. The day we stop producing results to match our output of funds…" He shrugged. "That day we, and the whole Net environment in our jurisdiction, are in big trouble."

"I see," Charlie said.

Winters paused as a small knocking sound came from the window, specifically, from the peanut feeder, where a small brown bird had just alighted. This in itself was nothing unusual, but the bird immediately picked up a peanut from the feeder, dropped it four stories, then picked up another one, and dropped that, and picked up another one, and dropped that…

"Now, stop that," Winters said. He turned, pulled up the venetian blinds, and tapped sharply on the window. "These guys, you give them all the food they can use, and what happens? They start to get picky. You! Yeah, it's you I'm talking to! Cut it out!"

He tapped on the window a few more times. The bird pointedly picked out two more peanuts, dropped them, and finally selected a third and flew away with it.

"I swear," Winters muttered, "they think I'm a charity." He sighed and turned back to Charlie.

"All right," he said. "If you find anything worth our attention, you'll let me know, of course. But you really should examine the possibility that your friend has something else going on in his life at this point which is making Deathworld look like an attractive alternative to physical reality. There are enough things on the Net that people find useful for that kind of purpose."

Charlie nodded. "I'm looking into it," he said. "But I really don't think that's it."

Winters regarded him with an expression that was hard for Charlie to understand, until he spoke. "Certainty," he said, and the tone was approving… in a way. "It's a wonderful thing to be so sure of your results that you'll discuss them with a superior before you produce the goods."

Charlie swallowed, and hoped it didn't show. "I'm pretty sure," Charlie said.

Winters sat quiet for a moment. "Good," he said. "Then go do some discovery, and report to me when you think you've found out everything you're going to find. If nothing else, what you turn up, if it's anything germane, can be appended to our master file. Data is always good, even if it's just deep background."

"All right," Charlie said. He got up.

Winters stopped him in his tracks with a dark look. "And Charlie-one thing. Any evidence you find that suggests anything like conspiracy, or anything else obviously illegal-I want to hear about it pronto. Don't get in over your head."

"Right, Mr. Winters," Charlie said, sweating again.. "Right. So get out of here and get to class."

Charlie started to get.

"Oh, and Charlie-"

He stopped and looked over his shoulder. Winters was half turned to bang on the window glass again, for the brown bird was back, chucking peanuts out of it, four stories down, at about a peanut per second. "One of the better uses for calculus, I'm told, is in the design of custom in-bone surgical prostheses. Check it out."

Charlie grinned. Does that man read minds? Or just faces?.

He headed back to his workspace in a hurry to get ready for school… though school was now the last thing on his mind.