Dream thief

16

… SPENCE HEARD THE FADING echo of a roar like thunder. He could not decide if he had indeed heard the sound or only imagined it, for it shrank away to become the sound of his own blood pounding in his ears. He dropped like a stone through an infinite darkness, falling and falling, turning over and over, spinning slowly through the void.

How long he had fallen he could not determine. Time had no meaning in this formless space. But presently he glimpsed-far ahead as in a tunnel a long way off-a single beam of white light. The light grew stronger and larger as he spun closer, growing until it filled his eyes with a gentle radiance. He could see it quite clearly-a large luminous disk, moonlike against the forever – darkness all around.

As he watched, the disk changed slightly. He noticed that it had features which resembled human features. The disk swept closer to him, or he to it, and he realized that it was not a moon at all, but a human skull.

The skull's black, vacant eye sockets rotated slowly toward him to fix him with their hideous blank gaze. He could see it clearly now, looming ever closer, filling the void with its wan, ghostly light. He saw that the skull was rushing upon him and at the same time that he was shrinking.

Great wrenching spasms of fear shook his body-he imagined he could hear his teeth rattle in his head. His heart hammered against his ribs and his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth as he fought to cry out.

Spence diminished as the skull swept toward him, growing larger as it came. Now it filled his field of vision-its eyes were huge black pits opening before him. He put his hands out as if to stop the terrible collision, but when he parted them he saw that he was spinning into one of the empty eye sockets.

The gleaming white teeth in the skull's bony jaw flashed as the mouth opened and began to wag. He heard a thin, cold laughter emanating from between the skull's bare teeth-the horrible fleshless sound of ghostly laughter. He clamped his hands over his ears, but it was too late; the sound had gotten inside his head where it reverberated endlessly.

Now he could see the scaly, pitted ridge of bone which formed the brow, and the triangular hole of the nose with its jutting sliver of bone slashing out from it. The eye hole seemed instantly to expand as he toppled through its yawning, craterlike aperture.

At the moment he fell into the monstrous eye socket, Spence's world flashed red-as if he had plunged beneath the surface of a sea of blood. His falling, shrinking, plunging motion abruptly stopped and he felt suspended in the weird crimson glow.

Slowly he became aware of the fact that he lay on a solid shelf of rock, his cheek flat against smooth, cool stone. The deep red color emanated from the stone itself. His terrible fear subsided.

Spence raised his head slowly. He looked at his hands, bringing them before his face in the blood-red glare as if they might belong to someone else. But they were his hands, and seeing them unaltered calmed his fluttering pulse. He stood uncertainly and gazed around him.

He took one step and his legs gave way beneath him; he was still too shaken and dizzy to walk. He pushed himself up on his hands and knees and waited until his head cleared. In this position, staring down at the stone beneath him, he saw something which caused his jaw to drop in amazement. He rubbed his eyes.

When he worked up his nerve to look again it still remained. He bent to examine it once more to make sure his eyes had not tricked him in the strange light. His breath came in long, shaky gasps of excitement as he brought his face closer to it.

Yes, there was no mistake. Before him in the red dust of the rock floor was a single naked human footprint.

Spence heard a shout echoing from the high, vaulted roof of the cavern, and realized with a shock that it was his own voice, crying out over and over: "It can't be! It can't be!" …

THE DAY DRAGGED AWAY like a wounded snake pulling its injured length painfully along. Spence felt every slow tick ebbing away as if it were wrung from his own flesh.

He had been in a sour mood upon waking and knew that he had dreamed again. This depressed him thoroughly. Somehow he imagined that, in light of his resolve to deal squarely with the problems besetting him, the dreams would not affect him any longer.

He was wrong. If anything, they troubled him more deeply than ever.

He worked the shift away in a silent, smoldering rage. Tickler felt the heat of his anger and kept well out of range. The meticulous little man watched his every move from a distance as if Spence were a lab specimen that might at any moment show signs of blossoming another head; his bright, beady eyes followed his master around with keen, if secretive, interest.

Spence waded through a magcart of neglected administrative work and hoped that Tickler had no intention of lingering after the shift ended. He had to bite his tongue on several occasions when he felt inclined to suggest that Tickler leave for the day. No, an inner voice cautioned, act as if nothing ix amiss, nothing out of the ordinary. Business as usual.

There was a reason for Spence's reluctance to open himself to Tickler's fussy scrutiny: he wanted the next two days to go especially smoothly. He wanted to maintain the appearance of stability and order right up to the moment of his departure. He wanted his leaving on the Mars trip to come as a complete surprise to anyone who might have reason to be interested in such an event-especially Tickler.

If he had been asked, Spence could not have given an explanation for adopting this course of action. Very likely he did not know why himself. He told himself it was because he distrusted Tickler, but he never stopped to consider why that was, or what Tickler had done to earn such ill will. In Spence's mind he represented a vague uneasiness which sent out vibrations of veiled suspicion like certain nettlesome vines sent out creeping tendrils.

At last the shift ended and Tickler approached his chair quietly, with his hands held limply in front of him as if they were wet gloves he had just hung out to dry. "Is there anything else today, Dr. Reston?"

Spence did not bother to consult the digiton above the console; he knew Tickler would not have approached one nanosecond before the specified time. He pushed back his chair and rubbed his eyes in a show of fatigue. "Oh, is it time to quit already?"

"I don't mind putting in an extra shift-"

"Thanks, but it isn't necessary. We've done a good day's work. Call it quits and we'll hit it again tomorrow. We can ready the equipment for the session tomorrow evening then. Good day, Tickler."

Tickler peered back as if he were trying to read a message that was written on Spence's face in a foreign language. "Are you sure there's nothing else?"

Spence shook his head and smiled as broadly as he could. "You sure are a workhorse. No, I can't think of a thing that can't be done tomorrow. You're free. I'll see you tomorrow."

Tickler did not reply; he only dipped his head in a smarmy little bow and then hurried away like a rat heading back to his burrow after a night in the pantry. Spence watched him go and then went to the portal himself. He cleared the access code on the doorplate and reset it with a new code so that he would not be disturbed.

"Now to business!" he muttered to himself as he sank back into his cav chair behind the console. Throughout the day as he worked, the thought kept nagging him that he should check out the riddle of the identical scan more thoroughly. Actually, the urge was not a new one-it had nagged him before, but he simply had not had time to do anything about it until now.

He fell to with a will. He retraced in his mind the steps he had followed to discover the similarity of the two scans in the first place. As to what the significance of the supposed similarity could mean, he was still at a loss for an answer. But deep inside he believed it to be important in some way. What he proposed to accomplish next was to establish that it had been no glitch, no momentary foul-up in the electronic circuitry or in the program which had fed him spurious information.

Spence picked up at the point where he had made his strange discovery three days before.

"MIRA, Spence Reston here. Ready for command."

"Ready, Dr. Reston," said MIRA's feminine voice.

"Compare all PSG Seven Series LTST entries. Display entries with similarities with less than one percent variability."

He sat back to wait, tapping his fingers on the table before him while MIRA worked. MIRA-the initials stood for Multiple Integrated Rational something or other which he could not at the moment remember-was the largest of a breed of biotic computers whose circuitry was in part derived from organic moleculesprotein grids which had been integrated with electronics. She was faster, smarter, and more creative in a dozen ways than any computer before her.

Within seconds the wafer screen spelled out the message, which to Spence's grim satisfaction matched the previous one: PSG Seven Series scans 3/20 and 5/15.

There it was again. The chance that it was a computer error ceased to be a possibility. Glitches did not repeat themselves. The chance that it was a kink in his program was also remote. The command was well within the program's range of flexibility.

Retracing his steps completely, he opened the yellow log book and matched the two disputed scans. They were, as he had previously discovered, quite different.

Next he pushed the inquiry a step further and went to the cabinet, getting out the tray of spools for the week of 5/15 and the tray for the week of 3/20. He set the trays down on his nearby desk and fished out the spools in question. He snapped the seal on each of them and rolled out a portion of the scan. The four red wavy lines undulated evenly across his desk. He matched up two intervals and placed one tape over the other and held them to the light.

The two scans, viewed one through the other as they overlapped one another, were clearly different. He could see peaks in one where there were valleys in the other. Laid one on top of the other all similarities between them ceased to exist. He checked the interval again and even tried to force the comparison by matching peaks and valleys, but could not. The scans were simply quite different one from the other. MIRA had apparently goofed after all.

But there was still one more wrinkle to check: the bubble memory. As an added backup to the overall design of the project, Spence had recorded each scan on a bubble plate. This was the source of the numbers entered in the log book. The rising and falling motion of the scanner's red ink lines was recorded within the thin sealed cartridge whose magnetic bubbles were interpreted by the computer as a continuous series of numbers. For every place the needle rested on the paper tape, there was a corresponding number. By reading the numerical values the computer could reconstruct the wavy lines on the paper tape.

He opened the bubble file and pulled the cartridge for the two sessions. He popped one cartridge into each of the slots in the memory reader of the console and gave the display command.

Instantly the numbers on the plates began filling the screen. He quickly scanned the columns and his breath caught in his throat; the two scans were exactly alike!

He dropped into his swivel chair and propped his feet up on the edge of the table. He stared at the rows of identical numbers on the screen and then closed his eyes, retreating into thought.

Here at last was the corroborating evidence he had been seeking-only instead of helping to solve the mystery, it deepened it. He began to think through the steps of his experiment and how it was recorded in all its various stages to determine how a situation such as the one glimmering at him from the wafer screen could ever have happened.

Given the fact that it was impossible for any two scans to be perfectly alike-even the same man on the same night could not produce two identical scans-he was forced to reckon the evidence an error, either human or electronic.

Now, with the evidence of the bubble memory, the likelihood of an electronic error diminished to the point of infinite improbability. The cloud of doubt in which he had so far carried his investigation began to condense into suspicion: someone had been tampering with his records.

The longer he thought about it, the more suspicious he became until the unproven hypothesis hardened into certainty. Someone had been tampering with his materials. Assuming that much, the next question was why? Why would anyone want to sabotage his experiment?

No, that was the wrong approach. Not sabotage-alter. That seemed closer to the mark. Why would anyone want to alter the evidence? And why these particular scans, in this particular way?

To puzzle this latest wrinkle in this confusing development he got up from his chair and shoved it across the room. He began pacing with his arms folded across his chest and his head bent down as if he expected the answer to form itself upon the floor.

The answer, when it came, hit him like a closed fist between the eyes; it nearly knocked him down.

The simplicity of it staggered him-it was so obvious. The scans had not been altered; they had been duplicated. The scan of 5/15 was a copy of scan 3/20. That was why they were identi cal. What about the other pieces of the puzzle? The tape, the log book, the main computer memory? Those simply had been man ufactured to fill in the gap. too Spence's mind raced ahead like lightning along a oncetraveled path.

The morning of 5/15 had been the morning after his first blackout when he awakened in the sleep chamber. That much he remembered clearly. He remembered Tickler remarking that the scan had gone well that night. He also remembered that he had not actually seen the scan at that time; it was not until after breakfast that he examined it. Plenty of time for someone to manufacture the missing pieces and place them in position.

Was the scan of 3/20 somehow significant? Probably not. It had just been selected at random from among the first of the experiment's records. It was used to fill in the gaps in the bubble memory and the data base memory.

What about the paper tape and the log book? That was the easiest part. Those had simply been created wholesale. The figures in the log book were dummies and the paper ribbon probably bore the signature of someone else's brainwaves.

Spence, swept up in the heady whirl of intrigues real and imagined, staggered to his chair and collapsed as if he had just run a thousand meters. He had it-the answer, or the beginning of the answer-and knew that he had it. Proving it was another matter, but he was not interested at present in proving anything. He was happy just to know.

His elation proved short-lived.

Within moments the other question reasserted itself? Why? Why had these things been done?

Clearly he stood at the beginning of the maze. Where it would lead he did not know. But at last he felt strong enough to face whatever he might find.

On an impulse he turned and punched a code into the ComCen panel. There was someone he had to see before another moment passed.