The Barsoom Project

Chapter Eighteen

Transit time from Security to Research and Development, on the far side of the park, was about forty-five seconds when Alex could catch the right routing.

There was the gentle bump as his shuttle capsule hit the bottom of the vertical tube, a moment’s hesitation as the gyros rotated the capsule, and then a shush as he accelerated, like a bullet fired beneath the thriving metropolis that was Dream Park.

For some of the trip, the clear walls of the shuttle revealed nothing save an occasional flash of light.

The maintenance shops were along this route. The Chief of Maintenance liked the transit tubes through her sector to be clear, so that she could see the shuttles streaking past.

Six years ago, a study had given Maintenance the greatest efficiency level of any department in Dream Park. This was considered puzzling. Someone noted that instead of the green or blue worn by maintenance personnel in the other companies, the Dream Park crew wore white, more like a doctor’s gown than the uniform of one who keeps pipes and wires humming.

Sandy Khresla, a chunky little woman with a Ph. D. in environmental engineering, was the pipe-smoking head of the division. When someone asked her why she chose such untraditional garb, she smiled as if she had been watching her clock and her calendar, wondering when the big brains would get around to asking that question.

“We service the veins and arteries of Dream Park,” she said around a mouthful of sweet, quasi-contraband Turkish smoke. “You guys are the brains or the arms, and transportation is the legs. But we’re the heart. Without us, everything dies.”

Alex Griffin remembered that story as Sandy’s offices flashed by. Three white uniforms huddled in conversation. A pair of eyes flicked in his direction, then indifferently away.

He thought of all the people who took their jobs so damned seriously, toiling for seventeen and twenty hours a day, who often had to be pried away from their desks and terminals. They believed in the dream. How would they feel if they knew? What if they knew of his mission?

The capsule shushed to a halt in the basement of R amp;D, quieted for a moment as it was switched to a rail, and then began to rise. The shuttles sat up to four people, and were completely modular, capable of hooking onto either the vertical or diagonal tracks that could take them anywhere in the Park.

An insanely complex machine. There were problems with such complexity, of course. The more complex a machine is, the more vulnerable it is to sabotage or simple breakdown. Obviously Fekesh had implanted a cancer somewhere in the organism that was Dream Park. Alex hoped it had not yet metastasized.

The shuttle door clicked open. Alex stretched his legs and pushed himself out.

He was standing on his head in the middle of a desert. Date palms hung by their roots below the horizon. A slow-moving line of camels walked upside down in the distance.

Alex stopped, checking his sense of balance. He didn’t think he’d fallen over. So he took a few cautious steps in that direction, to see if the perspective would shift.

It didn’t. He looked down at his feet. He was standing on a cloud. Arms stretched up to their maximum buried his hands in intangible sand.

“Hello? Is anyone here?”

No answer, but he thought that he heard a cough. The sun was beating up with unnatural ferocity, but there was no heat. It felt more like the air conditioning was turned up to full, possibly as a minor side effect of turning the entire region upside down. Dream Park had finally figured out a way to make the Sahara livable. How much would Fekesh pay for that?

“Hello? This is Alex Griffin from Security.”

“Oh, shit,” someone said from behind a shimmering dune. The entire illusion flickered, then died.

He was standing right side up in the hall, surrounded by gleaming Formica floors and fluorescent ceilings and all of the usual floating video boards and packed trophy cases. The only unusual thing was the holo projection device out in the middle of the hallway, inverted and poking halfway out of a door.

Curious, Alex approached cautiously. “Ah-hello? What exactly are you doing?”

The young man wiggling from under the machine was brown-eyed and innocent, with long wavy brown hair and an engaging thin-lipped smile. He looked more like a fullback than a lab tech, and was dressed in a pair of blue denim overalls. He spread his hands in supplication. “I don’t know who the hell built this thing,” he said, “but the only way you can reach the main processor is from the bottom. The function keys are on the top. I’m having a wonderful time.”

The device was a standard holo projection unit, an older model, vaguely reminiscent of an old planetarium projector.

“Can I help you with something?” the young man asked.

“I’m looking for Dr. Izumi.”

“Oh, yeah-” He twisted over from his uncomfortable position and pointed down the hall. “Third door to the left. Think he’s in Bioworks today.”

As Alex walked away, man and machine vanished again into the desert, and the young man said “Eureka!” a second before the entire machine shorted out. A colorful stream of adjectives and gerunds followed Alex down the hall.

The second door to the left was standing open. In the midst of a lab filled with monitors, cameras, and floodlights, a human skeleton sat calmly on a folding canvas chair. It turned and looked at Alex, and said, “Yes, can I help you?”

Alex managed a rather lopsided smile, searching for the human being operating the armature. “Ah… yes. I’m looking for Dr. Izumi.”

The skeleton clicked its teeth in a bizarre rictus that might have been a smile. How would you know if a skeleton was smiling? It was the lip articulation that made most of a “smile” happen.

It stood up and stalked across the room like something out of a nightmare. It held out a bony hand.

All right, he’d go along with the joke, and as soon as the hand went through his, he would declare the joke over and force Izumi to get down to business.

His fingers closed on warm flesh-and then dissolved. The flesh of his hand ended at the wrist, and two sets of finger bones intertwined.

He gritted his teeth.

The skeleton laughed heartily. “That was priceless,” it said. “Just the expression on your face. Excuse me.”

It turned its head. Alex expected to hear a creak of tortured bone, but what he got instead was that bemused, cultured voice saying, “Izumi. Save program two-eight-internal and mute.”

The air shimmered, and Tom Izumi appeared. He was of medium height, with straight black hair and an incongruously small mouth. For an embarrassing moment, he reminded Griffin of a villain from an old Dick Tracy comic strip, the kind whose physical features mirrored and indicated their criminal tendencies.

“What in the hell was that?” Griffin asked.

“A real-time holographic medical analysis simulator. Utilizes ultrasound projectors built into the walls.”

“Don’t you need lasers to make a hologram?”

“Heavens no. Any form of energy that can be carried by waves: sound, light, microwaves, or X-rays.”

“Whatever happened to ‘turn your head and cough’?”

“There’s a ton of diagnostic devices in here. I’ve been scanned up and down and sideways. We just create a three-dimensional model and project it onto the patient.”

“What kind of… ah, depth? I guess ‘depth’ is the word I’m looking for.”

“Oh, we can adjust it to any level. Izumi, circulation.” His skin disappeared. Alex looked into a coursing network of veins and arteries, with the contracting fist-sized muscle of Izumi’s heart pulsing queasily in stage center. The room behind the missing flesh shimmered as if he was seeing it through a heat mirage.

“Could you disappear entirely?”

“Here, in the room? Sure. Could I play invisible man out in the street? Nobody’s miniaturized the equipment that far, but I suppose it’s possible. The problem would be in reproducing every conceivable angle, so that anyone looking from any direction would see what he expects to see. A little adjustment for focus, maybe…” He became thoughtful. “Come back next month.”

“Great.” A security chief’s worst nightmare, available next month from the gentle lunatics at Research and Development. “Mind turning that off? It’s giving me a headache.”

“Sure.” Izumi smiled toothily, and appeared, fully clothed.

“You’re Alex Griffin,” he said. “Tomisuburo Izumi.”

Alex shook the man’s hand again. It was soft, like a baby’s. There was something curiously childlike about the man. He had that soft round cheekiness, without the angularity which normally intrudes during adolescence. There was no trace of a beard, and the black hair was undisciplined. The eyes didn’t fit in that face. Dark and deep-set, they were fiercely intelligent. “What can I do for you?”

“I don’t feel comfortable in a room with so many scans hooked up to it. Is there somewhere we can talk privately?”

Izumi thought for a moment. “There’s the party room. Come on.” Izumi carefully locked the door behind them and escorted him down the hall.

“Party room?” Alex asked.

“Yes. Our rotation doesn’t come up until two in the morning. Australia and Canada will keep things going most of the day.”

“What’s the record?”

“Nonstop holo party, thirteen months. With the feeds we’ve got right now, there’s no reason to assume that it will ever stop. We’re at eight months and cruising.”

They stopped in front of a small green door with the legend: “Environmental stress workshop. Please sign in.” Alex stifled a laugh as Izumi thumbed the door open, and they entered.

The room buzzed with activity. People laughed, drank, ate from a buffet table. A couple in the far corner were dancing a rumba. Some of the guests looked a little tired. They raised their glasses as Izumi closed the door, and a male voice said, “Tommy y’old slacker! G’day, ey? Good to see you. Who’s the straight?”

“This is Alex Griffin, Chief of Security here. Griffin, meet Robin Schultz.”

He was short and a bit pudgy, with a magnificent sandy beard. He tilted a bit as he stood up. “Welcome to the party, mate. Shake hands if I could, but you know how it is.”

Alex was overwhelmed with curiosity. “Where are you sending from?”

“University of Melbourne, old love. Plasma physics. We’ve had to shuffle the party around from one lab to the other this week. It’s been hysteric.”

“Why?”

“Rules. Officially, no one’s supposed to know. Unofficially, it’s the biggest open secret on campus, and they queue up waiting for us to drop a line.” He glanced at his watch. “Well, we only have to host for the next twelve hours. Then Canada takes over. Be glad too. Three days ago, I was the only person here for two whole hours. Lonely, of course, but hey! The party must go on!”

“Listen, Robin,” Izumi said, “I need a quiet conversation with Mr. Griffin, and this is the best place here, so we’re going to drop off line for a while.”

“All right, Tommy. Later, hey?”

The room disappeared. They were in a small studio, maybe a third the size of the ballroom, and Alex swallowed his amazement.

Dammit, he wasn’t going to get goggle-eyed again. He just wasn’t going to do it.

Izumi said, “So. What can I do for you?”

“Are you sure we’re secure here?”

“Very.”

Izumi gestured to a couch, and Alex tested it with the tip of his toe before sitting. “I want to talk to you about your brother Calvin.”

Tom Izumi stopped breathing for a moment, and his eyes closed. A network of little muscles clenched and relaxed under his eyes. When the mini-rebellion was over, he opened them again and examined Griffin.

“You were not even at Dream Park when Calvin died, Mr. Griffin. What is it that you wish?”

“I need to know more about the circumstances of his death. All of the files are sealed, or erased. The county coroner’s office had a terrible accident about eight years ago. Impounded some kind of electromagnet as evidence, and ended up erasing data files. Your brother’s included.”

“That is most unfortunate.”

They paused as someone walked down the hall outside. hum! reached over and bolted the door.

“What can you tell me about the death?”

Izumi leaned back against the wall, holding a private debate with himself. Then he began to speak. “It was in April. April of ‘48, I believe. Calvin was working on the combat rifle range we had set up for the California State Sheriffs’ Association. He took one of the rifles outside the park for additional testing up in the mountains. One of two shells had been a hangfire. While he was changing targets it detonated, and he was struck in the head. Killed instantly. A hunter found him.” He paused, and Alex saw calculations flashing behind those penetrating eyes. “That’s really all there is to say. What is it that you’re looking for?”

“The truth. I know that Calvin died here, in Dream Park. I know that there was an accident in a Game involving live ammunition. I know that it was no accident. I know about the cover-up.”

Tom Izumi was silent. Slowly he rose. “I’m afraid that I have to get back to my work. I’m sure you can understand.”

“I can understand your wish to protect Dream Park. I can appreciate your loyalty. You’re thinking this is what Calvin would have wanted. But what you have to understand is that there is a chance, just a chance that if you help me, we can nail the people involved. We can do it without airing Dream Park’s laundry in public.”

Izumi sat back down again. “I don’t understand. How?”

“Something new has been added. The Fimbulwinter Game is running again-”

“I know that.”

“The girl’s back too. She’s in the Game under a pseudonym.”

Izumi mulled it. “What of it?”

“Persons unknown got her killed out. I’ve put her back in. And that’s it, Tom, that’s all I’ve got. I don’t understand enough of what happened yet. Tell me. Help me. Somebody’s frightened. If I can get enough information, maybe I can find a pressure point.”

“And if you can’t?”

“Then we’ll be no worse off than we are now. I won’t do anything to jeopardize Dream Park, or your family. And at least we’ll know that we tried.”

Izumi seemed to weigh his words, then he shrugged. “Tried… okay. Calvin was a little heavyset, and he liked acting. They asked him to be an Eskimo in one of the Games over in Gaming A. He’d done it a couple of times, I think. Certainly no one expected any trouble. Then we got the call-there had been a terrible accident.”

“Who called you?”

“Medical staff. One of the doctors.”

“All right, go on.”

“My mother and I were working on one of the displays in a trade show set-up, and we hurried to the dispensary. It had been cleared out. Dr… Vails. No, Vail. That was his name, Vail.”

“Chief of Psychiatric Services?”

“No, not then, he was just one of the psychs. And Harmony was there, and two others. A half-dozen security people knew the truth, and three medical personnel. They were all sworn to secrecy. When they showed us the body, we had to make our own choice.”

“Just like that?”

“No, it wasn’t just like that. Mother fell apart. We had to sedate her. But when she was calm, we realized that justice could not be served. If we tried to find the murderer publicly, the whole thing would come out, and the killers would get the disruption they were seeking. So we covered it up, and we all helped, Mr. Griffin.” He paused. “It killed her, you know. She only lasted another year.”

In some corner of his mind Alex tallied up another life, gone for nothing. “How did you manage it?”

“Calvin and I were about the same height. The head of Prosthetics joined the conspiracy. She made me up to look like Calvin. Mother started crying again when she saw how good the job was. Really unbelievable, And then I went to a couple of conferences as Calvin, let myself be seen, and then took that rifle out into the mountains.”

Alex visualized the pieces thus far presented, letting them fall into place, in proper perspective. “You said you couldn’t try to find the murderer publicly. What about privately?”

Tom Izumi smiled mirthlessly. “We went over every possibility, Mr. Griffin, and we came up with only two ways that rifle could have gotten into the Game.”

“I’d like to know. I want to see.”

Izumi paused, and nodded, and said, “All right, come with me.”

Griffin wondered briefly how his subconscious had known that they would end up in Maintenance. Why else would he have had such a strong reaction to passing that window?

Sandy Khresla spent a lot of time outdoors. The sun had put streams of red in her straight black hair and turned her skin nut-brown. She was a demon softball pitcher; he’d watched her. She had the muscle to put speed on that heavy ball. Most women develop soft, smooth muscle contours; but a few, like Sandy Khresla, grow hard and defined. He’d lay long odds she pumped iron.

The blue smoke of an aromatic pipe tobacco hovered around her. Alex missed her leathery smile. She looked dangerous without it. She had never looked at him like this: like an enemy. He said, “So you know about all of this too?”

Sandy’s voice was surprisingly deep. “When they started poking around, Gruff, there was only one place to go. We’re the only people who have complete knowledge of every entrance and exit, how everything moves. I was just a junior supervisor then, but Calvin and I were tight. When his brother came to me and told me the truth, they knew they could trust me.”

Alex nodded. He felt like a Johnny-come-lately around these old-timers. “So what conclusions did you come to?”

“We have to go back to an earlier set of detail maps. A lot of additions were made six years ago, and new security put in.”

She called maps up on the computer, until a scale map of Dream Park rotated on the table in front of them. The image flashed and expanded, flashed and expanded, until they were looking at the dome of Gaming B, tangential to Gaming A but sharing no walls or surface connections.

“If I remember right, the Game was this winter thing. Eskimos. Sun going out. We had every refrigerator unit pumping at once.”

“Fimbulwinter.”

“Whatever. Okay, at the end of the Game the Gamers have lost almost everything, but there are still some weapons left be-hind after an airplane crash. These are handed out to the Gamers who need them so they can fight this last big battle. Are you with me so far?”

“No problem.”

“Now, all of the rifles are coded and numbered. The rifle that killed was indistinguishable from a Dream Park rifle. It hadn’t been modified. Somebody smuggled it in at the last minute, and handed it to that poor little mouse-”

“Michelle Sturgeon.”

“Yeah, that was it. Kid never had a chance. She had the highest score of anyone in the Game, you know that? They may have picked her for that.”

Alex examined the checkpoints. The Dream Park armory was an ultra-high security area, and all weapons were checked, rechecked, and the complete breakdown recorded on videochip for reference. Some of the weapons were replicas, and could never fire. Many were fantasy weapons dreamed up by R amp;D. But a few were antiques, or army surplus, and needed safety modification.

Tom Izumi traced his finger along the underground connecting tunnels. “This rifle entered the Game here, at a service duct, or here, at the players’ entrance. This corridor, where the equipment is brought up, is very secure.”

“But…?”

“But. One of our Eskimos disappeared after the Game. Poof, gone. Laid a false trail and was out of the country, as far as we can determine.”

“Pictures?”

“Yes,” Izumi said. “I can have them to your office this afternoon.”

“One of the Actors smuggled in a rifle, switched it, and carted the modified rifle away?”

“It seems the simplest explanation,” Sandy said.

Alex thought, and thought, and finally sighed. “I need more information. I think there must be a simple answer. Get me the data on the Actor. What was his name?”

“Called himself Toby Lee Harlow Jr. All of the files were lifted, but I got them out of the system, and kept them.” Once again, Griffin was treated to that utterly merciless smile.

“Just in case.”