Pipe Dreams

Illustration by Steven Cavallo

It was a normal day for Beckett Hodge. Which is to say an extraordinary day, for Beckett Hodge attracted extraordinary situations, things, and people the way black pants attract white cat hair.

Beckett—Beck to wife and friends—was, to outward appearances, an archetype—the mild-mannered and somewhat nerdish professor of computer science, habitually forgetful and distracted, his mind engaged in a never-ending background computation. He did not drink; he did not swear; he forgot his own birthday and resorted to electronic wizardry to remember his wife’s. He was a renowned lecturer and an author, too, of thick, arcane tomes about AI, nanotech and enviro-programming; every one written in what his wife, Marian, called “technese.”

In Beckett’s head, he was a fictioneer—a storyteller—though no one had ever read a word of his fiction. The clutter of scientific and academic accomplishments was merely a source of income, something he just did, the same way that he breathed, ate, slept and performed other necessary functions.

Beckett Hodge wanted people to be as impressed with his fiction as they were with the rest of the things he did, but as he approached his thirty-sixth birthday, that goal seemed no closer than it had the day he first opened a word processor file to write about something other than neural nets, bio-computing, and self-policing AI security systems.

He was bemused by his academic publisher’s lack of interest in seeing a work of fiction with his name on it. “You write like a programmer,” Terrence Lance had said, upon reading Beck’s synopsis for a novel. When Beckett failed to see the problem with that, he’d added, “Write what you know, Beck.” Beck disregarded the commentary. After all, the fellow edited and published textbooks, not novels. He had downloaded the synopsis to three publishers anyway, using his academic credits to get a foot in the electronic door. Nearly six months later, he was still waiting for the door to budge.

He put that out of mind now and assembled his lecture notes, penned neatly on yellow legal paper. He loved the feel of paper between his fingers, the smell of it when he flipped a page. It was a soothing touch of realism for a mind that habitually courted the abstract. He loved the smell of magazines and books, too. In his vivid imagination, the pages that held his own fiction were especially savory.

He brought his mind firmly back to the here and now—not usually so difficult a thing for a man who lived for the nanosecond—and began his lecture on the dynamics of programming the mood-sensitive entertainment system. The hall was packed; students stood along the walls and in every nook and cranny that would hold a body. Beck knew his peers speculated about his popularity—was it the subject matter or the fact that he reminded his students of a Disney character who might any moment begin lecturing on “flubber” instead of silicon?

When the lecture was over, Beck had a series of appointments: one with the head of the life-science department, one with the board of directors of a major financial institution, the third with his government liaison, Colonel Traynor. The department head wanted him to consider teaching another class in nanoprogramming, the bankers wanted to commission him to design one of his patented security system for their customers’ valuables, Traynor was negotiating enhancements to a security and defense system Beck had put in place the year before for the Department of Defense.

He didn’t want to teach another class in nanotech, and said as much. He found it difficult to concentrate during the meeting with the contingent from First Continental Finance. He accepted the job with his mind on how he might punch up the opening of his latest attempt at a novel, saw the bankers out of his office, and settled in to grab half an hour of writing time before his military escort arrived to take him to his next meeting. He wasn’t certain he really wanted the First Continental job—it would distract him just that much more from his writing—but he supposed Marian would think him foolish to turn it down. And as to the military contract… He disliked working with the government in a vague, abstract way. They were an incredibly paranoid group of people. He had difficulty thinking the way they did, but Marian said that was because he was naive. The thought brought a smile to his wide lips. Marian could say things like that and mean them as compliments.

To Beck, the DOD was a paradox: having determined never to use their deadly arsenal of nuclear weaponry, they must now make certain no one else could use it either. It was as if a man had purchased a gun to protect his home and family, only to decide he couldn’t bring himself to point it at anyone and pull the trigger. It was therefore necessary to go to great lengths to hide the gun, to lock it away in a series of increasingly forbidding vaults, complete with booby traps. The whole idea seemed absurd, and despite the fact that the contract would bring him several million dollars by completion, he would have still cheerfully advised the government to simply get rid of the gun—or at the very least to unload it and throw the bullets away. Instead they had opted for a “vault.” Now, they wanted it strengthened and enlarged.

The meeting with Traynor was cordial and orderly and Beck could hardly wait to get away. Specs in hand, he had the driver take him straight home. He was in a hurry to get into his office to get to work. The notes on the first chapter of his novel were burning a hole in his briefcase.

Marian was already home. “Took off early,” she said, handing him a glass of orange juice. “Had a lunch meeting with Liz Harris. God, that woman gives me a headache. Acts like she’s our only account. You have e-mail from a publisher.”

It took him a full five seconds to catch that, even though he’d had ten years of practice sorting through the diverse information his wife could layer into her dialogue. “I what?”

“I checked the mail.” He was already on his way into the office, orange juice sloshing; she raised her voice. “Some guy named Bourbon—Seton House, I think.”

The name was Laurence Bourbon. The publisher was Sefton House. The message made a sharp, shrill tingle of anticipation vibrate up Beck’s spine: I’m going to be in Boston next week and I’d like to meet you and discuss your manuscript. You have some very interesting ideas and I think we can work together. Lunch Tuesday at the Sheraton? Please let me know if this is agreeable. His Internet address followed. There was a 3-D scan with the message, showing a smiling man, probably above middle-age, with sparkling dark eyes and distinguished streaks of gray in his dark hair and beard.

Shaking, Beck dropped into his chair and logged onto the Net. I find it very agreeable, he sent back. Around one? I have classes until noon. He sent back a canned scan of himself so Bourbon would be able to recognize him. The reply came while he was sitting there staring at the original e-mail, sipping but not tasting his orange juice. “You have mail,” the computer informed him.

One is fine. Meet you in the main lobby. I look forward to it.

Beck felt a hand on his shoulder, followed almost immediately by warm lips at his ear. “You’re shaking,” Marian murmured. “I used to do that to you, once.”

Beck was not so much the absent-minded professor as to miss that cue. “Why don’t we go into town tonight? We’ll have dinner and go for a long walk in the Commons.”

She was watching his hand where it lay atop the keyboard, fingers just caressing the keys. “We’ll grab a quick bite at Giovanni’s and come home. That’ll give you about three hours to work on chapter one. Be in bed by eleven.” She left him alone to save his precious messages and read the rest of his mail, swaggering out of the room while swirling her orange juice in the rounded glass as if it were expensive brandy in a snifter. He noticed—he always did notice—how lithe she was, how long and catlike. She walked like a gunslinger. He, nerd, wondered how he had ever managed to snare a Marian.

The rest of the week was a blur of lectures and programming and anticipation. He got a lot of work done on the Pentagon Piece, as he called it, adding subtle and not-so-subtle nuances to his existing system. And he actually made a decent start on the “Bank Vault” program as well. Surprising, considering that in every spare moment he was noodling with the novel.

Marian’s business partner, Ruby, thought that was silly, “Considering,” she said, “that someone’s shown interest in the book as is.”

“He may want changes,” Beck told her.

“Mmhmm, but will he want the ones you’re making?”

That disconcerted him so much he spent Saturday and Sunday fully engaged in his programming with only half an afternoon out to go bike riding with Marian (his concession to her insistence on regular exercise) and start work on a short story which would no doubt end up in the same electronic file folder all his other unpublished short stories ended up in. He’d never had the temerity to publish even one of them on the Net. It wasn’t anonymous enough.

The Sheraton was corporately bland in its ostentatiousness; its foyer gleamed with brass that reflected only muted beiges and peaches. The potted foliage that decorated the place wasn’t real, nor was it intended to look real. It was intended to look alien. It didn’t. It looked like naked, airbrushed manzanita and cinchona spangled with tiny faux seed pearls, or draped with locks of gold and peach silk, that gave the impression of poodle-dyed Spanish Moss.

Beck eyed it with vague queasiness as he waited for the concierge to check him through to the elevator to the Tower suites. He was impressed in the extreme. He’d thought that the wealth in the publishing industry’ was invested in those who wrote, published or owned the movie rights to the latest multi-generational saga, horror classic or mucus-making romance. That Laurence Bourbon could afford such accommodation set him to musing about the differences between academic and commercial publishing. No textbook editor he knew could afford such luxury.

Bourbon was a tall man, Beck’s height or better, dapperly dressed in a suit with gleaming white shirt and red silk tie—an Ascot, not a Windsor. He was polished, urbane, even suave, yet his face seemed open friendly. Humor sparkled in his dark eyes. Beck liked him immediately and allowed his hopes to rise. More so when he saw a printed copy of his manuscript sitting in the middle of the round, glass-topped table at which Bourbon bid him seat himself.

“Dr. Hodge,” the publisher said expansively, sitting opposite him.

“Uh, Beckett, please… or Beck… whichever.”

There was a carafe of coffee on the table, Bourbon spoke as he poured. “Beckett, then. I’m very glad we could meet like this. And on such short notice.” He put down the carafe and laid both hands flat on the manuscript. “I don’t mind telling you, this is quite a book.”

Beck could feel his skin flushing. “I don’t mind hearing it. I’m surprised you actually wasted the paper to print it. Surely, a cyber reader—”

“False modesty, Beckett, seldom impresses an editor. This is a good book. Very solid. Exciting plot. Interesting characters. Especially Martin, your programmer/mage. Your knowledge of programming certainly comes through.”

Beck chuckled. “My textbook editor says I write like a programmer. He’s suggested to me that I should stick to academics and leave fiction to people with imagination.”

Bourbon shook his head. “I can only think he’s afraid of losing you to fiction. This novel shows a vivid imagination. At the same time, you apply your science extremely well. I’m impressed… obviously, or I wouldn’t be here. I hope you don’t mind my idle chatter, but I like to get to know my writers.”

His writers. Beck had the absurd desire to grin. He gave in to it and hid the grin in his coffee.

“Now, as to possible contracts,” Bourbon continued, then shot a glance at his watch. “I’ve an appointment shortly; could you drop by this evening… oh, around seven-ish? We could discuss terms…?” He spread his hands, leaving the ball in Beck’s court.

Beck was ready to jump at that, but remembered before he’d opened his mouth to accept that Marian had no idea what was going on. “Can we do it tomorrow? My wife and I have a rule. We never make last minute, solo plans without consulting each other—especially after hours.”

Bourbon’s brows twitched. “There’s the phone.”

“She’s on a buying expedition today. It… it wouldn’t be fair to spring this on her. She might have—er—plans for us this evening.” He flushed, hoping Bourbon wouldn’t inquire as to what kind of plans.

“A possessive woman, your wife?”

Beck had the impression the questioning tone was tacked on as an afterthought. “No, she’s not really. Well, I mean, she is—but we both are. It’s hard to explain, but we both have such hectic schedules and put in such long days; our time together is very precious to both of us. Tomorrow, maybe…” He trailed off, feeling vaguely idiotic—like a man who’s won the lottery only to balk at having to go down to the bank to pick up the check.

Bourbon’s smile was quick and bright. “Tomorrow’s fine. Some more coffee?”

Beck relaxed into the depths of his chair as they discussed some changes to the manuscript—all of which seemed impossibly minor. He left the Sheraton riding the crest of an adrenaline wave, eager to bring Bourbon a slightly reworked first chapter. He got home, had the house play an entire library of Vivaldi and Blue Oyster Cult, and worked on the book for what only seemed like minutes before Marian’s appearance at his office door interrupted him.

“What’re you doing home?” she asked, brow wrinkling. “Don’t you have classes this afternoon?”

He stared at her for a full two seconds before he realized she was right. He did have classes this afternoon—or rather, he would have had, if he’d remembered to go to them. Swift heat suffused his skin. “I…”

“Lost all track of time,” Marian finished for him. She laughed, leaned over and kissed his forehead. “Beck, honey, I think you’re halfway to discovering the secret of time travel.”

“What’s up?” The female voice came over Marian’s shoulder from the doorway.

Beck mumbled, “Hi, Ruby,” and tried to decide whether he should get up and race down to the campus in an attempt to retrieve his last class of the day, or to just call in and plead that he’d felt ill (cough, cough), taken a nap and… lost all track of time.

Marian’s partner, Ruby Wilson, sauntered into his office, arms folded across her substantial chest, and said, “You’re not supposed to be here.”

“Save file,” he told the computer. He looked up at her. “Are you having a secret meeting?”

The two women glanced at each other. “Yes,” said Ruby, “we’re part of a coven of cyber-witches and we’re having a ritual sacrifice this afternoon in your backyard.”

“No, no.” Marian shook her head. “That’s Tuesday. Today is the secret swearing-in ceremony for the new members and, of course—”

“The orgy,” finished Ruby, nodding. “How could I forget?”

“So are you just going to sit there?” Marian had folded her arms across her chest, too, and was glancing between him and the antique walnut wall clock that hung over the mantel piece. “Shouldn’t you go over and catch the fallout?”

“I could call…”

“You could,” agreed Marian, “but then again, you could still catch your last class.”

Beck glanced at his computer screen—longingly. His sense of responsibility kicked in hard. He saved the file a second time, idled the machine, popped out the memory core, pocketed it and headed for his car.

The two women watched him from the lanai at the front of the house, side by side, waving at him. Like conspirators, he thought, then wondered where the hell that had come from. It came to him as a surprise that he hadn’t told Marian about his book deal. It came to him as an even greater surprise that he was reluctant to tell her. He was a man who often dealt in secrets, and, because of this, he shared everything he could with Marian. It was odd, he thought, that this secret was one he rather relished keeping.

He was just able to salvage his last class, then logged onto the school Net to apologize to the students he had stranded, promising not to let it happen again. Then he went home. Ruby was gone when he got there, and Marian, fresh from a shower, was sipping orange juice on the lanai while the house audio system gave forth the sylvan sounds of a Northwest Coast rain forest.

“So, talk to me,” she said, when he’d kissed her forehead and folded himself into the seat across from her at the bistro table. “How was the appointment this afternoon?”

He hesitated, but the secret refused to remain a secret. He grinned. “It was terrific, Marian. Absolutely terrific. This guy really likes my book. Really likes it. He had some suggestions for improving the first couple of chapters—”

“Did you sign a contract?”

“Not yet, but—”

“You shouldn’t really make changes until you see the whites of President Grant’s eyes.”

He stared at her, bemused. “He wants the book, Marian. He just wants to see if I can correct a few things.”

She nodded. “What was the name of the publisher again? I told Ruby it was Seton. She said I must’ve meant Sefton. It isn’t Sefton, is it?”

“It’s—” He broke off and looked at her. That question had an agenda behind it; he could tell by the tone of her voice and the fact that she was gazing into the bottom of her OJ glass, not into his eyes. “It’s Sefton. Why?”

“Do you know what their last big publication was?”

“Not right offhand.”

“Voice from a Burning Bush by Ibrahim X.”

Beck shook his head.

Marian leaned forward and grasped a handful of the hair at the back of his head. “Sometimes, my beloved husband, you are too much of a nerd to live. Ibrahim X was the self-proclaimed ringleader of the Shalom/ Salaam terrorist group. You might have heard of them if you read the news we subscribe to. Sefton made a killing on his book, which is basically a ‘how-to’ manual for wannabe terrorists and a self-serving justification for mass murder. It generated a heated First Amendment debate in Congress and all sorts of bad press for Sefton, the net effect of which was record book sales and handsome royalties for one and all.” She stopped talking and just looked at him.

He waited a beat. “And?”

Her grip on his hair tightened. “You’re going to deal with these people? People who’ve figured out a legal way to make a buck from terrorism?”

Beck did not swear. Marian did occasionally, and he had no doubt she would be doing it shortly if he did not answer her questions in the appropriate manner. Beck, mounted on the horns of a dilemma that was at once clear and impenetrable, wished he did swear. A good solid, “hell” or “damn” would feel somehow purging. Instead he asked, “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure about the book and the author. Ruby’s sure about the publisher.” She let go of his hair. “Seriously, Beck. How can you do business with people like that?”

“Sefton is a big company. I’m sure their fiction department—”

“Cop-out.” She got up from the table, chair sliding back with a metallic groan.

“Marian—”

“Cop-out, cop-out, cop-out.” She disappeared into the house, the screen door sliding behind her with a slight popping sound. The rain forest fell silent. Some of Marian’s exits, Beck thought, really ought to be followed by the sound of a door slamming.

They argued about it further over dinner. He refused to make commitments of either feeling or intellect and she refused to see what a rejection of Bourbon’s offer (or potential offer) meant to him. He was not good at verbalizing emotion, but in the eleventh hour, he gave it a good shot. “Look, Marian. Try to understand. I see the bigger moral issues, really I do. But they’re not my issues. I just want to publish some science fiction. It has nothing to do with Mr. X or his book. I may be a hot-shot when it comes to AI systems, but I’m nobody when it comes to fiction. Bourbon could change that. This is something I’ve dreamed about for years. For decades. My stories in print, Marian. My name on a book of fiction.”

“And what about principles, Beckett? Your principles.”

He shook his head.

She went to see Ruby. He removed himself to his office and pecked at his manuscript, all the while imagining the two of them, hunched in a booth in their favorite latte bar, dissecting his character as if he were a piece of bad fiction. In the backwash of angst, his POV character took on a decidedly cynical bent.

Marian didn’t get home until after eleven, making a mockery, Beck thought, of everything he’d said to Laurence Bourbon about their “rules.” He was lying in bed, feeling a little betrayed, when she lowered herself into bed next to him. They drifted into sleep without touching.

By morning, Marian was curled in Beck’s arms and he had a hazy memory of hot sex during which he had played a decidedly non-aggressive role. He thought he’d dreamed of Marian riding through a stormy sea dolphin-back. It was a strangely erotic image. He wondered if he might make use of it fictionally.

She fixed breakfast for him. That was an unspoken apology, but she was still nettled by the whole terrorist thing. “You know, it’s possible that your publisher friend even knows who Ibrahim X is—and where he is.”

“I doubt it.”

“Well, think of it, Beck. Money has to change hands, manuscripts have to be delivered. Even if it’s all done through an agent of some sort, somebody must know something.”

He glanced up at her over the rim of his coffee cup. “And?”

“He’s wanted by the World Tribunal, for godsake. He’s a criminal. If somebody knows where he is, they should turn him in.”

“Look, Marian. ‘Somebody’ knew where Salman Rushdie was for years, but his enemies were kept in the dark until their regime fell. These people are obviously clever.”

“So are you.”

Hair stood up on the back of his neck. “You want me to spy? What—vigilante espionage? I’m not a spy, Marian. I’m a programmer.”

“A programmer whose business is to thwart spies—”

“Not even in the same county, Marian.” He got up and collected his briefcase. “I’m a nerd. A nerd who writes science fiction. If I wrote spy novels, I could see how you might get the idea that I could do counterespionage. But I don’t write spy novels, and I’m not even going to be working with the editor who handled the Burning Bush manuscript.”

“Are you sure?” she asked.

He wasn’t sure, but he pretended to be. What would a science fiction editor be doing with a controversial non-fiction manuscript? “Here’s another thought for you and Ruby to toss around,” Beck said as he headed for the door. “What if the whole thing’s a hoax? What if they got some ghost writer to make all this up based on news files, and just promoted it as the real terrorist?”

“That’s dishonest. You’re telling me you’d work with a publisher you knew was dishonest?”

He left without answering the question.

He had only morning classes today and spent the afternoon, until nearly 3:00, working on his commercial programming contract. The bank routines were proving problematic. Continental wanted some of the same safeguards he had incorporated into the DOD software, but national security dictated against his using the same code or anything remotely like it. As a result, he had to come up with new approaches to old problems—a nice enough challenge, but Beck was soon frustrated with the number of times he had to pull himself up short, realizing he was on too familiar ground.

At 3:15, he kept an appointment with Bourbon in his Sheraton suite, bringing along his edited pages to show. Bourbon read them in complete silence—not so much as a “hmm” or a nod or a throat clearing to mark his progress. Beck sipped a virgin daiquiri and wriggled like a middle-school kid at his first dance.

In the end, the editor raised his head and smiled. “Good edits, Beckett. I especially like the rougher edges you’ve put on Martin James.” He paused, nodded. “I think we can work together.” He rubbed his palms together in some sort of symbolic gesture, then reached out to shake Beck’s hand. “Now, about contracts. I’ll have them downloaded from Sefton so you can go over them tonight, review the terms and sign them at your leisure. I’m going to be in town a few more days, as it happens.”

Beck nodded. “Uh. Terms?”

“Well, in view of your other work—your scientific publications, et al, I’ve been authorized to offer you an advance of twenty thousand against royalties.”

Beck was still nodding. “Twenty that’s… that’s great.” Damn Marian, anyway, he swore silently. He should have been savoring this and wasn’t, because she and Ruby had raised the shade of Conscience. “Um, I was curious. Sefton published Voice from a Burning Bush, didn’t they?”

Bourbon’s eyebrows rose delicately. “Yes, we did.”

“You wouldn’t have been the editor to handle that property, would you?”

“Why do you ask?”

“My wife was… curious about how that sort of thing is handled. I mean with the author being… who he is and all.” He offered up a halfhearted smile. “I think she fancies I might get into writing spy novels or something.”

Bourbon’s mouth tilted wryly. “I’m afraid I’m just a science fiction editor. Mr. X did not enter Sefton through the servant’s quarters, I assure you. He had an editor from the non-fiction side of the aisle.”

Beck shook his head. “Servant’s quarters? I don’t get it.”

“Inside joke of the genre ghetto, Beckett. Finish your drink. I’ll get those contracts going.”

Beck glanced at his watch. “How long will it take to download them? My wife…” He broke off, clearing his throat. He was relieved when Bourbon didn’t react.

“I understand. It will take but a moment.” During that moment, Bourbon came back to the table and seated himself, pouring Beck a fresh, cold refill of creamy, pink crushed ice. “You know, Beckett, I really hoped we’d have an opportunity to talk programming. I’ve got this little AI project I’m working on for Sefton—” He broke off with a self-deprecatory smile. “Well, I’m only coordinating it, actually. I’ll probably hire a real programmer to do it, but I’d like to at least help design it.”

Beck was immediately interested. “Oh? A maintenance system, security—which?”

“A little of both, actually. You’d be surprised at the type of security problems we have in the publishing industry. Especially a house like Sefton which has a number of celebrity authors.”

Beck sipped at the daiquiri, trying to hide behind it. “Like Ibrahim X?”

“Yes, like that. Like J.R. Koenig. I can’t tell you the number of times our system has been hacked into and his manuscripts downloaded and distributed over the Net before we can get them to press. There’s a lot of money lost there for our cyber-press division, as you can imagine. Koenig even tried downloading a manuscript to us under his wife’s name and e-mail account. The hackers still got to it before we could publish it.”

“Sounds like it could be an inside job,” Beck said. “Are you sure you can trust everyone who’s working for you?”

Bourbon grimaced. “You may be right. And no, I’m not certain of everyone in our employ. But I thought, perhaps with your advice… I’m, em, not above taking advantage of this situation. I hope you don’t mind.” His smile betrayed embarrassment.

Beck flushed, smiling. “Of course not. I’d be happy to talk shop with you.”

“Tomorrow night, perhaps? A late dinner here?”

“Ah… how late?”

“Ninish?”

“I don’t know if I can, on such short notice, but I’ll try.” For the first time, Beck felt a spark of resentment for Marian’s possessiveness. It was embarrassing to seem so… well, henpecked. He had the absurd desire to puff out his chest and proclaim adamantly that he most certainly would be there for dinner the next evening. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

“I’d appreciate it. I’m really quite stumped by our hacker/thief.”

When Beckett left the Sheraton, he was surprised to find himself standing on a lamp-lit street. Somehow it had grown dark while he chatted with Laurence Bourbon. Puzzling, but not distractingly so. He drove home in a haze of buoyant cheer, ready to reconcile with Marian. But, though her car was parked in the curving drive when he arrived home, the house was dark.

Out with Ruby, no doubt, who would commiserate with her about having a husband who stood her up for dinner without notice. The aroma of Kung Pao still hung in the kitchen, making Beck salivate. Guilt warred with irritation and hunger. He grabbed a white carton from the refrigerator and headed for his office, deciding he’d work on the First Continental program while he waited Marian out. He would save the contracts for later, when he could savor them. He slipped the memory core into the computer, put on VR half-helm and gloves and let himself into the program.

It was a bigger mess than he remembered—a crazy-quilt of mismatched security fail-safes. He was deep into it, working on a lock for one of the bank’s massive data vaults, when a blinding flash of light all but knocked him from his chair. His head felt suddenly cool and light, as if—

“Beckett Hodge, what the hell are you doing?” Marian emerged from the haze of light wearing a rumpled, over-large Red Sox T-shirt, her short hair an auburn riot. She held his half-helm in one white-knuckled hand.

“I… was waiting for you.”

“To do what? Take up sleepwalking? Do you have any idea how worried I’ve been? First I thought you’d mutated into a prick, and then I thought maybe you’d been kidnapped by corporate spies or aliens or something, and then I started having these visions of you lying in a ditch somewhere. Where were you?”

“I had a meeting with Laurence Bourbon—you knew that. He’s given me a contract to sign.”

“And that took until one A.M.?”

Beck felt as if all the air had been squeezed out of the room. “One… ? That’s impossible.”

“You wear a watch. Use it.”

He did wear a watch, when he remembered to put it on. He pulled up his sleeve. Evidently this morning he had not remembered. He tilted the naked wrist so Marian could see it.

“The world is full of clocks, Beckett. Your car has a clock. Your computer has a clock. Your pager has a clock. This office has a clock although it’s damned hard to see in the dark. Are you telling me you didn’t glance at any of them?”

“No I didn’t.” How had time slipped away from him like that? How could he possibly have gone into the Sheraton at 3:15 in the afternoon and come out at—he hastily back-tracked, trying to calculate how long he’d been working on the First Continental project—10:30 p.m.?

Marian threw his half-helm into his lap. “I’m going back to bed. Now that I know you’re not dead or kidnapped, I don’t particularly care what you do.” She turned and made a patented Marian exit.

“Marian…”

“You could have called,” she slung over her shoulder.

“I’m sorry.”

“You could have left a message on my pager.” She was heading up the stairs into the loft. The trapdoor slammed.

The house was silent. Beck sat in the semi-darkness of his office, halfhelm in his gloved hands, feeling singularly confused.

By morning he had a plan of action. He would make it up to Marian. He would woo her. He would win her back. It was Saturday and Beck took full advantage of it. He had the bakery deliver scones. He made strong Arabicus coffee. He cut roses from a convenient bush that hung over the wall from their neighbor’s prize-winning garden.

Marian was surprised, pleased, and appeased. So much that when Ruby called to see if she wanted to go antique store hopping, Marian turned her down in favor of a weekend with Beck at a resort north of Marblehead. He effectively forgot about First Continental, Laurence Bourbon and his contracts, until late Sunday evening.

There were three messages for him from Bourbon when he finally got back to his computer again. They all said the same thing: Hope everything is all right. Have to return to New York Tuesday. Tied up all day Monday. Must meet Monday evening if you’re interested in a book deal. Around eight, my hotel. Bring contracts; hope you’ll stay late to talk revisions and programming. My apologies to your wife.

Beck pondered his options, which were exactly one—he had to meet with Bourbon and complete the deal. Marian would just have to understand.

She did not understand. ‘His apologies? Why didn’t he just include me in? Doesn’t he want to meet your fabulous wife? What’ve you been telling him about me?”

“I haven’t told him anything about you. I mean, nothing negative. He wants to pick my brain a little about programming. Something I know you find incredibly boring.”

“Not boring—just mystifying. Programming is like… invoking ancient gods. You know—mumbo-jumbo, hoodoo-voodoo, open sesame, and a partridge in a pear tree.”

“Fine, mystifying then. At any rate it’s not something you’d—”

“And why do you let people take advantage of you that way?”

“Take advantage of me? Marian, the man wants to publish my book. He even wants to pay me for it. How in heaven’s name could he take advantage of me? He has a little security problem, that’s all. Some hacker’s been into his e-mail, seems to know whenever J. R. Koenig turns in a novel; he snags it and publishes in on the Internet before it can get to press.”

She whistled. She could do that. It was something he vastly admired; just now he found it annoying. “And you’re so fascinated, you’re going to give this guy free advice.”

“We hardly need the money.”

She shrugged and he read into the shrug all sorts of censure. “Did you ask about Ibrahim X?”

“He had nothing to do with that, personally.”

“His house still published the book.”

Beck got up from the sofa they shared and headed for his office. “I have some work to do.”

“Avoidance tactic,” she called after him. “That’s cheap, Beckett. Really cheap. Ruby says—”

“I’m getting damn tired of what Ruby says,” he muttered.

“I heard that.” She got up and followed him from the room, something she never did during their rare arguments. But then, he never swore. “You never swear,” she accused him. “What’s gotten into you? And why this sudden antipathy toward Ruby?”

Beck flopped down in the chair behind his desk and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I don’t know what’s gotten into me. I’m tired. I’m keyed up. I’m on the verge of maybe publishing something—”

“Well, hell, if publishing something’s going to make you behave like a witch with sore tits, I’m not sure I want you to get published.”

He looked at her, balefully, he hoped. He’d never looked at anyone balefully before, so his face wasn’t quite sure what it felt like. “Maybe that’s the problem, Marian. Maybe you don’t want me to get published… for reasons known only to yourself.”

She turned and left the room, leaving him free to make whatever late-night dinner plans he desired. He dropped Bourbon an e-mail at the Sheraton confirming the engagement, and dove into his government project files.

It was very late when he finally crawled into bed—or very early, depending on how one looked at it. He was frustrated. He wanted to be writing fiction, not noodling computer code, and the effort to keep his mind on his work left him irritable and sapped. Yet, when he’d switched to a piece of short fiction around one A.M., he’d quickly discovered that guilt was just as debilitating a disease as frustration.

He gave up at about 1:30 and rolled onto his side of the bed, perching there horizontally as if he were sleeping on the edge of a cliff. Marian did not, as was her habit, trespass onto his dream turf and he did not trespass onto hers. They slept the entire night on either side of an imaginary line that bisected their mattress with perfect parity.

She was gone when he awoke in the morning, having evidently risen before the alarm went off and disabled the system. It was a cheap and childish thing to do and made Beck ten minutes late for his first class. He was determined to get even, which was strange. Halfway through the afternoon, he realized he’d left his computer’s memory core at home. That was also strange. He swore he’d put it into his briefcase just as he’d done every morning for the last five years, but it wasn’t there when he opened the case, and in its place was a copy of Voice from a Burning Bush. Obviously Marian’s work. Fuming further, he went home to get the core.

Ruby’s car was in front of the house when he got there. His lip curled in distaste. He had always liked Marian’s business partner, but lately he’d come to realize how much she reminded him of a pit bull in a Christian Dior suit. The image was funny. He was almost laughing by the time he entered the house through the kitchen door. The women were nowhere in sight, but he could hear their voices. Probably haggling over some piece of wallpaper—should the Feinmans have a nice rose pattern or Navajo white with a holographic life-scene? He slipped into his office and got the core from where Marian had left it in a potted plant; he caught the obvious symbology. God, but she was unsubtle.

Core in hand, he headed back out into the kitchen, reaching it just as Marian and Ruby did. The two women were lounging along side-by-side, arms about each other, eyes locked in an intimate smile. He stopped and stared at them staring back at him. Marian started to pull away from Ruby, but the other woman held her fast. Beck’s blood felt like liquid nitrogen. This could not possibly be happening. Marian was completely and unrepentantly heterosexual. He’d have bet his life on it.

“Hi, Beck,” said Ruby, her brown eyes amused. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“Oh, dear,” said Marian, and put her hands to her mouth. Marian never said, “Oh, dear.” “Oh, shit,” maybe. “Oh, damn,” maybe. But never “Oh, dear.” What had this woman done to his wife?

“Wh-wh-what… ?” he stammered.

Ruby shrugged, glanced at Marian, then smiled—no, grinned—at Beck.

“Caught in the act,” she said. “Or nearly so.”

Marian giggled and shrugged. “Sorry, Beck.”

The tableau froze just like that—hung, like a bad piece of spaghetti code. Reality.sys corrupted, read a tiny monitor in Beck’s head. Reboot universe, Y/N? Somewhere in the room, a persistent, rhythmic beeping started. The microwave, he thought. Who turned on the microwave?

Marian opened her mouth. “The time is seven A.M.,” she said. “The time is seven A.M. Coffee has been brewed. Instructions?”

The scene dissolved in a foggy special effect and Beck found himself staring at sunlight filtering in through the sliding glass door that gave onto the loft’s balcony. “The time is seven A.M.,” the house repeated. “Coffee has been brewed. Instructions?”

Beck sat up, the dream clinging to the inside of his head like mildew. He shook it. A futile gesture. “Where’s Marian?” he asked.

“Marian has left the house,” said the house.

Which meant she was still mad at him. He thought about calling her, but did not. He got up, showered, dressed, ate a meager breakfast and went to school. After his second lecture, when he realized he had forgotten to bring his computer core, his stomach tied itself in a double granny. He would not go home. Instead, he called the house from a terminal in his office at the school and asked it to turn on his desktop and download the files he needed. On the verge of breaking the connection, he hesitated. Skin clammy, stomach protesting, he asked, “House, where is Marian?”

“Marian is home,” said the house.

He hesitated long enough to have the house computer prompt him. “Instructions?”

“Is she alone?”

“No. Ruby Wilson is also in the house.”

He cut the connection, checked the time and left the campus. Obviously his dream was, if not prophetic, at least a subliminal message from himself to himself about the state of Marian’s relationship with Ruby. He, who confronted nothing that could be avoided, would confront them.

Marian’s minivan sat in the driveway, its nether regions full of carpet and drapery samples. He rounded the house and cut through the garden, gliding up the back steps and noiselessly opening the kitchen door. “I don’t believe it,” he said.

The two women were seated at the kitchen table, coffee in hand, poring over the flat display of an electronic drafting pad. Their heads came up in unison.

Marian frowned. “What’s wrong, Beck?”

“How can you ask me that?” He gestured with both hands. “The two of you… together… here.”

They exchanged a look.“And?” prompted Ruby. “What’s unusual about that?”

“Nothing, now that I think of it. Dear God, you’re always together like this. Why didn’t I see it?”

“See what?” asked Marian.

“You two are lovers.”

The two of them gaped at him, then Ruby threw back her head and laughed. When Marian joined her, Beckett turned and let himself out the way he’d come.

Beck, very pointedly, did not answer any communication from Marian for the rest of the day. He went downtown well in advance of his dinner appointment with Bourbon. To while away the hours, he availed himself of the hotel bar, got out a borrowed notebook computer and tried to write. He began drinking lattes around six, and had had four of them by the time Laurence Bourbon spotted him and came over to say hello. There was another man with him, a tall, thin fellow with an amazing tan and gleaming black hair, who he introduced as Zev Darren, an art director at Sefton.

They dined in Bourbon’s suite, and Darren captivated Beckett with talk of book covers. After dinner, the art director was called to his computer to answer some urgent e-mail. Beck turned over his signed contracts to Laurence Bourbon.

“No questions?” Bourbon asked.

Beck, lounging in a futurist’s idea of a recliner with a cup of cappuccino in hand, wagged his head, feeling remarkably relaxed considering the stress of the day and the sheer amount of caffeine he had consumed. “But I believe you had something to ask me.”

Bourbon smiled. “Indeed.” He leaned forward on his sofa. “This cyber-crook really has me baffled. Are there any traps I could lay for him—any lockouts I could devise—that would keep him from breaking and entering?”

Beck nodded and yawned. “I don’t know if I can explain them to you, though.”

Bourbon frowned. “Well, I am somewhat of a hacker, myself—an amateur, certainly, but I think I might understand. Still… could I record our conversation? What I don’t understand, I’m sure one of our programmers could.”

Beck agreed, and Bourbon got his recorder and popped in a tiny optical disk. He grinned in a way that belied his sophistication, the telltale hacker-gleam in his eye, and said, “I really appreciate this, Beckett.”

In that moment they achieved rapport. Laurence Bourbon asked questions, and Beck answered them enthusiastically. It was easy stuff, but it got Larry (Beck found it easy to think of him as “Larry” suddenly) sitting on the edge of his seat. Beck felt like doing the same, but no matter how much internal enthusiasm he generated for the subject matter, he couldn’t seem to get his body to reflect it. Zev Darren, he noticed, had no interest in hacker-babble. He had evidently finished with his e-mail and was immersed in a computer game, his face half hidden by a VR helm. Not unlike Marian, Beck thought, Darren obviously saw the computer as an entertainer. He leaned back in his chair and chattered on.

When he left the Sheraton sometime after midnight, Beck was tired but exhilarated. He had a contract in his pocket; his novel would be published within the next year. In the elevator, he paused to savor the signing, but found the memory imprecise and hazy. Despite the virgin daiquiris and cappuccinos, he’d come close to dozing several times during the evening; exhaustion had robbed him of his moment of glory. He blamed Marian, who, after all, had caused him to lose sleep.

Well, he’d sleep tonight—or rather, this morning. He checked his watch as he crossed the lobby: 12:22. Small wonder the place was subdued. He glanced toward the concierge. There was no one in attendance. There was no one in the lobby at all, in fact. He shrugged as the brass-and-glass doors slid open before him, and stepped out onto the sidewalk. It clacked back at him as if he wore taps on the heels of his shoes. He glanced down at his feet; the concrete gleamed a grooved black, like obsidian scored with a finetoothed comb. He looked up. Gone was the city street, the cars, the buildings, the street lamps, the painted curbing, the traffic signals. There were, in fact, no intersections for traffic signals to preside over. The glossy surface beneath him curved away to the right and left in a flat arc and, while the Sheraton s bulk still loomed comfortingly behind him, the rest of Boston had vanished.

Beck could have fled back into the hotel, but he didn’t; curiosity had gotten the better of more sensible fear. He moved forward, toward the center of the curving track and a circular red patch with a tall steel pole in the middle of it. As he crossed the odd tarmac toward the shaft, it occurred to him to wonder what light source allowed him to see either color or form. He could see none. The sky was an unrelieved, light-sucking black with not so much as a star to brighten it. Despite that, the shiny spindle gleamed sofdy in its field of bright, unambiguous red.

Heels in the black, toes in the red, Beck put hands on his knees and peered down. Letters stared back at him. The letters formed words and the words formed a recognizable phrase: THE PLANETS—Holst. The score, directionless, ambient, now oozed out at him from some unseen source.

Beckett Hodge straightened and gazed right and left. He was standing, he realized, on an immense record album. Not a CD or an OD, but a titanic, archaic, vinyl platter. He turned and made his way toward the outer edge of the record, discovering the source of the light. At the turntable’s rim, softly glowing walls rose into a haze of ambient light. As Beck tried to decide whether he should have noticed this feature of the place before, the turntable began to move.

He allowed it to carry him along away from the familiarity of the hotel. He had come to the inevitable conclusion that he was asleep and dreaming, and that, dreaming, he was exploring his own subconscious. He knew a moment of intense embarrassment at the realization that wherever his mind was, his body was still in Larry Bourbon’s suite in a shameful state of repose.

He was hearing “Mars,” now and hummed along tunelessly, watching the glowing, featureless walls move imperceptibly by. Curious. How can one know one is in motion if one cannot observe the evidence of motion?

As “Mars” continued to play, Beck noticed changes in his environment. The album beneath his feet was now carrying him toward a golden hoop that protruded from the glowing wall some yards ahead at a height of about twenty feet. The hoop, like the walls, seemed to gleam with its own light. It was turned on edge, its open circle facing him. He thought of brass rings and carousels, which were not unlike turntables in their basic design. It was a consistency that both delighted and comforted him. Approaching the hoop, he wondered if he could manipulate the dream plane.

That train of thought derailed when he noticed a mist gathering around the golden circle. It seemed to issue from nowhere, surrounding the ring, flowing through it, then lowering itself toward the turntable. Obvious symbology. His particular brass ring was the book contract he had just signed; the mist was something that attempted to obscure it from him.

As he was pondering the mist, the turntable slowed perceptibly and a wire basket filled with soccer balls appeared to his right along the wall. Beck started to analyze exactly how the basket had appeared and what it might mean, then decided, instead, to accept the playful nature of the dream. He reached into the basket as he passed by it, fished out one of the balls and lobbed it through the hoop, expecting to miss. As this was a dream, he did not miss; the shot was perfect, soaring through the ring without touching any part of its gleaming rim. If only he might have done that in high school.

Beck laughed and turned to get another ball. The basket was gone. A tone sounded—like a crystal goblet struck with a mallet. Overhead, the mist sucked away into the noplace it had come from and the hoop went dark. The turntable picked up speed. Beck knew this without knowing how he knew it. There was no breeze, the walls gave up nothing but diffused light; he simply knew.

Another ring appeared high on the curving wall ahead. A basket of balls awaited his approach. This time, the turntable didn’t slow, but continued on at a leisurely pace. Beck snagged a soccer ball and put it through the hoop with pinpoint accuracy.

Perhaps it was the sixth hoop or the seventh at which Beck decided he no longer wanted to play. He was bored and the turntable was moving more briskly; he wasn’t convinced he could make the shot. He wasn’t convinced he cared enough to try. He approached the hoop, lazily dribbling the soccer ball off the grooved surface beneath his feet. When he had bypassed the point at which he usually threw, the turntable slowed. He continued to dribble the ball, glancing toward the center of the record. The cut was “Uranus.” He could no longer see the spindle.

Movement above him drew his eyes back to the great golden ring. The vapor that had surrounded it seconds before was sinking toward him. An icy cold prickled over his skin. The vapor was malevolent; he was absolutely certain of it. Not poisonous, not toxic, but malevolent. In the instant it touched his face, he loosed the soccer ball, hurling it in a soaring arc through the golden hoop. The vapor was gone in a breath, leaving behind the irrational conviction that it had almost sucked his soul out of his body.

He did not tempt the vapor at the next hoop or the next. He sent the soccer ball through unerringly, still uncertain how a man for whom sport was torture was able to do such sporty things. As the bright ball cleared the ninth hoop accompanied by the strains of “Pluto,” the world around Beck changed. The turntable glided to a halt and to his right, in the curving wall, a doorway spilled light out onto the grooved, black plane.

Beck glanced around. Pluto. Unlike the others, this cut was oddly disturbing. Beck had little time to decide why. As he hovered in the open door, all light disappeared from the turntable as if sucked up by a vacuum. He stepped through the door.

He stood in a corridor, at the end of which he could vaguely make out a staircase. If he recalled his Freud correctly, climbing that would be symbolic of having sex. He wondered if the nights without a willing Marian were beginning to take their toll. He chuckled. The hoops and balls would no doubt also count as expressions of sexual desire in Freud’s book. How wonderful and complex was the language of dreams.

Before him the floor of the corridor lit up. It was a simple pattern of blue-and-white tiles that seemed to be pulsing in a random sequence. He stared at the checkerboard momentarily. It brought to mind his grandmother’s kitchen floor. A floor on which he used to play his own peculiar version of hopscotch. As he recalled, grandma’s kitchen floor hadn’t blinked on and off.

Another memory was invoked, oddly, of an episode of Dr. Who in which the good Doctor(s) (five of them, as he recalled) was confronted by such a puzzle. It had been booby-trapped with a laser beam that would zap anyone unwary enough to wander onto the wrong square. Beck crouched to watch the play of light across the tiles. The Doctor’s solution to the puzzle had lain in computing the value of pi. He rose. Pi. There were nine rows of tiles. 3.14159… The digits couldn’t stand for rows of tiles, but they might stand for columns.

In the first row of tiles, a white lit up, three tiles from the left edge of the checkerboard. Beck moved to stand in front of the tile and waited. When it lit up again, he stepped on it. A tone sounded, the tile blinked several times in rapid succession and then stayed on. He looked down at his feet. There was just enough room for both of them on the tile.

“OK,” he said aloud. “I’ll play your silly game.” He watched the first tile in the next row for a flash of light. When it came, he missed it, because the tile was a deep blue. He waited nearly a full minute (or so he thought) until the square lit up again. He stepped on it this time and was rewarded as before with the tone. As the first, the tile stayed lit.

It was easy after that—merely a game of waiting and leaping. In due time, he found himself in the very center of the corridor. There the pattern made an abrupt change. Both feet on a tile of blazing white, Beck stared in consternation at the floor ahead of him. From where he stood to the suddenly distant staircase, the tiles formed an expanse of strangely patterned brown and muted gold. Here was a group of three gold tiles, here a group of two, here a single tile. The squares themselves were smaller, too, leaving room for only one foot at a time to occupy them.

Recognition made Beck chuckle. He’d viewed similar patterns of tiles in myriad public men’s rooms. He waited, but none of the tiles before him lit up. After a moment of study, it seemed to him that the gold tiles did seem to form an irregular, but navigable, path from here to there, if one had a reasonably long stride and was willing to play hopscotch. The only problem was the size of the squares. Dreamer’s instinct told him that stepping over the edge of one was a Bad Thing.

He was contemplating his first move when he noticed a slight dimming in the corridor. A glance over his shoulder revealed the reason—behind him, the lighted tiles were winking out, darkness marching toward him. He had the creeping feeling that it would not be very pleasant to find out what happened when the square he was standing on went dark. He glanced ahead. About three feet away was a set of two gold tiles set about two feet apart. Not a bad split. He leapt.

He landed, the “reward” tone sounded and the gold squares beneath his feet blazed with brilliance. At that moment, he realized he was wearing sneakers instead of the black leather ankle boots he’d started out with. His dream was nothing if not accommodating. Pleased with himself, he made another selection and hopped again. The third leap was harder, leaving him teetering on one foot. In searching for his next landing pad, he lost his balance and toppled forward, only barely managing to land with his left foot on one square and his right hand on another, his opposite arm and leg flailing for balance. Gingerly, he moved his free foot to the square where his hand rested. He came close to falling again, but somehow managed to keep his balance and work his way upright.

He now saw the wisdom of plotting his moves in advance. He negotiated the remainder of the corridor in carefully planned hops, skips and jumps. The pattern took an interminable amount of time to complete. Beck was glad he was dreaming; in real life, he’d be close to collapse.

From the bottom of the staircase, he took a look back at the field of tiles he’d traversed. The golden tiles, now ablaze, seemed to form a stylized question mark. As he watched the tiles began to dim, just as the previous set had done. He turned his attention to the next obstacle—the staircase.

It was of aged-looking wood—mahogany, Beck guessed. It even smelled of age, the incense of mildew’ and ancient varnish. It was a pleasant odor and it reminded him forcefully of his childhood. A wash of reminiscence came, giving the staircase a time and place in Beck’s existence. Like the checkered kitchen floor, this came from his grandparents’ house in Swampscott.

Finding his grandparents’ staircase in a dream tickled him. He’d loved that staircase. It had given him hours of pleasure as he practiced climbing it without making a sound. This was difficult at best, for the stair was full of the creaks and moans and complaints of advancing age. He paused a moment to savor the memory, trying to recall the formula that would take him safely to the second-floor landing, for to call forth sound from the venerable beast was to loose gremlins in the house that would swarm the stair and carry little boys off to “bedlam.”

Grinning, Beck began the climb. Center tread, far left, tar right, step on the knot hole, skip two by climbing the banister, right of center, center, leap to the landing.

“Ha!” Beck exulted and turned back to give the staircase a triumphant glance. It had been replaced by a slick expanse of oily-looking metal. A slide. A means of escape? A pitfall? Bemused, Beck checked his forward trail, which opened up, not into the second floor of his grandparents’ house, but into a sunny meadow of waving ultra-green grass, teeming flowers and chirping, Disney-esque bluebirds. The sky was at once pink and blue, the sun literally smiled down at him, and clouds looked very much like cotton candy. Such scenes populated uncounted refrigerator doors.

A circle of woodlands surrounded the place tiny, bright orange fruit fairly glowing amid the dark foliage of hip-high bushes. Clown noses. Beck thought, and was struck with the absurd image of clowns skipping through the woods picking baskets full of noses. Picking their noses. The pun doubled him over with laughter. And Marian said he had no sense of the absurd.

He wondered if he could bring her here, tried and was rewarded with a “moo.” He straightened. Aside from the overly cheerful birds, the meadow was populated by exactly one black-and-white cow which munched the terrifyingly green grass ruminatively, as it gazed at him through immense, chocolaty bovine eyes. A bright golden cow bell hung from a blue cord around its neck. This was not Marian. There was nothing remotely bovine about Marian.

OK. Beck thought. I’ll bite. He walked over to the cow, scaring up a score of the bluebirds. They circled and chirped like something out ol an old Warner Brothers cartoon. “Hello,” he said to the cow, because after all, dreaming is no excuse for discourtesy.

The cow gazed back, opened her mouth and said, “Watch this.” She proceeded to rise up on her hind legs, produce three of the outrageously orange fruit, and juggle them. She was actually quite good, Beck thought.

After about thirty seconds of juggling, the cow caught one orange globe between her front hooves, then snapped the other two out of midair and gulped them down whole. She came back to all fours, belched and shook her head, ringing the golden bell. “What did I just do?” she asked. “You have thirty seconds or four guesses, whichever comes first.”

“Isn’t that supposed to be three guesses?”

“That’s wishes. Three wishes. Do I look like a genie?” She didn’t give him time to answer. “First guess.”

“You… juggled clown noses?”

“Wrong. Three more guesses. Fifteen seconds.”

“Oh, sorry. Tangerines. You juggled tangerines.”

“Is that your answer? Juggle tangerines?” She rolled her eyes. “Wrong again. But you’re getting warmer.” In the cotton-candy clouds over the cow’s piebald head, a slot-machine face appeared, its rollers spinning like crazy. The one farthest to the right stopped, showing the word “tangerines.” He assumed that he’d score a jackpot if he got the right answer. It occurred to him to wonder what he’d score if he didn’t. “What happens if I don’t guess the riddle?”

“You lose.”

“And then what?”

“You’re out.”

“Out. Out of the dream, you mean? I wake up?”

“What makes you think you’re asleep?”

“The fact that I don’t usually hold conversations with spotted cows in Technicolor meadows or watch them juggle clown noses.”

The cow sighed. It was a deep sound and seemed to issue from her voluminous belly. “Do you need a clue? I’m allowed to give one more clue.”

Beck nodded.

“Watch.” The cow turned her brown eyes on the fringe of woodlands where a man in a pith helmet and bush outfit carefully stalked something among the foliage with a large, cartoon butterfly net. Beck couldn’t see what he was pursuing so raptly. He started to ask the cow, but she shushed him.

The hunter tiptoed up to one of the bushes, then leapt forward with a cry and took a swipe at it with his net. Two of the orange globes fell into the webbing. He swiftly scampered away with them. The cow turned her increasingly mournful eyes back to Beck. “Well?”

“He, um. Shoot. Ah, capture… net… um…” Beck opted for the literal approach. “Bushwhack two tangerines?”

In the slot machine another window braked to display the number “2.” “Ooh,” said the cow. “Close, but no cigar.”

“What’s close?” Beck asked, but the cow merely looked away across the meadow, toward the bushes. “Bushwhacked was close?”

She sighed again, jiggling her udder.

The answer came to Beck with the sudden recollection of a story a colleague had told him about the strange combinations of words her students would produce during classroom exercises in a language class she had taught. He knew it was the answer—it was his dream, and his own memory had provided it. “Ambush two tangerines,” he said. Overhead, the final bar rolled into place and a loud bell sounded.

“Fuck it, I quit,” announced the cow, and disappeared along with the pink/blue sky, cotton candy clouds and clown-nose bushes. In their place the violently green sward sprouted a graveyard complete with ravens, crows, ornate listing headstones, and a gleaming white mortuary.

Beck was momentarily taken aback. Why a graveyard? He’d answered the riddle correctly; why this presentiment of doom? The place was eerie, but familiar, and he felt more memories pressing for release. He made his way to the mortuary.

The foyer was empty. He moved into a display room where a fleet of new caskets were arrayed, tops open like convertibles in a car lot. On the opposite side of the display room, he could see the steel-and-glass doors that led to the nether realms. He certainly hoped his dream journey wouldn’t take him there.

He turned and peered across the foyer. A chapel—the carved wooden doors bore a representation of the Solar System—nine planets arranged around the central Orb. Each planet was engraved with a religious symbol: a Star of David, a bowl of fire, a lotus, a cross, an Evam, a yin-yang, a five-pointed star, a star and crescent, a nine-pointed star. He moved to the door, put his hand on the handle and pulled. It was locked. He glanced at the Solar System again. The planets, with their religious symbols, were out of order. Another puzzle. After a moment of thought, Beck rearranged the planets in their engraved orbits—beginning with Mercury and its nine-pointed star, and ending with Pluto, bearing the Evam. Pluto. The ninth planet was Pluto. But it hadn’t been discovered when Holst wrote The Planets—the music he had heard on the turntable, he suddenly realized, was a symphonic rendition of the Mickey Mouse Club theme, music Beck had always associated with the immortal rodent and his dog. Nine planets, nine religious symbols, nine hoops, nine everything.

Teetering on the verge of recognition, Beck entered the chapel. At the altar in front of a closed and locked casket stood a clown in a black suit. He had blue hair, a tangerine nose and a pair of red, floppy shoes that looked incongruous with the natty attire. His face bore a half-mournful, half-manic expression. When he saw Beck, his bright red lips stretched into something that bore a closer resemblance to rigor mortis than a smile. He produced a clipboard out of the ether.

A manic-depressive clown, Beck thought. Oh great. Clowns had never amused him as a child. They had given him the willies. He now realized they still gave him the willies. He’d often thought they’d make ideal scarecrows—or rather “scarekids”—for people who had flower beds or pools they wanted to keep the neighbors’ progeny out of. He steeled himself and went to the altar to confront the clown-mortician.

“You are…?” the clown asked lugubriously.

“Beckett Hodge.”

“Beckett Hodge, you must answer four questions for me, before you may proceed.”

Beck nodded, not at all sure he wanted to proceed. Right now what he really wanted was to wake up, even if it meant having to go through the embarrassment of explaining to Laurence Bourbon and Zev Darren why he’d fallen asleep in the middle of a conversation.

“Listen carefully,” said the clown, “and finish this sentence.” He glanced down at the clipboard and read: “Touch not the cat—”

“But with a glove,” said Beck automatically.

The clown smiled and checked off something on his clipboard. At the foot of the casket, a latch popped open. Beck jumped.

“Now,” said the clown, “complete this: He was like a giant on dry land—”

“And… and like a silkie in the sea.” Another check mark was drawn, another latch popped open and an icy shaft of recognition speared Beck’s brain. He knew these sequences. And he knew them for reasons other than their association with childhood games or television shows he had watched.

“By the prickling of my thumbs,” the clown read.

Beck backed away from him. Memories had been converted to binary expressions and coded into a targeting series, and eight pattern-matching sequences.

“By the prickling of my thumbs,” the clown repeated.

Memories had built a nine-level security system for the DOD.

Beck turned and fled.

Behind him the clown said tonelessly: “Abort. Restart sequence. Touch not the cat—”

The graveyard metamorphosed as Beck crossed it, back into a meadow full of bluebirds, butterflies and tangerine bushes. The cow did not look up as he flew past her, but he thought he heard her say, “Abort. Reset.”

The meadow had faded by the time he reached the top of the staircase/ slide. It was still a slide. He threw himself down it, landing at the bottom on his behind. Scrambling to his feet, he confronted the corridor of tiles. Both sections of the course were now just ordinary-looking floors. He took them without so much as a hop, skip or jump and came out onto the giant turntable. It rolled away and to his right, inexorably. If he was where he thought he was, the situation demanded that he exit this scene just as he had entered it. While the eight pattern-matching segments of the program were reset upon completion or exit, the initial nine-layer “hacker trap” was not. It could be tripped as easily by a clumsy exit as it was by a clumsy entrance. Beck had no desire to find out what it meant to be caught by his own fail-safes.

He stepped out onto the turntable. Not content to let it simply carry him along, he trotted along with the rotation, eyes open for the hoops. His mind churned. How the hell could he be here? Was this a drug-induced dream, or was it more real than that? Was it being monitored? The image of Zev Darren playing a VR game in the corner of Bourbon’s suite came to him with the force of a blow. Could that be it? Could he literally be inside the DOD program? He had constructed the DOD scenes with specialized programming Gear—had seen them as programming objects. But interpreted by a VR system—provided one could be made compatible—with his own imagination in control….

He shook his head as if that might rattle some answers loose from the inside of his virtual skull. The Who and the Why were obvious, the How conceivable. The question was: what would prompt a fiction editor and an art director from a major publishing house to get involved in terrorism and espionage?

He hurried to the first basket of soccer balls and hurled one through a hoop before the Ghost routine could intercept him. Timing. This part of the program was all timing. He worried that he might do better if he didn’t know what those bright hoops and balls represented: clever traps and one-way viruses that would backwash into the inept hacker’s system—in this case, his mind. Beck chafed as he negotiated the nine hoop stations, returning at last to where he had entered the program.

The “Sheraton” stood alone on a barren corner, symbol of Beck’s connection with the real world—a world where Laurence Bourbon and Zev Darren waited for him to unlock the gates to hell.

He stood inside his own creation—a creation where virtual cows juggled tangerines and where manic clowns presided over coffins full of death—and pondered explosive things. What he needed was a break program that would shatter the external connection—a virtual bomb. He floundered for a moment, trying to decide how to create a bomb in this impossible universe. Then he laughed at himself. Impossible it might be, but it was his universe and ultimately obeyed his divine decree.

He patted the breast pocket of his suit. His wallet, a pen, his pager. He took out the pager and examined it. It was as much a computer input/output device as his keyboard or Gear. He thumbed it on and started to speak into it. But wait—what if his words were audible to those who had put him here? He had to take the chance, he supposed. He held the pager to his lips and whispered. “Break routine… uh, ‘Sheraton.’ Delay fifteen seconds from activation. Activate on command destruct.’ Routine: Induce general protection fault at address…” He glanced up at the comer of the hotel and almost grinned—a bronze plaque gleamed dully on the virtual wall. “Address 008D:0015.”

Fine, but that might not be enough. The system had three overt inputs, two covert ones. Five in all. Two of these were set up for Gear protocols. His vicarious hackers could be using either, but if he shut down both, the system alarm would engage, which could cause… well, panic for one thing. A military panic was not a pretty thing. He’d have to make a choice. The covert link made the most sense. It would be accessed at the installation only in an emergency, so the hacker-spies could expect little chance of interruption. Beck completed the routine with a fatal interrupt to the covert Gear device, wondering how long he’d been here and if Marian had tried to reach him.

He entered the virtual hotel lobby cautiously, as if Bourbon or Darren could be expected to pop out of nowhere to intercept him. He didn’t think they had the technology to do that—to enter this dream world completely—and doubted they could even monitor him precisely. He wondered which of them was the programmer. Maybe they both were. Maybe neither of them had anything to do with publishing. But then how had they intercepted his manuscript? He remembered what Bourbon had said about novels being lifted electronically off editors’ desks. Had that happened to his?

He moved directly to the elevator core, chose the center shaft and punched the “up” button. The doors slid apart. “Destruct,” he told the pager, lobbed it into the elevator car and ran, thinking of Marian. He was still thinking of her when a flash of blinding light enveloped him and lifted him into the non-existent sky.

“I thought you weren’t speaking to him,” Ruby said.

Sometimes, Marian thought, Ruby could be impossibly dense. “Not speaking isn’t a synonym for not caring, Rube. It’s two A.M. He hasn’t answered his pager and Mr. Bourbon hasn’t answered his phone.”

“So, they’re out celebrating the book deal.”

“Until two A.M.?”

Ruby shrugged. “Why not? We’re commiserating over his thick-headedness until two A.M.”

“You don’t know Beck the way I do. He would never stay out so late without calling me. Even when I know his schedule and he knows I know his schedule, he calls.”

“Uh-huh.” Ruby sipped coffee, steam coating her glasses. “Even if he’s not speaking to you?”

“Especially if he’s not speaking to me. Then guilt takes over. He has to call.” She got up and headed for the kitchen, leaving Ruby camped in front of the fireplace.

Ruby sighed volubly. “Shall I lock up?”

“Whatever.” Mentally, Marian was already on the road, already pulling up to the Sheraton, already leaving her car in the hands of a bleary-eyed valet. Already on her way through the lobby to the elevators.

Fifteen minutes later, when she actually entered the Sheraton’s spacious lobby, she had to take a detour to the concierge—she had absolutely no idea which room Laurence Bourbon was in. As it turned out, he was in one of the Tower suites and would have to issue an invitation to her if she was to go up. Marian decided a good lie was in order.

“My husband had an appointment with Mr. Bourbon this evening and he forgot his heart medicine.” She scrabbled in her fanny pack and produced her own pill case, full of stress tabs, vitamin C and Midol. “He didn’t expect to be this late. He should have had one of these hours ago.” She knit her brow and let her voice sound very slightly frantic.

The concierge called a rather muscular bellman to escort her up (as if she might possibly need to be overpowered). The elevator ride was silent. Marian looked at the ceiling of the car—stained-glass, it clashed with the once-upon-a-time modeme decor of the lobby. The broad corridor that gave onto the Tower suites was Queen Anne. What could they have been thinking?

“He’s stuck.”

“He’s what? What do you mean, he’s stuck?”

Zev Darren turned away from his monitor and pointed at the flashing cursor, which had sat for the past forty-five seconds in the same place in a crude but colorful maze. “Check his pulse rate.”

Bourbon glanced at the tiny screen that displayed Beckett Hodge’s vitals. “It’s up.”

“He’s stressed over something. He may be having trouble with the last stage. Sometimes programmers put randomizers into their routines—sort of a code du jour thing. He may not remember all the different sequences. Damn.” He watched the cursor a moment longer. Watched it until it abruptly blinked out. “Oh, shit.”

It was like something out of a James Bond movie. As Marian knocked repeatedly on the door of Bourbon’s suite with no result, someone within the suite howled. Having no pass card, the beefy bellman opened the locked door with his foot. Marian flung herself through the door. She was hardly prepared for what she saw—Beckett, strapped to a chair, VR Gear on head and hands, with two men hovering over him. One had his hands on his shoulders and was shaking him hard enough to make his teeth rattle.

Marian’s female instincts kicked in. “You sonofabitch! Get your hands off my husband!”

Lawrence Bourbon obeyed without hesitation, while his partner reached for a gun lying holstered on the sofa. The bellman was having none of it.

When he woke, Beck was surprised to be alive and in a hospital room. The room was under military guard and, besides Beck, held two occupants. Marian and Colonel Traynor chatted quietly in one comer. He cleared his throat, drawing their immediate attention.

“Bourbon?” he croaked.

Marian, her eyes still showing concern, afforded him a lopsided grin. “A little early for the hard stuff, isn’t it?”

He shook his head; his brain wobbled. “I mean—”

“I know what you mean. He’s in military custody, courtesy of your ferocious and quick-thinking wife and a burly bellman named Frank. And he’ll stay there for awhile too, thanks to Colonel Traynor and his buddies in the CIA.”

Beck’s eyes shifted automatically to Traynor’s face. The movement hurt. “They—they—” He choked, prompting Marian to give him a sip of water. Throat wetted, he ploughed on. “They linked me to the ICBM security system using some kind of specialized VR rig. They wanted me to crack it for them—my own code…”

The colonel was nodding. “Yes, we suspected as much when we saw the system. It was… tremendously sophisticated. We had no idea a high-end ‘off-the-rack’ system could be modified to that extent.”

“But why? An editor and an art director? Why?”

“Money. But people aren’t always what they seem. Oh, Mr. Bourbon is an editor, all right. A minor, poorly paid line editor. But Zev Darren is no art director. He’s a computer expert lately in the employ of Shalom/Salaam and Ibrahim X. In simple terms, a terrorist.”

Beck glanced at Marian. She was looking away, her face wearing the patented Marian Whaley-Hodge “Itoldyouso” look. The blood drained out of his head. If he hadn’t been lying down, he would have swooned. “Ibrahim X?”

“Bourbon line edited his best-selling manuscript,” said Traynor. “Mr. X evidently felt his position in the publishing industry could be advantageous. Unfortunately, he was wrong; Bourbon was a poor choice of accomplice. Zev Darren is a professional mercenary, at least in the realm of hacking, but Larry Bourbon is only a greedy amateur. The threat of a treason charge rattled just about everything loose. Your editor friend got swept up in the romance and intrigue of it all. He simply wasn’t prepared to be caught.” He gave Beck a sideways glance. “Honestly, professor, how close did they come to breaking it?”

Beck wetted his lips. “Too close. I was deep inside the program, at the last security protocols, when I realized… sort of… what was going on—that someone had set me up to breach my own program.”

The colonel’s alarm showed as tiny white brackets on each side of his mouth. “But you stopped them. I assume you recognized your code.”

Beck closed his eyes. “No… I recognized my childhood.”

“Excuse me?”

Beck smiled wanly. “You would’ve had to be there.”

Later, with Traynor gone, Marian sat next to him on the bed and held his hand. Her scent struck him softly. He opened one eye. “You were right, all along. Bourbon was connected to Ibrahim. In ways I couldn’t have imagined. I seem to have an imagination deficiency. Not a good thing for a guy who wants to write science fiction.”

“What was it like in there?”

“Weird. Like being in a dream. Or down a rabbit hole. But it was my rabbit hole—which is why I finally recognized the… the programming. It was all from my childhood. Games I played, shows I watched, pictures I drew, riddles I made up. Patterns in floor tiles, staircases, cow pastures. But it was the clown. The clown in the funeral chapel. That was what did it.”

Marian grimaced. “Imagination deficiency, huh? Hell, I’m not even going to ask.”

“Aren’t you at least going to say, ‘I told you so’?”

“Do I need to?”

He shook his head. A sigh, deep and silent, broke over him as a realization struck.

Somehow Marian heard it and squeezed his hand. “What?”

“The book. Sefton never really wanted the book.”

“Maybe they did, and it gave Bourbon a legitimate excuse to contact you.”

“Maybe. But it’s more likely I got duped. 1 let my naivete compromise the secrets I hold for my government.” He closed his eyes again. “But the worst thing is what they led me to believe about you and Ruby. I think they must have drugged me, planted suggestions in my head that I couldn’t trust you… and other things. They wanted you out of the way, I guess.”

Marian’s mouth curled. “So, that’s what that was about. And that was worse than almost giving away the deed to Uncle Sam’s farm? Sweet, but silly, Beck. There was a hell of a lot at stake in those silos. On the bright side, I think this little episode has given Colonel Traynor and his fellows reason to consider an alternative to hiding loaded guns.”

Beck looked out the window where the Sun had risen on a brilliant day. “Funny. I guess I turned out to be a secret agent after all. So secret, even I didn’t know it. Secret agent double-oh-one—binary spy.”

“You could write a book about it.”

“Yeah, I could. But, who’d buy it?”

There were, in fact, several publishers standing in the electronic queue in Beck’s e-mail box when news of the virtual break-in surfaced and Ibrahim X was arrested on charges of masterminding it. Beck had his pick of offers, his shiny new agent finally accepting the high bid from a large publisher most widely known for its techno-thrillers.

Beck was pleased, without being ecstatic. He had a book contract, but it was non-fiction—just one more real-world title on cutting-edge programming by Beckett Hodge, destined one day to reside on the shelves of universities and computer super-stores everywhere. Still, given the sensational nature of the subject matter, it would almost certainly arrive there by way of the AT-T bestseller list.

At least that was the picture until the Pentagon intervened in the form of an apologetic Colonel Traynor, who appeared in the Hodge living room one evening and parked himself in Beck’s favorite chair.

“I’m sorry, Professor Hodge, but we simply can’t allow you to publish this book. It would reveal too much about our security system and its…”

“Vulnerability?” Marian suggested.

“I was going to say, its nature.”

Beck didn’t care what he had been going to say. All that registered was that the brass ring had dodged him once again.

“But if you prevent it from being published—” Marian objected.

“The public would suspect a cover-up,” Traynor finished for her. “And they’d be right. That’s why we’re willing to allow the book to be published provided two conditions are met.”

Beck raised his head. “Which are?”

“First, that it be published in a vastly altered form. You would have to fictionalize the account. Change names and circumstances, alter the order of events, make up different riddles.”

Amazement settled on Beck like a woolly cloud. “But anyone who followed the news would know—”

“Ah, no. You see, that’s the second condition—you have to wait.”

“Wait? How long?”

“Three years… or the length of time it takes for you to completely redesign your security system.”

Beck sagged back into his chair. “Completely?”

“You’ll have to design two new systems, actually—one for the warheads and one for the delivery system… which we’ve decided should be separated by… some distance.”

“But in three years, there may not be a publisher still interested in the story.”

Traynor shrugged. “I’m afraid that’s the only recourse you have, Professor Hodge. We simply can’t allow the story to be published now—not even as fiction.”

Beck nodded. He was still nodding when Traynor was gone.

“You should be happy,” Marian told him. “They’re unloading the ‘gun.’ ”

“I suppose I should be, but I just feel… exhausted… and silly. I was so taken in by Bourbon and his flattery. What made me think I could write fiction? Terry Lance was right; I should stick to what I know.”

Marian made a rude noise. “Terry Lance is a textbook jockey. He wouldn’t know good science fiction if he had a close encounter with it. Besides, you did write fiction. You just wrote it into the national defense system.”

Beck had to laugh, and Marian, who didn’t need to be told why he was laughing, laughed with him. The irony was delicious: He wrote fiction like a programmer and programmed like a science fiction writer.

Mentally, he was still laughing when his head touched the pillow that night. He didn’t know if he could convince a publisher to wait three years for the story—especially a fictionalized version of it—but he did know he would continue to write both programs and fiction. Eventually, he would get them straight.