The Barsoom Project

Chapter Eleven

For twenty-seven minutes Harmony had ignored his personal pager. Cary McGivvon looked at Alex expectantly, her fingers floating above the red button on her keyboard. “Should I try the priority override?”

“No… even Harmony has a personal life. I tell you what.” He moved around behind her, hands resting lightly on her shoulders. “Give me a movement scan. Tell me the last time his personal code passed one of the checkpoints. Let’s be sure he’s still inside the Park.”

She ran the scan. There was a brief flicker of schematics, and the outline of the entire structure of Dream Park appeared in the wall. A sixteen-hundred-acre rotating pie studded with towers and arcs, the skeletal outlines of roller coasters and dropshafts, the single long loop of the Gravity Whip, the facades of thousands of rides, exhibits, “experiences,” shops, stages, mini-hotels, restaurants, tram and train stations, security and information kiosks, and more street vendors than anyone could count. Code colors red, blue, green, and finally executive silver flashed. Thirty-seven hundred and twelve personal checkpoints flashed negative.

“His beeper is still in his office, Griff. He’s inside the grid.”

Alex liked this less by the moment. “Well… why in the world wouldn’t he answer the page…?”

An unpleasant suspicion niggled at the back of his mind. “Get his medivac channel. Get a complete scan.”

Millicent jumped. “Chief… ah, Griff, that’s personal space.”

Cary nodded. “I don’t have clearance for that.”

Alex fished a flat clear-plastic card out of his wallet. “I do. Override it.”

“All right.” She slipped Alex’s card into a narrow slot on her console, and waited a moment as the wall began to fill with alphanumerics. “Well… pulse rate is ninety-eight… it’s erratic, blood pressure high, skin temperature low. He’s very agitated, Griff. Something’s wrong.”

Cary had discreetly omitted mention of Harmony’s alcohol level. It was sky-high.

Alex drummed thick fingers on the desk. “All right, don’t go to priority override. I want to keep this personal until I find out what’s going on around here.”

Millicent raised an eyebrow. “I think I’d better stay here.”

“I think you’re right.”

Harmony’s office was in the Dark Tower, the tallest building in the communications and research complex. Thadeus had been booted up there eight years ago, when Alex was brought in, after a short stint at Cowles Seattle and a longer service in military intelligence.

Considering Harmony’s importance, one might have expected his office door to be larger, the vestibule more ostentatious. It could easily have been the entrance to a secretarial pool.

The scan system showed that Harmony was still in his private quarters, just off his office. Clearly, he didn’t want to be disturbed. Just as clearly, there was no way Alex could honor his wish. All Dream Park executives and personnel above Class 3 were on duty twenty-four hours a day excluding specific vacation time. Get above Class 2 and even that was no protection.

Harmony had accepted the whole bill when he accepted promotion. Not that he was given a choice. In Cowles, as in most major corporations, it was Up or Out.

Harmony still didn’t answer the buzzer. Alex didn’t want to make a stink with the central computer, so he used his priority override card, passed it through the electric scan, answered the vocal scan’s impertinent questions, and waited as the door decided whether or not to slide open for him. It slid.

It was terribly hot in the office. The wall furnace had been turned up to near max.

Harmony was in one of his overstuffed chairs, sitting with his hands wrapped around a glass. His blunt features were heavy and slack. “Alex,” he said, his normally mellifluous tones slurred. The slurring blurred the line between amusement and irritation. “Are you going to stand there, or are you going to come in and pour yourself a drink?”

“Well… I’m still on duty.”

“You’re not on duty. Nobody’s on duty. Goddamit.”

“I am."

“Well, get off duty.”

“I need to talk to you.”

Harmony raised his voice until it shook the room. “I’m not talking to anyone who’s on goddamned duty. You want to talk to me, get off your fucking duty.”

Alex moved to the compact wet bar and mixed himself a scotch and soda; weak, but not quite weak enough to be a token.

He sat down opposite Harmony and waited, watching as the gas flames painted shifting patterns across the vast expanse of his friend’s face. For all the heat, Harmony’s eyes were cold black pits. The telephone rang, and rang. Harmony didn’t answer it.

“They won’t even let you forget.” His voice was unspeakably tired. “They rub your nose in shit, you eat it for them, and they won’t even let you brush your teeth.” Harmony looked at him and said, “Alex, you’ve had good times and bad times. I know you didn’t like sending that McWhirter kid to prison.”

“Well, I’ve been able to do some things for him there. Anyone who can break through my security system is someone I want on my side. Hell, he’s turned Chino into a career college. When he gets out next year he’s got a job waiting for him. I still work with him sometimes.”

“Yeah. That’s okay. I had to do worse than that. I had to turn my back on murder. I knew who the son of a bitch was, and in the end I had to turn around and smile at him.”

“Smile at him?”

The corners of Harmony’s mouth tugged up, hard. Alex supposed that the result had to be called a smile, but in the firelight it looked like something peeled off a jack-o-lantem. “That’s the worst thing in the whole world.” His next drink emptied the glass. He turned it upside down, shook it. “The whole mess started about two years before you came, Alex, in ‘46 or so. We’d had problems around here, some real problems at Dream Park. We’d been so damned successful that we’d had psycho-sclerosis: hardening of the attitudes. Our creative arteries were blocked with administrative fat. Hell! We had it made. Everybody loved Dream Park. We were so damned good, and what was bad was we knew it.

“So we made some bad mistakes. A couple of ninety-milliondollar movies bombed. We tried to push through that Dream Park coproduction deal in the Mediterranean. Remember that synthetic island? Hell, we lost a quarter billion dollars in three years.

“We couldn’t even get the idiots out of here, because half of them were related to Old Man Cowles. Well, to say we were cash poor would be like calling Australia ‘an island in the Pacific.”

“I see,” Alex said, not seeing at all.

Alex watched Harmony study his glass and decide that he really, really didn’t want another just now. “This was all happening at the same time that an interesting new theory was evolving in the Surgeon General’s psychological services office. It really started with the development of the Show Scan system back in the 1970s, the system that old Doug Trumbull created. Superfast film projection, enough frames flashing per second that your brain can’t tell what’s real and what isn’t. The big problem was, not only were the images as real as real, but they were also bigger than life.”

“A ‘hot’ medium,” Griffin offered, struggling to remember an ancient college lecture. “Twentieth-century television was a ‘cool’ medium, because the images were smaller than you.”

“Bingo. When Cowles Industries introduced Interactive Holography, ‘hot’ went ‘supernova.’ They called it ‘Reality Distortion.’ The papers called it ‘Dream Park Syndrome.’ Confusion, nervous exhaustion, memory disorders, the whole lot. Too many people don’t realize that Dream Park techs can make it look even realer than they do. We’re afraid to. Afraid of overloading people. Two thousand years of civilization does not undo a million years of genetics. Rumor has it that the original Haunted Mansion at Old Disneyland was so realistic that people were fainting and vomiting.”

“Story probably grew in the telling.”

“Maybe.” Harmony took a pull at his drink. “The upshot of all of this is that there was a slight but unnerving downward stock market trend for Cowles Industries. As the price dropped, somebody out there was buying it up. Now, at the same time, Cowles management was being raided by corporate headhunters.”

“Hitting us hard?”

“Made Jivaros look like altar boys.”

“Kind of odd that all of this was happening at the same time.”

Harmony smiled sarcastically. “Yes, isn’t it? It was not, in the immortal words of Bartholomew Cubbins, ‘something that had just happened to happen and was not very likely to happen again.’ It was a massively well financed, utterly ruthless takeover bid. Wasn’t even that hard to figure out who. Our Saudi Arabian friend.”

“Fekesh? Kareem Fekesh?”

“The very one. Funded by oil, backed by the same radical assholes who tried to blow up a space shuttle forty years ago, he’s built an empire like few in the twenty-first century. He thrives on destabilization-of people, organizations, countries. Hell, he doesn’t give a shit about OPEC, or Allah, or anything.

“Well, once we knew what was at stake, we were able to kind of circle the wagons, act with a little common sense and foresight. Then it happened-the one thing we’d always been afraid of. It was in the first run of the Fimbulwinter Game.” He paused, noting Alex’s take. “Oh, yes, the same game that’s playing right now in Gaming B, drastically altered, of course. A real gun got in there. People got shot.”

“Oh, shit. How badly?”

“Two down. One badly injured but recovered. One got nailed square in the hooter, dead before he hit the ground.”

Alex drained his glass and headed back to the bar. He was going to need some help with this one.

“We moved the Gamers out and sealed the area. Game ended. The woman who actually pulled the trigger was shattered emotionally. Arrangements were made with her father.” He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together, indicating money. “He was a real winner-didn’t give a damn about her, thought she was from Venus anyway. ‘All that sci fi drove her nuts.’ We threw in some mumbo-jumbo about Dream Park Syndrome, coughed up a generous annuity, and he never peeped.” Harmony’s face was so dark Alex could barely read it. “We sent her to Brigham Young. They’re the best. I wanted to keep track of her, but the doctors didn’t want us meddling. I prayed she’d come out of it. She was so frail… Alex, for years I’ve watched the faces come in and out of this place, and I’ve seen the portfolios on the Century Club-the people who have been here more than a hundred times. She was just a poor lost thing, Alex.”

Harmony stood, throwing out his arms for emphasis. “This was realer than real, Alex, bigger than life. It was her refuge from a world that had no room for magic, a family that didn’t care. We let her down. Then we buried her.”

For a long time Harmony was silent, and Alex thought he was finished, but then he began to speak again. “We never found out how the gun got in.”

Alex said, “It was an inside job, wasn’t it?”

“It had to be. Everything was perfect. Someone knew exactly how to get through the holes.”

“I hate to think about that.”

“We cleaned up Security afterward. More complacency. There shouldn’t have been holes. Still, no outsider could have done it.” Harmony stood next to the fire, the flames and shadows laying his body with a shifting mask of black and red. “I’ve had eight goddamned years to sit here and think about it. Every time I deal with someone who worked here in ‘48, I think about it. Why do you think I had you brought in from up north in ‘49? Why do you think I went right over good people, damned good people like Bobbick, and promoted you? Why? Because I didn’t know who to trust. Do you know how that makes me feel? I sit here, and I eat with these people, and I play with them, their children… I’ve watched some of their kids grow up. I know most of them love what we’re building here, that they believe in what Arthur Cowles dreamed all those years ago… and one of them is a killer.

“One of those wonderful wackos at R amp;D. One of the Gaming staff.. what would you bribe ‘em with, for Christ’s sake? What could you give ‘em that they haven’t already got? But somebody did. Somebody got to ‘em. Somebody gave ‘em something we couldn’t give.

“And so, I work here because I love it. But all the time I work here, all the time I do, I look at the faces, Alex, I look at the faces and I wonder, ‘Which one? Which one?”

Alex let Harmony wind down, waited for the great body to relax before he spoke again. “So what happened, Thadeus?”

“Oh, the whole thing was hushed up. The kid who died, Calvin Izumi, was out of R amp;D. He was only there because he had the right facial characteristics for the Game. Lucky Calvin. Calvin, his brother Tom, and his mother were all rabid for Dream Park. They had their lives, their money, everything wrapped up here. Drowned if they were going to let some goddamned terrorists get away with this. They helped us hush it up.

“We bought off the coroner, Alex. I hope you don’t want me to pretty it up. We greased palms. We made it look like a hunting accident, we covered up murder. We had to. It’d have knocked our stock through the floor. There were about twelve of us who knew everything that had happened. Twelve of us with blood on our hands. Four have retired. I don’t know how they handle it. We don’t talk much anymore.”

“And you think Fekesh?”

“Fekesh. I know it in my guts, and can’t prove a thing. When the Barsoom Project came along they told me to just forget the whole thing, you know, close my eyes and think of England. And like a good little monkey I did.”

Griffin waited to see if Harmony was going to add anything else. The only sound in the room was the slow crackle of the fireplace. Then he threw his ace onto the table, and watched his friend carefully. “Was this woman’s name Michelle Sturgeon?”

Harmony turned snake-quick. His gunmetal eyes were level and cold. “How did you know that?”

“She’s back, Thadeus.” Griffin smiled. “Do you believe in Providence? She’s come back to Dream Park, and at the same time as the man who destroyed her. What are the odds of that? We’ve been making miracles for everyone else for so long, maybe we’re in line for a little one ourselves.”

Harmony leaned forward. His eyes were intense. His thick fingers, templed against each other, trembled. “She’s come back?”

“And Fekesh knows it. Somebody kicked her out of our replay of the Fimbulwinter Game. Almost destroyed her mind.”

Griffin had seen piranha with more kindly, inviting smiles. “Lovely timing, don’t you think? The bastard who originally seeded that rifle into the Game must be fudging his shorts. Poor girl’s mind must be like a scrambled egg, but maybe she still knows something.”

“Well, or somebody’s afraid she knows something.”

“You know, we won, but we lost. Fekesh lost, but he won. Missed his takeover bid by four votes. But the bastard bought his stock low, and made his profit when Cowles won the design bid for the Transcontinental Subway. Didn’t lose a dime.”

“How can you be so sure about Fekesh?”

“When you follow the money back through all the filters and all the fronts, after it changed hands through all the brokers, it went right back in his lap.”

Alex rolled his glass in his hands. You could follow the money, and that would tell you the truth, all right. But it was nothing that could be proved in court. Even if Fekesh had been a U.S. citizen. Even if there had been a reported crime. Shit, what a tangle.

Harmony was looking more peaceful. His shoulders were more relaxed and his voice less strained. Damn well should be. He’s dumped it all onto you, boyo.

“I grew up in the corporate world. We bent a lot of rules, sometimes broke rules, but it was a structured world. The world worked because of structure. And you know, sometimes in the back of my head, I always hoped you’d fix it, Alex. I brought you in from the outside. You grew up in a different tradition, where the world was a little more real. I was hoping that you could trace this all down. Help me make sense of it. Maybe I’m asking for too much, Alex. Maybe it’s all been dead for too long. But I’ve got to hope.”

Alex thought for a long time. He sat, watching the fire. He thought about all of the people, all of the time, all of the factors.

There would be few leads to follow. Nothing to prove. But… if there wasn’t something, why would the unknown traitor have tipped his hand by trying to kill Michelle Sturgeon out of the Game? That didn’t make any sense, either. There had to be something.

And if there was… it still had to be found. Maybe if The Griffin stirred things up a little?

“All right, Thadeus. I know my move.”

“Good! What?”

“I don’t know what else to do. It’s not fair to anyone involved. But it might work. It might work small, or it might work big. The girl is the key. Eviane. This Michelle Sturgeon. Somebody wanted her out of the Game? Hah! I’ll put her back in.”

Harmony sat heavily. His eyes glittered in the firelight. “You can’t do that. She’s emotionally unstable. It’s against the rules.”

Alex grinned mirthlessly. “That’s where you’re wrong. That’s where our traitors made a big mistake. There aren’t any rules, Thadeus. There aren’t any rules at all.”