The Feelies

"OKAY, SO YOU WIN AGAIN."

Sam put down The House at Pooh Corner and reached for the TV's on/off switch. The cat watched him with absorbed interest. A picture spread out across the screen. The color shimmered for a moment and then held steady. It was much too green, but Sam didn't bother to adjust it. He didn't really like watching TV. To be precise, he didn't like to have to concentrate on it. Most of the time he would turn it on and just let the sound and vision wash over him. With that attitude, it didn't matter whether the color was balanced or not. He frequently told himself he only turned it on for the sake of the cat. In fact, when Max wasn't eating or pestering Sam in order to eat, he was asleep. Sam attributed a great deal to Max. Much of it was his own imagination.

"So remember, with Securicare, you know who's there."

It was an ad for a closed-circuit door scanner. The scene was a spick, orderly B+ home. A trim, attractive housewife responded to a set of door chimes. The picture cut to the exterior of the same house. Standing on the doorstep was a sinister figure. He wore the typical close-cropped hair, earring, the black nylon jacket and heavy boots of a kid from a welfare gang. He wasn't, however, built like any juvenile Sam had ever seen. He had the physique of a block position ball player. His eyes were red-rimmed and a scar ran down his left cheek. Between thick chubby fingers he held a length of boat chain. He was every B + 's nightmare of rape, robbery, and terror.

Sam looked at Max the cat. "They sure do run some crap."

Max yawned. The picture was back to the housewife. The music held its breath as, unaware of the horror on the step, her hand went to the door latch. Then the picture froze.

"With Securicare you don't have to open to look."

The motion continued again, only the scene had subtly changed. This time the woman's hand was operating the control of a Securicare door scanner. The brute on the step appeared on the machine's small, full color screen. Without hesitation or even any noticeable change of expression, the woman reached for the hall phone, presumably to call for either help or the police. Again the picture froze.

"With Securicare, you know who's there."

Sam sighed. "I guess we don't need one of those. We don't have anything worth stealing."

The NCC logo came up on the screen. The voice over it was urgent. "Tomorrow at ten."

It was a trailer. A gang of gaunt men, clad in filthy rags and holding makeshift weapons, charged across a bare, sunlit expanse of concrete. Another set of men waited for them in a disciplined half circle. They wore tight black uniforms and visored helmets. They all cradled riot guns or held electric prods at the ready. The ragged mob halted. In the middle of them was a pneumatic blonde in a white plastic nurse's outfit. She was obviously a captive or hostage. Her arms were being forced behind her back and the front of her blouse was ripped to fully expose one breast. There was a close-up of one of the men holding her. He yelled, showing a set of yellow, broken teeth.

"You better let us through, Molloy, or the nurse gets it."

A cold voice came from behind a visor. "She knows she's been on her own since you animals grabbed her. I'm going to count to five and open fire."

There was a shot of the riot guns slowly being leveled.

"One-two-three-four."

Fade-out. The voice-over came back.

"Don't miss May Marsh in another savage episode of 'Penal Colony,' tomorrow at ten, on this channel."

The NCC logo came back again, only this time it was against a background of shifting, moving patterns of color. They were similar to the ones in the feelie adverts. Loud rock music on the polite side of tension, the kind the old folks liked, fought with a burst of almost hysterical canned applause. After a few seconds, the music won. It was joined by an enthusiastic but disembodied choir.

"Everybody's dreaming

Everybody's scheming

Everybody's got their

Wildest dreams

Maybe it's you

Baby it's you

Maybe your wildest dreams Really will come tr-u-u-e."

A heavenly staircase materialized among the swirling patterns. The choir was replaced by an equally enthusiastic voice-over.

"And now… the man who makes it happen… the man who makes dreams come true… Mister… Bob… bee…"

Sam hit the channel selector. As he flicked through the seemingly endless selection he looked regretfully at Max. "I'm sorry, cat. I can't watch those game shows anymore, not since Ralph explained how they were fixed."

BOBBY PRIEST'S VOICE HAD DROPPED to its lowest, most reverent tone. The crowd were hushed. They weren't going to mess up the moment of anticipation. The light had shrunk to harmonize with the mood. He stood alone in a single white-blue spot. The black sequins on his formal suit glittered with every slight movement.

"Well, my friends, now we come to that moment in the show where the hopes are highest and the pitfalls are deepest."

He paused to let the spurious drama of the moment sink right home.

"Waiting outside are four young people. For each one it is another moment of truth on the trail of their wildest dreams. Very soon you and I will know whether each one of them has come closer to that big prize, that lifetime contract for a feelie of their choice, or whether those dreams will have been dashed forever."

If anyone had cared, right then, to drop a pin, the whole studio would have heard it.

"Yes, my friends, it's that moment again. It's time for…" His voice lifted. "The Dreamroad!"

Right on cue the lights blazed up, the audience roared, and Wanda-Jean and her three companions bounced out into the studio. Wanda-Jean made every effort to look as happy and confident as the others. Inside, she felt like a Christian trotting out to meet the lions.

The contestants wore the usual costumes. The only change was that the numbers on them were in gold rather than red as they had been in the preliminary stages.

Wanda-Jean didn't doubt they were still made out of the material that inevitably dissolved in water.

Bobby Priest's voice rose over the shouting and cheering of the crowds in the bleachers. The contestants formed a line beside the host's raised podium. Priest turned toward them with a sweeping gesture.

"And let's meet the people who are taking a chance on the chance of a lifetime tonight."

The cameras moved in on the contestants. They all smiled just like they'd been told at the briefing.

"Wearing number one, it's the fantastic Sammy. Those of you who watched last week will remember just how truly amazing Sammy's been on the Dreamroad. If he gets through tonight he's got just two…"

He let the momentous fact sink in.

"That's right, two more shows between him and the big, big prize."

The cheering rose to an almost deafening volume. Sammy was the current blue-eyed boy of the show. He had the kind of soft sandy hair that just begged to be tousled, and his open freckled face had inspired double page pin-ups in the fan rags. Sammy ducked his head shyly and gave out a toothy grin as the camera pulled him into close-up. The subteen girls in the crowd went even wilder. Bobby Priest let them run on for a while and then raised his hands to cut it off.

"Okay, okay, that's Sammy. Next to him is Goldie. Goldie's a newcomer, but I'm sure you all remember her from the early rounds. If her luck holds, I'm sure we'll be seeing a lot more of her."

Goldie came on cute to the camera. She was blonde, petite, and came on cute to everyone, particularly Bobby Priest. Wanda-Jean reflected acidly that she might not be so cute to him once he'd had a go at her.

"Wearing number three, the girl who doesn't let anyone get in her way. That's right, it's Wanda-Jean!"

A roar went up from the crowd. At best it could only be described as jovially hostile. Wanda-Jean sneered at the camera. If they were hell bent on forcing her into this bad girl role, she might as well go along with it.

"And finally, wearing number four, another newcomer starting on the Dreamroad. Let's hear it for Marty."

Since she wasn't so familiar to the crowd, the greeting was only lukewarm. The girl had an angular body and close-cropped dark hair. Wanda-Jean had decided, the first time that she saw her, that Marty was probably a dyke.

Bobby Priest looked serious. "And now we've met the contestants, let's get down to the game."

As on every show, Wanda-Jean and the others had been given the details of the game the previous day. It was a rough one.

"In tonight's game, the contestants won't be playing against one another, they'll be playing against the clock. It's possible that we'll see all four stay on the trail, or it's just as possible that every single contestant will get knocked out!"

He put particular emphasis on the last two words. While he was talking, the players were cued to start walking toward the four clear plastic cylinders, about ten feet high, that were the focal point of the whole studio.

In the front of the cylinders were small, flush-fitting doors of the same material. The ever-present, silver-clad attendants moved in to open them. Each contestant stepped inside a cylinder. The doors were closed behind them. Bobby Priest once again took over the screen.

"The contestants are in position."

The game was a rough one. With the doors sealed, the cylinders started to fill with water. As they slowly filled, the contestants had to solve a problem. They had to rearrange a set of colored squares into a set pattern they had to guess for themselves. It was a race of mind against rising water.

"Then we'll begin."

Wanda-Jean looked at the arrangement of squares. There were at least two hundred of them, set in a square form. The squares were evenly divided into red, blue, yellow, green, black, and white. They interlocked on a tongue and groove system. There were enough empty spaces to allow them to be maneuvered vertically and horizontally, but not removed from the frame.

The floor under Wanda-Jean's bare feet was already covered with a quarter-inch layer of water, and she hadn't even made a move.

To guess at the correct pattern of colors and then move the squares to conform with it seemed an almost impossible task to complete before the water rose up to her chin.

Wanda-Jean put out a tentative hand. Along the top of the frame that enclosed the whole puzzle was a set of colored lights. There were fifteen of them, one for each vertical row of squares. At the start of the game the lights were all dead. When the particular row was arranged in the correct order, the light came on. It was the players' most valuable aid; in fact, it was their only one.

Wanda-Jean started quickly to rearrange the first row. She had made up her mind, at rehearsal, that there was no point in making a blind guess at the overall pattern. The way she had decided to work was to keep switching squares, one line at a time, until the light came on.

The trouble was that it didn't seem to be working. She frantically shifted the squares of plastic, but the water was already up to her ankles and not even the first light had come on.

This was the game that had cost "Wildest Dreams" its only fatality. A player could go on trying to solve the problem until the water finally forced him or her to float to the top of the cylinder and climb out in disgrace and failure. In order to stay on the Dreamroad, all the contestant had to do was get the right answer. One guy, some eight months earlier, had hung on so doggedly, trying to find the solution, that he'd drowned.

The water was almost up to her knees, when, totally unexpectedly, the first light came on. As Wanda-Jean started on the second line she flashed on the fact that the law of averages wasn't doing her any favors.

The only consolation of the game was that it didn't allow Wanda-Jean any time to think. The only thing that distracted her from total concentration on the little plastic squares was the water slowly creeping up her legs.

The water had started to eat away at the crotch of her costume when the second light came on. Wanda-Jean started on the third row, blessing the merciful release that inside the cylinder the noise of the crowd wasn't audible.

Out of the corner of her eye she could see them. By the time the water had eaten away her suit right up to where the tops of her buttocks curved in to meet her spine, the crowd was on its feet, waving and gesticulating. The third light had not come on yet. Wanda-Jean refused to admit that the game had become, in logical terms, hopeless.

Because of the water, she was now naked from the waist down. They had not bothered to heat the water. It was stone cold. It was hard to know whether the chill clutching at her stomach was the knowledge that she was going to lose or simply the chill of the rising water. There was a cameraman down in the floor in front of her with a handheld camera. He was shooting up at her. She couldn't see a monitor, but she could imagine the shot. There was no way she was going to recover from the humiliation of hundreds of millions of people seeing her like this. The water was creeping up to her breasts. She started to panic. She couldn't concentrate on the puzzle. She had to get out. She had to get away from the lights and the cameras and the howling crowd. The water was up to her neck. The last shred of her costume floated away, rapidly dissolving. She would drown before she would crawl naked in front of them. And then the water was coming up over her chin.

"Noooooo!"

She grabbed for a handhold to haul herself out. There was nothing left.

"WE ARE GOING TO BEGIN THE economy-class program. In one month we will announce a major technological breakthrough that will make IE available to everyone. Ladies and gentlemen, we are about to offer the feelies to the underclass. In a short while, the primary purpose of this endeavor will be in motion."

There had been shocks in the penthouse boardroom all through the meeting-but nothing like this. The heads of department were silent. It was what they always theoretically worked for, but they had never expected it so soon.

Lars Axton, the head of Procurement, was the first one to find his voice. "Is it possible?"

Deutsch nodded. "I believe so."

"The plant involved alone…"

"I have had discussions with the president of Krupp. He thinks that his people can handle the production end."

"But there's been no breakthrough."

"And the system was never expensive in the first place. The prices have always been artifically inflated."

Gorges Gomez was shaking his head. "We'll be inundated."

Deutsch smiled. "I'm not saying that we can do everything straightaway. In the beginning, there will be quotas and waiting lists, but those will only excite demand. It will be a year or more until we can offer life contracts to the poor, but we will be receiving considerable, if somewhat covert, financial help from the government."

Renfield frowned. "Why should the government…"

"Because the government is well aware that what we are basically offering is a painless alternative to the death by disease or starvation of hundreds of millions of people. The feelies provide a safety valve, a place to warehouse the excess population. The cost of maintaining a human being in a feelie fantasy is only cents per day, far less even than the most minimal welfare. Population control by birth control has failed. We have to face that. What we also have to face is that any species that is unable to regulate its birthrate becomes subject to regulation by death in one form or another. Either by plague or by famine or by killing one another. The system is self-selecting. Those who desire nothing more than to live in a garish fantasy will be allowed to do so."

Deutsch permitted himself a smile. "And believe me, my friends, the fantasies will become exceedingly garish."

Renfield sighed. "I can believe it."

Deutsch ignored him. "Those who remain in the real world will be those who are able to accept reality for what it is. We are using technology to reassert a very fundamental Darwinism. We may be giving humanity another chance. In fact, we may well be the last, best hope."

Deutsch paused to let that sink in.

"Do you now see that, when we are on the brink of something as immense as this, the last thing that we can afford to have is an Alamo state of mind?"

Gorge Gomez was looking exceedingly disturbed "This is more like Auschwitz than the Alamo."

Deutsch's eyes narrowed. "Is that what you believe Gorge?"

"We are talking about marketing a product that we know full well will kill the users in five to seven years. Is that mankind's last best hope?"

"We aren't forcing anyone to do anything. Anyone who enters the fantasy is doing it of their own free will."

"But we'll be concealing the long-term effects. They'll be making the choice without full knowledge of the facts."

"The facts, Gorge? Do any of us ever have full knowledge of the facts? Perhaps these people are merely exchanging duration of life for quality of life. Can you look at it that way, Gorge?"

WANDA-JEAN MOVED LIKE A ZOMBIE. She was trying not to see her cramped little apartment. The only way to hold back the truth that she was back there was simply not to see it. It was the only way to hold back the much more awful truth that the adventure was over. Her pill box was clutched tightly in her hand.

It was like slow motion. Keeping her back very straight, she sank to the floor and crossed her legs. She placed the box very carefully in front of her. She inspected it for a while, then she opened it and tipped the contents out on the floor. The collection had grown considerably since she had been on the show.

With painful method, she began to arrange the pills in neat rows, five to a row. By the time she had finished there were twelve of them, sixty pills. She had been hoarding them since she had started on the show. She studied the pattern of colors formed by the different medications. With infinite patience she started to rearrange them, until she realized that she was echoing the terrible game.

She didn't want to think about it. She stood up and went into the kitchen. She looked in the fridge. It was almost empty, just a piece of aging cheese and a container of Coke. She took the Coke out and went back into the lounge. Her next stop was at the booze cabinet. That too was thinly populated. About an inch and a half remained in a bottle of Jap whiskey.

Wanda-Jean resumed her cross-legged position on the floor. She set the whiskey and the Coke beside the box and pills. She had forgotten a glass. Almost impatiently she went and fetched one, and quickly squatted on the floor again. It was the first time she had moved rapidly since she had left the studio.

The bastards had let her go home in a taxi. They hadn't even bothered to…

She wasn't going to think about that. She unscrewed the top of the whiskey bottle. She one third filled the glass. Next she stripped the seal from the Coke container and topped it up. She tasted it experimentally. She added a little more Coke. She tasted it again, and seemed satisfied.

She picked up the first pill, turned it over in her fingers, and put it in her mouth. She sipped her drink and swallowed.

She took a second pill and then a third. She started to get into a kind of mindless rhythm. She took the pills in scrupulous order, up one row and down the next. Pick up the pill, place it on her tongue, sip Jap and Coke, repeat the process.

She had worked her way through a third of them when she started to feel sick and a little dizzy. They couldn't be coming on so fast. It had to be her imagination. She got a grip on herself and pressed on.

The pills were half gone. The nausea had not faded.

She forced down five at once. She couldn't hold it together anymore. Her hand started to shake. She couldn't get herself to control it anymore. Wanda-Jean was afraid. She wanted to go, to end it, but she didn't want to go like this.

She suddenly wanted to talk to someone. She needed desperately to talk to another human being. She got up. Her legs seemed a very long way away. It was difficult to breathe, and walk. She lurched to the wall and made a badly coordinated grab for the wall phone. At the first attempt she missed. On the second attempt she managed to get a grip on it. She put it to her ear and pressed the button for the operator.

"Operator."

It was a synthetic voice. Wanda-Jean sobbed. "I need to talk to someone."

"I'm sorry, I'm not programmed to process that request. If you require an emergency service, please press three."

"I just want to talk to someone."

"I'm sorry, I'm not programmed to process that request. If you require an emergency service, please press three."

She should call someone, a friend, one of the men in her life. Yeah, right. Call Murray Dorfman, call Bobby Priest, call any of the millions of people who had seen her crawl naked from that tank.

The synthetic voice of the phone was in her ear. "I am breaking the connection. I will report a fault on the line."

The colors around her had become strange. They seemed washed out and dead, as if they were slowly fading to black and white. Wanda-Jean felt terribly tired.

It was very, very hard to stand. Things were fading around her. It was hard to make her thoughts work. She was drifting to an empty warm place. She would be safe there. She wouldn't be.

Wanda-Jean's legs gave way. She slid down the wall and crumpled in a heap on the floor. Her head lolled onto her shoulder. Her eyes had rolled up into her head. They didn't find her until three days later.

RALPH TURNED INTO EMPLOYEE ENTRANCE K as he had done every day, four days a week, for as long as he could remember. The sky was gray and overcast, and the air was sticky. Very soon it would rain, but that probably wouldn't help any. He had spent the night with the woman in the blue coat, so at least he was coming from somewhere different, and that in itself was a novelty. They had gone drinking together after the disturbance outside the Sanyo-Hyatt, and after a couple of hours, she had invited him to go back to her place. It was another cheap-lease as small and as pokey as his. He found it a bit disturbing that the walls were covered with stills from "Wildest Dreams," but he didn't say anything. They made love with the drunken clumsiness of the desperate. It turned out that her name was Nancy, and they made plans to meet later in the week. Ralph wasn't sure how he felt about that. Nancy was a little strange. She had spent too much time alone with her television. He really wasn't sure what he thought about very much at that moment. He had a vicious hangover, and he was still wearing the previous day's clothes. It didn't really matter. No one would notice. He passed his ID card across the scanner and punched himself in. He was actually on time for a change. Nancy lived a lot closer in than he did. He took the elevator down to 5066 section. Sam was already there. Sweeping.

"Morning, Sam."

"Morning, Ralph."

JOHN WILSON HEFFER WAS STILL BILLY the Kid, and his mind was screaming. The dialogue went on and on.

"So I guess there's no way out of this thing."

"Not unless you want to surrender peaceable and come back with me."

"You know I can't do that."

"Then I don't see no way out. We'd better get to it."

Without another word, Billy/Heffer's hand flashed to the Colt, but he wasn't fast enough. The rifle was in Garrett's hand before his own pistol was even clear of its holster. There was a bang, a puff of smoke, and, immediately afterward, a searing, burning pain in his chest that was made doubly bad by the overloaded tactile input. He was thrown back onto the hot, red dirt of the street. The loop of malfunctioning fantasy went around and around, picking him up and knocking him down again, over and over again, and all the time there was the pain of the bullets smashing into his chest. It seemed to have been going on since infinity. The detached part of his mind had curled into a metaphoric fetal ball, praying that madness would come and take away the pain. No one was monitoring, and no one was coming to get him out. All he could hope for was that something would snap and that he would achieve oblivion.

He was suddenly on his feet again.

"So I guess there's no way out of this thing."

"Not unless you want to surrender peaceable and come back with me."

"You know I can't do that."

"Then I don't see no way out. We'd better get to it."

Without another word, Billy/Heffer's hand flashed to his Colt, but he wasn't fast enough. The rifle was in Garrett's hand before his own pistol was even clear of its holster. There was a bang, a puff of smoke, and, immediately afterward, a searing, burning pain in his chest. He was thrown back onto the hot, red dirt of the street.

He was suddenly on his feet again.

"So I guess there's no way out of this thing."