He walked down the avenue toward that distant traffic light. His footsteps rebounded from the fronts of the fake houses and the cement wall between them. Seventy yards later he confronted another wall upon which a hologram film of the rest of the street was projected. The redlight and the moving car and the rest of the pretty suburb were all features of a cleverly made background film, nothing more.
Therefore, Galing had never meant for him and Allison to come this far. They would have plowed into the wall at sixty or seventy miles an hour; they would have been killed if they hadn't crashed back at the intersection. As violent as it had been, the fan shuttle accident was nothing more than another scene in the play, a carefully set-up drama that had been programmed to occur even before Joel had climbed into the car.
Unable to cope with the complexity of the deception, he went back to find the hologram projectors that were responsible for this facet of the illusion.
On the porch of the last house he discovered a projector concealed from the street by the banisters. He kicked it apart and brought darkness to one half of the corridor wall.
Across the street, on another porch, tucked in behind a big outdoor chaise lounge, another projector was thrumming softly as the hologram cube whirled and whirled inside of it. He picked it up and threw it down. He kicked it into the wall of the house, kicked it again, stomped on it with his heel. He went out onto the lawn and picked up a child's tricycle which was turned on its side by a hedge, and he brought the tricycle back onto the porch, and he used the cycle like a hammer, flailing away at the projector with all of his strength. He enjoyed the destruction, even though he wasn't gaining a whole hell of a lot from it.
He pretended that he was pounding on Henry Galing, the faceless man, and Richard.
When there was nothing more for him to smash, when the machine lay in total ruin, when the sweat was dripping steadily into his eyes and dribbling in salty rivulets over his lips, Joel dropped the tricycle and staggered backwards and sat down heavily on the chaise lounge. He let his chin rest on his chest, and he breathed in slowly and evenly as his head began to clear. He was ashamed of himself for losing control like that; rage had accomplished nothing, and it might have lost him most of what he'd gained in the last hour. If Galing hadn't known he was out here, the old bastard might have gotten the idea from all the racket if it carried as far as the mansion. He'd been through a lot, of course; but this was thoughtless, childish, the last thing he—
It was then that Joel noticed the neatly folded sheet of dark paper which had lain beneath the now demolished hologram projector. It was partly concealed by the bent housing of the machine, and it looked as if it had been put there for him to find.
“Galing?” he asked, staring out at the street, searching for movement.
But he was alone.
“Okay,” he said hoarsely. “I'll play along with you, Galing. What have I got to lose?”
He slid off the lounge, hunkered down, and picked up the paper. It was yellowed with age, and the creases in it were so dry that they cracked when he disturbed them. Flakes of paper speckled his trembling hands. The sheet fell into three separate pieces as he opened it.
He went to the porch stoop where the light from the streetlamps was bright enough to read by, and he sat on the top step. Fitting the fragments together like pieces of a puzzle, he looked disbelievingly at the message. He read it three times:
The note had been written with a dull pencil.
It had been written in haste.
And the handwritting was his own.
XVII
The longer he stared at the ancient note and the more he tried to make sense of it, the less clear it became. If he had written this himself, he had done it decades ago — at least fifty years ago, judging from the condition of the paper. And how was that possible, when he was not even thirty years old? The pods? Furthermore, if he had been this way, why couldn't he remember it? If the intent of Henry Galing's deceptions was not sinister, why did he have this gut-level fear, this sense of impending disaster? And having taken the time to write this note to himself, why had he not explained to himself the circumstances behind this charade?
Finally, he folded the paper, tucked it in his pocket, and went back to the middle of the street. The discovery of the fifty-year-old message had contributed to his sense of urgency. He didn't have any time to waste.
He studied the gray wall where there had once been a long tree-lined avenue, houses, a redlight, a moving car. Now that the two hologram projectors had been smashed, the only thing of interest about the smooth cement was a door which the film clip had concealed. It was the same ugly gray shade as the walls. It had formidable stainless steel fittings and was devoid of warning signs, directions, and other labels.
Perhaps the very anonymity of it was what made it so intriguing. He went to it and tried the knob.
The door was unlocked, and it swung open silently.
He looked back along the street down which he'd just come. No sign of Galing.
He stepped out of the street into a corridor that was more than sixty feet long. Eight, closed elevators stood on each side, and the long hall ended in a set of bright yellow doors…
He let the gray door behind him close quietly on the artificial residential street. Since he now suspected that his adventures had all taken place within a single building, the elevators were of great interest to him. With those he could more fully explore this place and learn the nature of it. Once that was done, it would be a simple matter to deduce the reasoning behind this program and his purpose in behind here.
Or at least he
Although he was extremely pleased to find the elevators, he was more interested in those two yellow doors. Hesitantly, he walked down to them, pushed them open, and found the same long corridor into which he had first come when he had left the storm drains after escaping from that dungeon and from the murderous vegetation in the tunnels. At the far end was the six-foot pressure hatch that guarded the observation chamber. The computer display screen in the wall beside it was dark. He remembered the metal-walled room, the foot-thick glass window that looked out upon—
Upon what?
He had not actually forgotten what lay beyond that window; the memory had merely been suppressed, not erased. He had passed out in front of the deep glass, had been found and taken back to Henry Galing's mansion where he was fed that story about sybocylacose-46. He was aware now that the entire sybocylacose fantasy and — by logical extension — all the scenes that had come before it had been invented for a single purpose: to make him forget what lay beyond the observation room window.
He stepped on the metal grid in the corridor floor before the pressure hatch, and he looked at the display screen as it turned a restful blue.
CYCLE FOR ADMITTANCE.
He put both hands on the steel wheel in the center of the door and wrestled it clockwise as far as it would go. The door remained locked, but the message on the display screen changed.
WAIT FOR THE ESTABLISHMENT OF
COMPUTER DATA LINKAGES.
WAIT FOR VERIFICATION OF
VIEW CHAMBER'S SANCTITY.
