“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?”
