Larry Niven - The Barsoom Project

“Well, who sealed it?”

“Harmony. I’m going to have to take it up with him. I don’t know what’s going on.”

“Maybe Harmony kicked her out of the Game.”

“I don’t think so. He wouldn’t have interfered without talking to me. Even so it’s awfully queer… and clumsy.”

“Clumsy. So, what are you going to do with her?”

Griffin looked at the picture of Michelle Sturgeon, smiling and happy in the file, contrasted it with the pudgier, angrier woman who had challenged Vail and his nurse: “ Unless I get you first… ”

“I’d… better talk to Harmony,” he said finally. “I guess it’s time I did just exactly that.”

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.”