Piers Anthony: Total Recall

Sure enough, he continued down at the same rate as before. This freed his hands for anything else they might be needed for. He relaxed and looked around.

Moonlight illuminated the pit, showing him details he had not been able to see from above. There were dozens of gigantic vertical pipes rising from the depths, reminding him vaguely of a monstrous calliope. Somehow he was sure they didn’t play music! But what did they do? They weren’t here as a work of Martian art!

There was a vibration at his waist. Something was going wrong with the reel! He grabbed for it, but his clumsy gloves either had no effect or made things worse. The cable uncoiled at a terrifying rate.

Quaid plunged into the bottomless abyss. He flailed wildly, trying to stop himself. His feet lost contact with the wall, and he spun around, seeing the wall, the pipes, and the space between them whirl dizzyingly as he fell.

“Doug!” It was the woman, calling in alarm from above.

He tried to answer, but was too disoriented even to do that. He kept falling, hurtling down into the void, out of control.

“Doug!” her voice came, despairingly, faint in the distance.

The abyss filled with bright white light. Quaid knew it was the end. Somehow he wasn’t frightened; all he could do was meet his destiny.

Quaid woke, startled. He was in bed, on Earth, quite safe. The bedroom was bathed in morning light. As he reoriented and his heartbeat returned to normal, he realized that he should have known that his experience wasn’t real. He had never been to Mars, so how could he have found himself there, without even questioning it, without knowing how he had come? He had simply popped into existence on the barren surface, and met a girl, and gone into a cave or crevice in the side of a mountain shaped like a pyramid, and down into a huge hole. Did any of that make sense on any rational basis? In the dream he had accepted it, but that was the way of dreams.

Now his mind reviewed it, finding place after place where the scene broke down. All that light from that tiny moon? Well, maybe; how could he know, without being there? But that cable—why hadn’t he simply grabbed it and halted his fall? There was no question of his ability to do that; it was attached to him, so he could have circled it at its exit from the reel with his gloved hand, and clamped down, and held on.

With his weight only a fraction of its Earth amount, and the power of his arms, it would have been like catching a huge turkey someone threw to him. A jolt, but not impossible. Only the ambience of the dream had made that fall seem inevitable.

Yet a trifling detail bothered him most. Doug! the woman had called. That meant she knew him, though he could not draw her name from his memory. Not Mr. Quaid, not Douglas, but Doug, cried out with feeling. That feeling summoned a return feeling from him, even now that he was out of the dream, back in reality. She was important to him, more than important; she—

Then the rest of it clicked into place. How had he been able to hear her call— there in the near-vacuum of Mars’ atmosphere? They had not spoken throughout the dream, but there at the end the verisimilitude, the semblance of truth, had broken down.

The bright light at the conclusion—that was this light, the light of day on Earth, more intense than that of Mars. Not the brilliance of Heaven or the inferno of Hell encountered at his death, but the ordinary brightness of ordinary day when he overslept. That was a relief!

Yet that voice still tugged at him. That woman…

There was someone with him. Quaid blinked and looked.

A beautiful creature was leaning over him. She wore a filmy nightgown that was falling open with a readiness that had to be intentional, to reveal portions of her splendid anatomy. She was not the girl of the dream; she was a stunning blond Amazon. His wife, Lori. How could he have forgotten!

“You were dreaming,” she said sympathetically as she reached forward to wipe the sweat from his brow.

He did not answer, distracted by the clear sight of her full breasts within the hanging nightgown. He had of course seen them many times before, but somehow he never got tired of looking. Talk of impressive architecture…

“Mars again?” she inquired solicitously. Her breasts moved as her arm did, as she completed cleaning his face.

He nodded, still upset by the experience, though he was rapidly coming to terms with the current situation. What did the woman of the dream have that Lori didn’t? Brown hair, maybe; nothing else. And Lori wasn’t exactly wearing a space suit.

Suddenly he realized that the Mars-woman’s voice had not been an error in the dream. They had been in space suits, and space suits had intercoms or whatever. He had heard her via his helmet system! It encouraged him to make that connection; it meant that his dream wasn’t quite as farfetched as he had thought.

Lori, mistaking his distraction, started to caress him. Her hand trailed down his neck, and she squeezed the muscle of his shoulder. She liked his muscles, and liked touching them; they were a turn-on for her, and he hardly objected to that.

“My poor baby,” she murmured, stroking his pectoral muscle. “Poor thing, with those bad dreams, those horrible nightmares.” She brought her head down, kissing the crotch of his neck and shoulder in a way that might have been comforting, but was becoming erotic. “Is that better?”

Her lips were moving across his chest, pausing in the region of the nipple. Her eyes angled up to sight on his face. He didn’t want her to stop. “Mm-hmm,” he said.

Lori resumed progress, working her way down toward his belly. She was trying to seduce him, he knew, to take his mind off the dream, and she was good at it. He was happy to let her continue. If only the woman of Mars hadn’t been in that space suit! He could imagine it was her…

“Was she there?” she asked nonchalantly.

Oh-oh. Did she have antennae to pick up his thoughts? He felt guilty, thinking of the other woman when it was manifest that Lori was all that any man could desire. But Lori’s interest in that other was amusing in its way.

He played dumb. “Who?”

“You know.” Lori lifted her head, making a contemplative moue. She was playing dumb too, pretending that she couldn’t quite remember or describe that other woman. “The girl with the…” She cupped her hands in the universal gesture for large breasts.

He smiled. “Oh, her.” As if Lori weren’t of that type.

But she refused to let it go. “Well, was she?”

He laughed. “Amazing! You’re jealous of a dream!” The thing was, this did intrigue him, perhaps because it lent some reality to a figure he knew existed only in his imagination.

Lori punched him in the stomach and twisted away. He tried to grab her, but she struggled to get out of the bed. They had always played rough, but not too rough; he never hit her back.

“It’s not funny, Doug,” she said, half off the bed. “Let met go!” Now gravity was helping her; if he let go, she would fall on the floor. “You’re on Mars every night now.”

All too true! “But I’m always back by morning,” he protested weakly. He realized that there was only so far this could go without turning ugly, because he really did have a secret passion for that nonexistent woman, and Lori was catching on.

He succeeded in pulling her back on the bed. Now Lori occupied his full attention, as surely had been her purpose. They wrestled, and she got her legs around him, squeezing him in a harmless but most interesting scissors grip. He pinned her arms to her sides and tried to kiss her. She turned her head from side to side to avoid his lips.