“Ought to. I directed the crew.”
“But, Chuck, there isn’t a door or window in this room large enough for something that size to pass through!”
He was confused for a second. Then he laughed and pointed. “Unless it would be that rear door opening on the parking lot.”
I kept a straight face as I turned and looked. There was a door there—large enough to have admitted the integrator. But it hadn’t been there a moment ago!
Chuck’s perplexed reaction had triggered an automatic adjustment circuit. That only I was able to remember the time when the door had not been there was evidence of the fact that I was still, for some reason, exempt from reorientation.
The intercom sounded. I flicked it on and Dorothy Ford’s tense face lighted the screen. She glanced uneasily at Chuck.
“Got some work to do,” he said accommodatingly and left.
I watched Dorothy wage a pitched battle with distress. Her eyes moistened and her fingers entwined nervously. “Would it help any if I said I was sorry?” she asked.
“You told Siskin I planned to cross him up?”
She nodded ashamedly. “Yes, Doug. I had to.”
And I knew, from the sincerity in her voice, that betraying me was the last thing she had wanted to do.
She went on soberly. “I warned you, didn’t I? I made it clear I had to look out for Siskin’s interest.”
“You rate an E for efficiency.”
“Yes, I suppose I do. But I’m not proud of my performance.”
So she had admitted exposing me to Siskin. Would she also eventually own up to selling me out to a Power far greater?
I laughed. “We’re not going to let it drop there, are we?”
She frowned in puzzlement.
“Well,” I went on, “you once said we both had our jobs but that there was no reason why we couldn’t have fun at the same time.”
She only lowered her head, apparently in sudden disappointment.
“Oh, I see.” I feigned bitterness. “The set-up isn’t the same. Now that you’ve achieved your objective, I’m no longer fair game.”
“No. That’s not it, Doug.”
“But certainly you’ve discharged your obligation commendably and you don’t have to keep an eye on me from now on.”
“No, I don’t. Siskin is well satisfied.”
Pretending impatience, I started to snap off the intercom.
She leaned forward anxiously. “No, wait!”
Merely a girl who was disillusioned because the supposedly modest fellow for whom she had made a play in her line of duty had decided to take her up on it? Or a Contact Unit in fear of losing her direct line of communication with the subject under surveillance?
“All right,” she said unenthusiastically. “We can have fun.”
“When?”
She hesitated. “Whenever you say.”
At the moment, I couldn’t imagine a more likely suspect in my search for the Contact Unit. This one I would check out properly. “Tonight,” I suggested. “At your place.”
Dorothy Ford’s apartment was one of those soft, opulent sanctums that have traditionally been associated with the libertine privileges of wealthy businessmen. Letting me come here, I saw from the beginning, was but another humiliation for the girl.
Tri-D animated murals, each with its own background music, flaunted suggestive scenery. Pan piped and kicked up his cloven hoofs while uninhibited maidens ringed him in with their sensuous dance of abandon. Aphrodite embraced Adonis between a pair of marble columns festooned with climbing roses and framing a glistening Aegean Sea in the distance. Cleopatra, dark hair radiant with the soft caress of moonlight reflecting off the Nile, raised a jeweled goblet to toast Mark Antonym, then leaned back against the railing of her barge.
Overseeing all was a huge tri-D portrait of Horace P. Siskin. I stared up at the painting, recognizing now a facet of the man’s character of which I hadn’t been aware. His eyes, as they bored into the Aphrodite-Adonis mural, were vivid in lecherous intent. His entire expression added up to only one inescapable impression: satyriasis.
The euphonious enchantment of the room was shattered as Dorothy punched the order button on the autotender. Receiving her drink, she swilled half of it, then stared abstractedly into her glass, as though trying to find something she had lost long ago. She wore paste! blue lounging pajamas, trimmed in ermine. Her hair, upswept and aglitter with sparkle-spray, was like a soft crown of Stardust that somehow imparted a fresh, innocent appearance to her chiseled face. But there was calm determination in her features. She had committed herself to a bargain. And now she was going to carry out her end.
Strolling over, she gestured toward Siskin’s portrait. “I can draw the drapes and cut him off. I often do.”
“Cut him off from all these things that belong to him?”
She winced. “He’s no longer interested. Once they meant something. But, then, vitality isn’t a permanent thing.”
“You sound regretful.”
“God, no.”
She went over and dialed herself another bracer, leaving me standing there perplexed. Would a Contact Unit allow herself to become involved in unconventional complications?
She drained the fresh drink, waited for another, then returned. The alcohol was beginning to have its effects. Her spirit seemed somewhat higher, although a certain trace of sullenness remained.
“Here’s to the Great Little One.” She raised her glass, sipped from it, then stepped back and hurled it at the portrait.
It shattered against Siskin’s left cheek, leaving a gash in the canvas that continued the wry slit of his mouth. The liquid content of the glass appeared to be pouring from both.
“Now I didn’t want to do that, Doug.” She laughed dryly. “You’ll think I’m not a good sport.”
“Why did you let me come here?”
She shrugged and lied. “For the atmosphere. You won’t find a more appropriate setting anywhere in the city. Siskin’s taste, such as it is, can’t be beat.”
When she headed back for the bar I caught her arm. She turned, swayed slightly and stared piercingly into my eyes.
“I gave you a warning once before when I wasn’t supposed to,” she said. “Have another on the house. You don’t want to have anything to do with me. I brought you up here so you’d realize that for yourself.”
Despite my own compelling purpose for calling on her, I found myself being drawn involuntarily into the enigma of Dorothy Ford. And, with a sense of pity, I wondered what strange requirement of special programming was responsible for her character.
“When was Siskin here last?” I asked.
“Two years ago.”
“And you’re disappointed?”
Indignation flared in her eyes and she snapped my head aside with a stinging slap. She went over to the chaise contour and buried her face in its cushioned depths.
I followed. “I’m sorry, Dorothy.”
“Don’t be. I went in with my eyes open.”
“No you didn’t. That’s obvious. What happened?”
She looked up and stared through the Antony-Cleopatra mural. “I often imagine I have no more power of self-determination than one of the characters in your machine. There are times when I feel like one of them. I even have horrible dreams about Siskin sitting in front of Simulacron-3 and making me perform like a puppet.”
I knew then that Dorothy Ford couldn’t be the Contact Unit. The last thing such an agent would do would be to hint, however remotely, at the true circumstances of reality. Instead, she had hit the nail almost on the head.
“No,” she went on distantly. “I’m no nymphomaniac. There’s been only Siskin. You see, my father is one of the corporate directors of the Establishment. And Dad will continue to be the financial genius he imagines he is only as long as I hop through Siskin’s hoop.”
“You mean your father’s a success only because you—”
She nodded miserably. “That’s the only r
eason. When Siskin took him in five years ago, Dad was recovering from a heart attack. He couldn’t survive the knowledge of what the set-up has been.”
She started as the door buzzer sounded. I went over and flicked on the one-way video screen.
The man in the corridor had a pad ready when he identified himself. “James Ross, CRM Number 2317-B3. For Miss Dorothy Ford.”
It was most coincidental that just when I was trying to establish whether Dorothy was the Contact Unit a monitor should appear.
“Miss Ford is ill,” I said. “She can’t see anyone.”
“Sorry, sir. But I’ll have to stand on my RM Code rights.”
Then I remembered what I had seen on entering the apartment. “If you look above the pickup lens, Mr. Ross, you’ll notice a certificate that says Miss Ford holds a special Evening Exemption.”
Hardly glancing up, he grimaced in disappointment. “Sorry, sir. I didn’t see it.”
After I turned the screen off, I stood there for a long while with my hand on the switch. An honest mistake? Or was ARM involved in some special way in the Upper Reality’s designs on me?
I went over to the bar, the faint beginnings of logical realization trying to break through my confusion. Besides being programmed by the Higher World Operator, the Association of Reaction Monitors was in excellent position to keep close watch over not only me, but everybody else, if it wanted to.
Hadn’t it been an anonymous pollster who had warned me, “For God’s sake, Hall… forget about the whole damned thing”?
I dialed a drink, but left it sitting there in the delivery slot, wondering whether the monitors themselves might not be discharging some specific, unsuspected function in this counterfeit world.
Then the answer burst in upon me: Of course! Why hadn’t I thought of it sooner? A simulectronic creation wouldn’t exist as an end in itself. It would have to have a raison d’être, a primary function. The analog community Fuller and I had created was originally intended to forecast individual response as a means of assessing the marketability of commercial products.
Similarly, but on a higher plane, our entire world, the simulectronic creation in which I existed as an ID reactional unit, was but a question-and-answer device for the edification of producers, manufacturers, marketers, retailers in that Higher Reality!
The reaction monitors comprised the system whereby the Upper Operator asked His questions, introduced His stimuli!
The method was analogous to Fuller’s own, cruder expedient of using analog billboards, public address networks, open telecasts to stimulate responses in our simulator!
And wasn’t it only logical that the Operator would have a cognizant agent associated directly with ARM, the most important institution in His whole simulectronic creation?
Early next morning I cushioned down on a public parking lot two blocks away from the Association of Reaction Monitors building. Pedistripping the rest of the way, I attached to my sleeve the one object that would insure unquestioned access to ARM headquarters—the armband I had wrested from the pollster who had tried to warn me off.
At the entrance, though, there was no guard to check on the identities of the monitors flowing in for their assignments. But before I became suspicious, I reminded myself that ARM wasn’t a secret organization, nor did it ostensibly have anything to hide.
In the central lobby, I paused before the directory and searched out the entry “Office of the President—3407.”
I had a simple plan. I would merely ask the secretary of each official, from the top on down, to announce that a new monitor from Upper Reality, Inc., was checking in with the association. If there was a Contact Unit here, the mere mention of the name of the firm I purportedly represented would flush him out.
On the thirty-fourth floor, I stepped from the elevator and ducked immediately behind a luxuriant potted plant.
Two men were just emerging from the office of the president.
But even as I tried to hide I realized that one of them had seen and recognized me.
And that one was the Contact Unit himself!
It had to be. For it was Avery Collingsworth.
13
Collingsworth drew up beside the potted plant and our eyes met, his inexpressive, steady, mine casting frantically. about for an avenue of escape. But there was none.
The other man had darted back into the president’s office.
“I’ve been expecting you,” Collingsworth said evenly.
Instinct screamed out for me to kill him, quickly, before he could signal to the Operator. But I only backed against the wall.
“I knew you would eventually suppose that the Association of Reaction Monitors was the Operator’s factotum in this world,” the psychological consultant said. “Whenever you did, you were bound to come here looking for your Contact Unit. Right, Doug?”
Speechless, I nodded.
He smiled faintly. The expression, along with his slightly mussed, white hair and stout face, gave him an anomalous cherubic appearance.
“So you come here and find me,” he went on. “I was afraid that would happen. But I don’t suppose it makes any difference now. Because, you see, it’s too late.”
“Aren’t you going to report me?” I asked, just a bit hopeful.
“Aren’t I going to report you!” He laughed. “Doug, your mind won’t get out of its rut, will it? You don’t yet see that—”
The man who had been with him made his second emergence from the president’s office. This time he had four rugged-looking reaction monitors with him.
But Collingsworth stepped in front of them. “That won’t be necessary,” he said.
“But you said he was with Reactions!”
“Possibly he still is. But he won’t be, not for long. Siskin’s got him on the skids.”
The man eyed me speculatively. “This is Hall?”
Collingsworth nodded. “Douglas Hall, former technical director for REIN. Doug, Vernon Carr. As you know, Carr is president of ARM.”
The man extended a hand. But I drew back. Only dimly had I heard the conversation. Instead I had braced myself for the final moment when I would be summarily yanked. Would it come without warning? Or would the Operator first couple himself with me to verify my incorrigibility?
“You’ll have to excuse Hall; he’s not himself,” Avery apologized ambiguously. “He had his own trouble to begin with. And Siskin hasn’t been making things any easier.”
“What are we going to do with him?” Carr asked.
Collingsworth took me by the arm and drew me across the hall toward a closed door. “Before we decide that, I’d like to speak with him alone.”
He studded the door open and brought me into what was obviously a board room, with its long mahogany table bracketed by two lines of empty chairs.
Then I understood. He had to get me alone so then would be no witnesses to my deprogramming!
I whirled and hit the door stud. But it was locked.
“Take it easy,” Collingsworth said soothingly. “I’m no Contact Unit.”
I turned incredulously to face him. “You’re not?”
“If I were, I would have decided to have you yanked long ago, on the basis of your obstinate convictions.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“Forget about your damned obsession. Look at this development rationally. Isn’t it understandable that my sympathies might be fully against Horace Siskin and his grubby enterprise? In short, I’m an agent, all right. But not in the sense you imagine. I’m aligned with ARM because I realize it’s the only organization strong enough to fight Siskin’s simulator.”
Relieved but confounded at the same time, I groped m way into a chair.
Collingsworth came and stood over me. “I’ve been working with the reaction monitors, keeping them filled in on ever move Siskin’s made. That’s why ARM was ready with it picketing gambit within hours after Siskin broke the news of Simulacron-3 at the party.”
I glanced u
p. “You planted the thermite bomb?”
“Yes. But believe me, son, I didn’t know you were going to be in the peephole room when it went off.”
Unbelievingly, I repeated, “You’ve been spying against Siskin?”
Nodding, Avery said, “He’s vicious, Doug. I realized what his ultimate goal was when I saw him with Hartson. But I was working with Vernon Carr long before then. I had enough sense to know you can’t, with the flick of a simulectronic switch, throw millions of men out of jobs all over the country.”
Convinced finally that he wasn’t, after all, the Contact Unit, I lost interest in his petty intricacies. But he misinterpreted my silence for skepticism.
“We can fight him, son! We’ve got allies we don’t even know about! For instance: Siskin and the party get their flunkies to introduce legislation outlawing public opinion sampling. And what happens? A bill that should have become law gets dumped for this session!”
I lunged from the chair. “Avery! Don’t you realize what that actually means? Don’t you see who your ally is in Congress?”
He straightened, perplexed.
“The Operator up there!” I pointed. “I should have realized it long ago. Don’t you understand? The Upper Reality is not just trying to reorient or deprogram anyone who learns what the set-up is. That’s only one of Their purposes. Their main target is Siskin’s simulator itself! They want it destroyed!”
“Oh, for God’s sake, son!” He scowled. “Sit down and—”
“No, wait! That’s it, Avery! You didn’t plant the thermite bomb in the interest of ARM. You did it because you were so programmed by the Operator!”
Impatiently, he asked, “Then why wasn’t I programmed to plant another and another, until I succeeded?”
“Because everything that’s done down here has to be manipulated within a framework of reasonable cause and effect. After Siskin redoubled his security effort at REIN, it wasn’t likely that a subversive attempt would succeed!”
“Doug,” he interrupted wearily, “listen—”
“No, you listen! The Upper Reality doesn’t want us to put our simulator into operation. Why? Because that would wipe out ARM and all its reaction monitors. And They can’t have that because the pollsters are Their system for introducing reaction-seeking stimuli into this world!”
Counterfeit World Page 12