by Robert Maxxe
He gazed at her steadily, for the first time robbed of a quick answer.
Then, from a distance, Carrie heard the sound of a bell tolling. It was, she realized, the clock in the steeple of the Church of the Holy Spirit, a block away on Linden Street, chiming the hour.
"Let's go, Lon," she urged again. "It's midnight."
"Just give me another minute. I may be able to tell more about these contraptions after a look at the back." He ducked down behind one of the machines.
Carrie became increasingly jittery. Lon could give his logical technically informed explications till the cows came home, he'd never persuade her it wasn't damn queer that this place locked itself up. (That she'd never seen a single soul looking after the place, come to think of it, not since that one time she'd met Mr. Peale.) She walked quickly back to the street door and gave it a push. Again it opened easily. No problem.
Lon's voice rose from behind the machine. "Hey, this is interesting . . ."
She hurried back to join him.
The way the lighting in the arcade was arranged, only the front area of each game was illuminated. At the rear, where the machine stood free of the wall, there was an aisle of deep shadow. Coming around to the rear, Carrie almost stumbled over Lon, who was on his knees, head down as he peered closely at the lower edge of a machine's rear panel.
She crouched beside him. "What do you see?"
Intent on his inspection, he ignored her question and muttered: "Wish to God I had a light . . ."
"No need to bring God in on this," Carrie said, as she set her shoulder bag on the floor and began rummaging inside. Old habits died hard, and when she'd been with Mike—a chain smoker who was forever patting his pockets and asking: "Got a light?"—she had started picking up matchbooks wherever she went. In a moment she found the one she'd taken tonight from The Laundry. Tearing a match from the book, she struck it and held the flame near the area Lon was examining.
He gave her an appreciative glance. "I knew we'd make a great team," he said, before turning back to the machine.
What interested him, Carrie saw, was a place near the floor where two wide, flat, multi-colored cables were plugged into the rear panel. Lon touched one of the plug junctions, then ran his hand down along the wide colored band as it descended to the carpet and, almost buried in the deep pile, snaked off toward the adjacent machine. Hand still on the cable, Lon followed it, staying down on his haunches. Carrie kept pace, bent over as she held the match to supply light. At the point where Lon found that the cable plugged into the next machine, a second identical cable was also connected, leading off toward a third machine in the same row.
"This, I'll admit," Lon remarked as he started following the second cable, "is a little out of the ordinary."
"But the machines are electric," Carrie observed. "Don't they have to be plugged in?"
"Right. These aren't power lines, though. They're serial ribbon cables. It's pretty strange to find them here."
"Why?"
"Because it means the games are interfaced."
The words were on Carrie's tongue to scold Lon again for his obscure computerese—when the ceiling lights in the arcade suddenly went out. All of them. They didn't flash, they were just turned off. Carrie looked up startled, and only a moment later the flame of the match singed her fingertips, and was extinguished as she dropped it.
Blind in the impenetrable darkness, Carrie felt the first sting of real panic.
"Lon?" she cried out.
"Right here," he said soothingly.
She felt his hand fumbling for hers and seized it gratefully. "Are we locked in?"
"Only one way to find out. C'mon."
Groping in the dark, they guided themselves along the edges of the machines toward the front of the arcade. Nearing the glass doors, they could see the faintest ambient light coming through from the foggy night outside. Lon reached the exit first and pushed.
The door opened and they went outside.
Carrie drank in a deep breath of the cool wet air. "Thank God," she gasped. She'd never had any tendency to claustrophobia, yet just now she had been truly terrified by the prospect of being cooped up overnight. It wasn't merely being locked in that scared her, it was being kept here—imprisoned by the arcade itself, as if the place could administer punishment for her suspicions, for snooping with Lon.
"You don't have to sound so goddamn relieved," Lon chided gently. "Speaking for myself, I wouldn't have minded a bit being locked up all night with you."
She smiled and hugged him, and then the last of the panic gave way to exhilaration. Now that it was behind them, she felt a kind of bubbly adolescent delight with their adventure.
And then the realization hit. Whirling back to the door, she grabbed at the handle and gave a furious tug. It didn't yield. The door was locked.
"Oh no!" she wailed, and then actually gave out a squeal of frustration.
"What's wrong?"
"My bag—I left it in there on the floor."
Lon slipped his arm around her shoulder. "Okay, no sweat. You'll come back tomorrow, soon as it opens."
"But all my keys are in it! My money. Everything . . ."
"You can manage overnight. There's someone at home to let you in."
Carrie nodded absently as she lingered by the door. Then she leaned her forehead lightly on the glass pane, and rested it there. "This place," she seethed. "It lets you out the door and then wham —it knows exactly when to throw the bolt." She turned on him, shirking off his arm. "I suppose you've got some perfectly sensible explanation for that, too!"
". . . if you can stand hearing it."
"Go ahead." She stared at him, simmering.
"Could work a couple of ways. An electric eye at the door counts bodies in and bodies out, and blocks the closing until the numbers tally. Or some pressure sensors in the floor keep it open until there's no one standing inside."
And worked the lights, too, she thought. "Jesus," she said amiably, "you are a clever bastard, aren't you?"
He shook his head. "It's standard security stuff, Carrie." Then again he put his hand around her shoulders. "C'mon. I'll drive you home."
Carrie turned with him toward the car. Then, seeing it waiting at the curb, she said impulsively, "Do you mind if we walk?"
"You know I don't mind a hike," Lon said.
Carrie wasn't sure why she'd suggested it. Perhaps it was only to salvage some of the romantic mood they'd had earlier. Or perhaps, right at this moment, she didn't want to entrust herself to a machine, any machine.
They ambled in silence through the fog. The moist air felt effervescent on Carrie's skin, like some relaxation treatment at a chi chi beauty spa. Walking with Lon, Carrie's thoughts returned to their earlier mood. If she was angry now, it was only at herself. Her fretting about the arcade had steered the night off course. They could have been in bed together at this very moment, exploring each other And she was so starved for the touch of a loving man.
He broke the silence. "What's your name?"
"Huh?" Her thoughts were miles away, in a fantasy with him.
"Your name," he insisted. "Tell me your name."
"Carrie Foster," she replied wearily, acceding to his game.
"See?" he said. "You did what anyone would do, gave the familiar form. What is your full name, by the way?"
"Carolyn Foster."
"Only you left out your maiden name—and probably a middle name. In fact, the odds are that anyone giving a name to the machine the first time would leave something out. Kids are especially casual. So the machine can hardly go wrong if it asks again—but it's just a trick."
She sighed. "Okay, you win. There's no bogeyman in the computer."
"Not so fast. I was just coming to the things I can't explain."
"You? About the arcade?"
"Take that equipment. All that extra RAM and ROM, and those graphics delivered on big screen HDTV"—he caught himself—"high-definition television; that's the latest visual gear, muc
h more expensive than the standard low-resolution game screens. I'd guess each of those Spacescape units goes for thirty, forty thousand bucks. Maybe more. With just nine in the arcade . . . I don't see where the profit comes in."
Carrie said nothing. Where the profit came from didn't matter to her. She wished he wouldn't think about it anymore, that he'd just be with her.
"Then there's the interfacing. . . ." Lon murmured.
Now her interest perked up again. She remembered he'd mentioned that just before the lights went out. "What does that mean—interfaced?"
"When one computer system, or component of a system, is connected to another we say they're interfaced."
"But why would you need interfacing between games?"
"Beats me. Each one ought to be self-contained, it only needs to communicate with the player. But with interfacing, they can all communicate with each other. Their memories could exchange information, pool the input coming from all the different users."
"So if you play one machine, you're playing them all?"
Lon nodded. "Though it doesn't make sense. There's no reason. Playing against one is enough. . . ."
They walked in silence, chewing it over, until they turned onto Shoreview Drive.
"Lon," Carrie asked at last, "do you agree now: there is something wrong?"
He shook his head. "I'm not ready to say that, Carrie. Hell, these are just electronic tools, heaps of silicon and metal and plastic jammed together. There's got to be a logic." He paused. "It'll just take time to work it out."
They stopped on the lawn outside her house. Carrie glanced through the lighted window of the den and saw Klm Larrimore watching a late movie. She turned back to Lon. The unresolved riddle of the arcade hovered over them. Her fault. She wanted desperately to have it out of the way.
"I wonder if you'd mind . . ." she said.
"Yes?"
"Interfacing with me."
He laughed softly, then drew her into a close embrace and lowered his lips slowly, deliberately onto hers. She pressed herself into him, no longer shy about revealing the fullness of her need. And his was no less. He opened his mouth to hers, and with the mingling of warm, moist breath and tongues, their hearts told all the pain of past loneliness and the joyous hope for all their tomorrows.
A dog barked somewhere along the road. Reminded of the neighbors, Carrie eased herself away from Lon. She didn't want someone looking out the window, starting to talk about "the merry widow."
"I ought to go in," she said.
He walked her to the door, and rang the doorbell for her, and waited until the baby-sitter came. He told her he'd call in the morning, and then left.
As Carrie went inside, she heard Lon somewhere out in the fog starting to whistle "Too Young," jaunty and contented though he still had miles to walk.
Before the baby-sitter went, Carrie asked her about Nick.
He had kept his curfew, Carrie was told, coming home at ten-thirty on the dot.
17
At a few minutes after four in the morning, Carrie switched on her bedside lamp. From a lower shelf of the night table she pulled a local telephone directory onto her lap, and turned to the Gs.
There were three residential listings under "Green."
Planning to call in the morning, she started to jot the numbers on a message pad by the phone. Then she decided it would be better to ask Nick if there was an Andy Green who frequented the arcade. The Green boy had looked several years older than Nick—not a natural friend any more than Dana—and if Nick knew him, it would be a further index of how much the spacies mingled, how tightly they were all bonded.
Yet . . . even if they were thick as thieves, so what? For that matter, what conclusions could be drawn from anything she'd seen or heard? That the games were treacherous? Evil? Could you talk about evil coming from a device that didn't possess a will or a soul—even if it did have something like a mind?
She had been batting the questions around all night, failing to snatch more than a few minutes of sleep since climbing into bed. Every time she waded near the drifting calm, alternate waves of excitement or anxiety would knock her back onto the hard shore of consciousness. Sometimes she thought about Lon, about a future with him. But then the pretty thoughts were pushed aside by apprehensions, a replay of remembered moments in the arcade. The animated space creature on the screen, clustered shadows of watching children, that attack of claustrophobic panic she'd had when the lights went out.
Of course she knew Lon was right. There had to be sensible reasons for everything they had witnessed. But then what rational explanation was there for the gut-wrenching terror that had gripped her for an instant when she was locked in the dark with those machines?
Maybe her antipathy to the whole spacie craze came simply out of —what had Lon called it—cyberphobia? Fear of computers. A strictly modern disease to stack up alongside all the others: fear of flying, fear of elevators, of crowded places, of nuclear annihilation.
Still: why were the games wired together—interfaced, as Lon would say in the special tongue of his technology?
He would give her an explanation for that, too. He had said he would.
Carrie turned out the light and lay back again. Marooned in the silent darkness, she moved closer to the belief that she had herself to suspect more than anyone or anything else. She had been under a lot of pressure for a long time. Pressure to survive and provide, to be the solitary pillar of strength that kept the sky from falling in on her children. Carrying that stress alone, wasn't it possible that cracks could develop? Maybe now—precisely because the burden had eased, and there was hope she wouldn't have to carry it alone anymore—the cracks had been allowed to show.
There was no reason for fear. Couldn't be. Lon would prove it. Wait and see, she told herself, more and more certain as the new day crept closer; Lon would give her all the answers.
Wait and see.
Wide awake at sunrise, she went down to the kitchen and poured her restless energy into cooking. She made a chicken potpie for Sunday lunch, and enough fresh pasta for the house and shop. By then the children were up, so she made crepes for breakfast, a dish they both loved, rolled up with different-flavor jams inside and powdered sugar sprinkled on top.
When they were seated around the table, Carrie asked Nick her four A.M. question.
"Yeah," he answered, "I know Andy Green."
"From the arcade . . .?
"Mmm-hmm." Nick's mouth was full again.
"When you gonna take me there, Mommy?" Emily piped up.
Never, she had an impulse to say, I'll never let that place get its—what: hands?—on you! Then she remembered the self-diagnosis made in the fitful hours that turned bedroom to examining room. All right, there was a boy named Green and the game knew his name. Lon had told her how the trick was done. Keeping Emily away from the arcade was yielding to irrational terror, subverting reality. In fact, Carrie decided, if she went with Emily, it would provide a good opportunity to reassure herself. She could watch Em play Spacescape, make sure nothing happened to her. Happened? What could happen? If there was any risk at all, it was certainly worth taking to measure her own stability.
Carrie turned to Nick. "It's open on Sundays, isn't it?" She recalled Nick lying to her a week ago today, telling her he would be rehearsing at Doug's.
Nick nodded. "Opens at two."
"Okay," Carrie said to Emily, "I'll take you today. But be ready early. I want to be there the minute it opens."
Nick squinted at her curiously. "Why?"
Carrie skimmed through the story: the man she'd been out with last night had taken her to the arcade just before closing time, and she'd forgotten her purse.
Days ago, expecting it would be a bombshell, Carrie had slipped into conversation the news that she had met a man who would be taking her out on a date. After the initial shock—Emily found it hard to believe that "old people" actually went on dates—there had been a torrent of predictable questions: Who is he? Where
'd you meet him? Is he good-looking like Daddy? Is he rich? Carrie had sloughed them all off. "He's someone from town. You'll meet him if we go out some more." No point in making it too much of an event if it wasn't going to last. She had even gone out to the car last night when Lon drove by to collect her, rather than force him to come into the house and submit to the business of being sniffed over by the children.
But of course they weren't about to let up.
"You mean, that's where you went on your date?" Nick whooped now, greatly amused. "To the arcade? Cheap guy, huh!"
She answered in a clipped tone. "I asked to go. And he took me out for a very nice dinner first."
"I'd like my men to take me to the arcade," Emily offered.
"So what about it, Mom?" Nick said. "When do we get to meet this turkey?"
Carrie took the razzing in stride. "Well . . . he's also got two kids. Maybe we could all have Thanksgiving dinner together. Sound like a good time to meet a turkey?"
"Eat a turkey, not meet a turkey," Emily said, and giggled.
Nick said nothing. Suddenly he was eyeing Carrie gravely. She couldn't quite read the expression, whether it was suspicion, or doubt, or classic oedipal jealousy.
Then he said: "You asked to go there, huh? What for?"
The look in his eyes wasn't any easier to pin down, but now it worried her. "What else?" she replied, hoping it sounded casual. "I wanted to play the game."
Nick stared at her, eyes narrowed thoughtfully. A moment later he pushed his plate away without finishing one of his crepes and, still looking solemn, he left the table.
The flowers were delivered at eleven o'clock by a boy on a bicycle —two dozen long-stemmed white roses in a box from the local florist.
I miss you, the card said. Call follows.
She stood in the front hall hugging the flowers, intoxicated by their perfume, high on the very sentiment behind them. God, how nice it was to be courted! She could imagine how much trouble it was to get flowers delivered on a Sunday morning. That only made the gesture more endearing.