by Robert Maxxe
Carrie glanced to Lon, saw his expression mirroring her own perception. Peale appeared truly stricken with remorse. The denial of harmful intent was still on his lips, being mumbled as though by a fighter left punchy from a colossal uppercut.
Yet without her distrust of Peale, Carrie felt adrift in a sea of hopelessly unfathomable events and observations. She clung to her suspicion like the victim of a torpedo hanging on to a piece of floating wreckage.
"If you've only got good intentions, Mr. Peale, why are you hiding?"
"I'm not hiding."
"Running your business out of a place like this?" Carrie waved at the cracked ceilings, the grimy windows. "It's like some . . . underground bomb factory."
"The rent is extremely low, Mrs. Foster, and holding down costs is conventional business practice. I'm not the only one who's seen the advantage to locating here."
"Price isn't the only advantage," Carrie countered. "You're way off the beaten path. Hardly anyone to see how much traffic moves in and out, how many of your infernal machines you're shipping all over the country—the world, for all we know."
Peale rolled his eyes to Lon like a man cornered by a yapping dog, seeking rescue.
But Lon kept up the pressure. "Let's forget about your business methods. It's the product that's really strange. I'm familiar with computers, and I can see these games are far from ordinary."
"Indeed," Peale asserted firmly. "I worked very hard to develop something unique, challenging—"
"I'm not talking about the nature of the game itself. I mean the equipment."
"You find it strange?" Peale asked without surprise. "In what way?" He was evidently testing the depth of Lon's knowledge.
"The amount of stuff you've packed inside each—"
"You've seen the internal workings?" Peale asked quickly.
"No. But it's obvious from the weight—"
"Ah," Peale said, with a lilt of amused irony. "So because my games are heavy . . . I bear a burden of guilt."
"You've also designed them to work in teams," Lon went on sharply, irritated at being mocked. "All your shipments are for the same number of games. Nine. The same number we have in Millport, all rigged to work together. That's the strangest part, Mr, Peale. You've got these games exchanging data. In computer terms, they're talking to each other."
Peale's playful mood had vanished. He stared soberly at Lon, drumming the fingers of one hand on the desk.
"Technology," he sighed then. "It's a kind of language, isn't it, Mr. Evans? When you learn it, then you think everything in a certain territory, within certain boundaries, is easy to understand. You may forget there are variations, nuances, dialects, words that have become obsolete. You forget that there are dead languages that gave birth to the one you speak, of which little pieces may survive. But if you could speak a dead language, Mr. Evans, perhaps you would understand why my machines are not like the ones you know—why they feel as they do, work as they do. . . ."
For a long moment Lon contemplated Peale with narrowed eyes.
"What's he talking about?" Carrie said impatiently.
"I think," Lon replied, "he's telling us that he's put together a very sophisticated game using some very outdated hardware."
Peale turned to Carrie. "Your friend is obviously schooled in the latest computer developments, familiar with circuits that are being miniaturized to the point where the knowledge of civilizations may dance on the head of a pin. But he lost sight of evolution, Mrs. Foster. There were computers once as big as dinosaurs, with intelligence just as limited. What fits now on a desk no bigger than mine once filled rooms, whole buildings. My technology isn't quite that ancient, but what I was able to design for myself isn't so advanced either—not what Mr. Evans would call 'state of the art.' "
"That would explain the size and weight," Lon said to Carrie. "If he's used some old transistor circuits along with memory chips—"
"It accounts, too, for the interconnection," Peale put in quickly. "The game actually draws on nine separate circuits, with a part of the memory in each one. My design was too unwieldy to fit into one box. If I hadn't split it up, I would've had a machine that weighed two or three tons."
"But the technology exists to do it much more simply," Lon said. "I could redesign that system so that each game worked independently and weighed no more than a suitcase."
"I'd be pleased to have you do it," Peale said earnestly. "When can you start?"
"Look, I didn't exactly mean that I would. I have other commitments." Lon gave Carrie a wide-eyed glance, sharing his amazement at this bizarre turn—the investigation turned job interview! To Peale, he added, "If you really want it done, though, I might be able to find you someone. . . ."
"Fine," Peale said. "As long as they'll work for nothing."
"Listen, it's not something you do overnight," Lon said shortly, defending the value of his profession. "No one's going to—"
"Don't bother to explain," Peale broke in. "I only wanted you to understand why I'm saddled with a poor design. I tried at every turn, you see, to save money. It's what you do when you're financing your own business." He shrugged wearily. "I should have done it differently, I suppose, but it's too late now."
"It wouldn't be terribly complicated or expensive," Lon said encouragingly.
"Too much, in any case," Peale smiled pathetically at Lon, then looked to Carrie. "You won't have to worry about the arcade much longer, Mrs. Foster. It will be closing soon. Spacescape has its fans—those children who become caught up in it, form clubs and teams, make up words. I'm sorry if all that alarmed you, but it was gratifying to me because I'd wanted so much to create something special. It's over, though. There weren't enough of them. I failed."
Failed? For a moment Carrie was puzzled by Peale's confession. Hadn't he denied there was any secret purpose to the game?
Then the plain truth dawned: he wasn't saying that a mission had failed; merely a business. It was the same mundane context in which he'd discussed everything else. His location. His design. Costs, overhead. Was this really all there was? Profit and loss?
"Who are you, Mr. Peale?" Carrie asked. The harsh demanding edge was gone from her voice. With his admission of failure, she couldn't suppress a certain sympathy. She posed her question as she might ask the identity of someone she'd found wandering, lost.
The more charitable spirit behind Carrie's interest prompted a change in Peale's tone, too. He was no longer so guarded and oblique as he answered her question.
Until a few years ago, he had earned his living as a radio engineer. Through his work, he had become interested in more advanced electronics. First as a hobbyist, he had built relatively simple devices from purchased kits. Eventually he had been drawn to computers, and fascinated by the games they played. Though he was childless and unmarried—or perhaps because of it—he was interested in children, and recognized the potential for educating and entertaining them with computers. The idea for Spacescape began to take shape. At about the same time, the boom in video games was developing and he had seen an opportunity to turn his conception to profit. He set out to manufacture the game himself. In a field where large corporations were already firmly entrenched, however, it had been difficult for a small independent to attract investment. He was told there was nothing so innovative about Spacescape that its success could be ensured in the fiercely competitive game market. He was told, too, that the format was much too complex to have wide appeal. At last he was faced with a choice to abandon his idea, or proceed entirely on his own.
As he came to this point in his story, it was obvious to Carrie from the faintly feverish glow in Peale's eyes why he had decided on the rasher, riskier course. He was, like many inventors, totally obsessed by the fruit of his own imagination.
So, Peale continued, he had invested his savings, including money raised by selling his home and a bit of land he'd inherited. Everything he owned, in fact, every last penny had gone into manufacturing the game according to designs that he
had been required, of necessity, to do himself. Then, because he couldn't find enough buyers, couldn't afford a sales force, he had decided to try opening arcades himself. Millport was a pilot project.
With a sad smile and a shrug of resignation, he finished the tale. "It was a gamble. An old story in this country—start with a dream, and get rich. For plenty of people, it works. I'm not the first who had an idea and backed it to the hilt, took a chance to get in on a boom. Plenty hit the jackpot with these video games. But maybe I was too late . . . missed the boom. . . ." He shrugged again. He meant to be bravely casual about his failure, but he looked merely beaten down. "For some, it works, everything happens just right. For some . . ." He gazed down at his desk in an apparent reverie of might-have-beens.
Carrie and Lon exchanged pitying looks. The story, like the game, might be a clever invention, a touching tearjerker to discourage further scrutiny. Yet the man was so convincingly pathetic. His gray bloodlessness seemed the pallor of one who has long endured the persistent stress of risk and failure.
But what explained his manner of operating, the stealth and slipperiness? Was he avoiding creditors?
Peale came out of his reverie. "Ah, well, I tried to make something special. But I can see now it was too hard, too difficult. So few were able to get through.
Get through. The children had used that phrase. . . .
"What does that mean?" Carrie said. "Get through to what?"
"Why, to the last level of the game," Peale replied mildly. "It works that way, you see, gets harder and harder as you go. . . ."
Carrie was finally stunned to silence by the possibility there was nothing more than this: simple explanations.
Lon was fidgeting, anxious to leave. But he asked one more question, as if to demonstrate loyalty to Carrie.
"All those games in the back—what are you doing with all of those?"
"I made them to sell, of course. I've sent out brochures to arcades around the country; here and there I've found a buyer. The ones that are left will be auctioned to settle with my creditors."
Lon pushed himself away from the wall. "Considering the way we came here, Mr. Peale, you've treated us very fairly. I'll reimburse you for the damage we caused. I don't know what else I can do by way of apology."
Peale rose and came around the desk. "Never mind the damage, Mr. Evans, you've seen the condition of the neighborhood. I'll be moving out soon, and it won't be long before the rest of the place is vandalized." His benign glance shifted to Carrie. "There is one favor I'd like to ask, though. . . ."
She said nothing. Peale had won a measure of sympathy, but she wasn't able to think of granting favors.
"What is it?" Lon asked.
"I'm trying to salvage as much as possible, It would help if I could have . . . a period of grace."
"Grace?" Carrie echoed curiously.
"Well . . . if anything is said publicly to the effect that the death of this boy in Millport was directly caused by playing my game . . . you can see how that would destroy any chance of selling off the rest of my inventory. You mustn't go against your conscience, of course. But please ask yourself: is it really fair to hold me responsible?" He was looking at Carrie again.
Still she couldn't answer, unable to shake the feeling that Peale was requesting this grace period to accomplish something more than a company liquidation.
To get through.
"Don't worry, Mr. Peale," Lon interceded again. "You won't be held responsible."
Peale escorted them to the front door. Before stepping outside, Carrie looked back once more along the corridor leading to the rear of the building. At the threshold of one door a thin vapor was swirling, the condensation of warm air meeting cold. Carrie remembered the refrigerated room.
"That freezer back there," she blurted. "Why do you need that to make your game?"
Peale glanced back. "Oh, that's a relic of a former tenant, a sausage-maker. Running it is cheaper than rewiring the building to cut out those lines." He laughed as he showed them out. "Goodness! How could you imagine a freezer would have anything to do with making a video game?"
26
Carrie rode in silence while Lon drove, her thoughts in a fog—like the swirling condensation she had seen in the corridor, a mist formed by the hot gusts of imagination colliding with the cold air of reality.
How indeed could a freezer be involved with the game?
How could she think the game commanded children?
How could she believe that Nick was involved with the drowning of another boy?
They were driving back to the Intellitronics factory so Carrie could pick up her car. The full darkness of a winter evening enclosed them, focusing their attention on the strip of road chiseled out of the night by the headlights. Mile after mile their subdued silence lasted. The subject of the game remained explosive territory for discussion, Carrie knew. Lon had gone the distance to help; if she raised new doubts, there was a chance the bond between them might be demolished.
Still, there was no way for them to be together without getting across that minefield.
"You believe him?" she said at last when they were on the expressway, halfway back to Meadowdale.
"I have to," he replied tartly. "As the saying goes . . . it computes."
"Before we talked to Peale, you said the technology for the game was fairly advanced. Now he tells you it's old-fashioned, and you go for it. How does that compute?" She spit out the last word, feeling Lon had chosen it to bait her.
"He's getting advanced results using cumbersome methods. Why not? He's an engineer, Carrie, with a good grasp of electronics. No reason he couldn't figure out how to get the effects he wants." Lon paused, then threw an appealing glance at her. "Let's not argue, sweetheart. He's closing up, anyway, going under. There'll be no more arcade in Millport. What more can you want?"
"Nothing, I suppose. But why did he ask for more time—what did he call it, a period of grace? It's as if he wanted to finish something."
"You can't wind down any business overnight."
Carrie hesitated before taking another step across the minefield. "I'd just feel a lot better if we could have gotten inside. . . ."
He looked at her in alarm, perceiving her wish was expressed less in wistful regret than with simmering intention.
"Carrie, it's finished. Forget it! Maybe you don't realize how lucky we were. We broke in. Peale could have shot us and gotten away with it, told the police something about prowlers, mistaking us for burglars—"
"Are you saying he might the next time?" Carrie broke in. "Are you beginning to think he might have a reason?"
"No!" Lon shouted back. "I'm saying that we broke the law and he had every right to be angry, but he overlooked it. If he wasn't on the up-and-up—if he really had something to hide and wanted to get you off his back—he had his chance. He could have killed both of us."
Carrie looked out the window and let half a mile of landscape go by. Then she said quietly, "He lied to us about the gun."
"In that neighborhood? If I saw my factory had been broken into—"
"But he didn't see that right away, Lon. The window we broke was toward the rear of the building. What he must have seen first, right out front, was this car—not exactly what a petty burglar would be tooling around in. And before coming in, he went up the road and was told that a woman had been around asking for him—and he guessed it was me because of the purse business. Put that all together and he didn't walk in holding that gun because he was afraid. He wanted to have the gun ready, in case . . ."
"In case of what?"
"If we'd already found out too much, opened a machine. Since we hadn't, he was able to bluff us."
"Okay, Carrie, okay," Lon said testily. "I see where you're going with this, and I don't like it."
She could hear that the leash on his temper was frayed to a thread. But the more she thought about it, the harder it was to yield. "Didn't you notice the way he asked us if we'd actually seen inside a machi
ne? The crates were still closed up when he walked in, but he was worried—"
"No, damn it, no!" Lon hammered a palm on the rim of the steering wheel. "I made some remark about the internals, and he was making the point that I couldn't know what I was talking about because I hadn't seen it. Now listen, Carrie: I'm through holding your hand if you've got some lunatic idea about tearing down one of those machines. You're twisting up a chain of harmless facts into knots—and what you're making is a noose. It'll hang you, and it's already choking the life out of us, what we could have together." He was trembling. The car was no longer holding rigidly to the middle of the lane. "God, I love you, Carrie. I honestly think this is the first time in my life I've really been in love. We could share so goddamn much, but with this crazy fear in your head, you're not leaving room for anything else. As long as it's there, I don't belong in your life. You'll never trust me any more than you trust Peale."
A horn blared raucously. Lon had veered too far out of his lane and almost sideswiped another car. He concentrated on driving again, eyes fixed on the road.
They drove the rest of the way to the Intellitronics plant without talking. Lon got a quick wave of recognition from the guard as he sped through the gate and continued up the hill. He stopped the car in the visitors' parking area, right beside Carrie's station wagon.
They sat for a couple of minutes, wordless, motionless. Carrie didn't know what to say, yet she was afraid to get out of the car, knowing it would mean rupturing her connection to Lon, perhaps irreparably. He kept looking at her, waiting for a sign of trust and commitment while she stared out the windshield at the lighted windows of the factory, a place that was turning out computers around the clock. One after another, rolling off assembly lines that were partly controlled by computers. She wondered idly if there were as many children being born around the world at this moment as there were computers being made. Then, oddly, the image of Mickey Mouse flashed in her brain, and she had to search her mind for a moment to find the context where the mouse belonged—that Disney cartoon, the one in which brooms came to life and kept multiplying, replicating uncontrollably like splitting cells, fetching and spilling buckets of water until the sorcerer came and banished the plague of brooms, and the flood they made. The Sorcerer's Apprentice, that was it.