Death Dream Read Online Free PDF Page A

in the dimly-lit control booth. Dan wormed his arms out of his jacket. There was no place to put it, so he folded it over one arm. Pulling his tie loose and unbuttoning his collar, Dan leaned in between the other two technicians seated at their consoles and peered through the tinted window. Beyond the one-way glass stood his friend, his colleague and partner, Jason Lowrey.
    The room in which Lowrey stood was spacious, although its ceiling was almost oppressively low. The chamber was utterly empty: walls totally blank, not a stick of furniture, floor bare gray vinyl tile. Jace was crouched slightly, hands on knees, as if winded from exertion. He wore a heavy-looking bulbous black helmet with a darkened visor pulled down over his face. Metallic gloves on both hands. Barely-visible wires trailed from the helmet and gloves toward the window where Dan was watching.
    "What's he doing in there?" Dan asked in a whisper.
    One of the young men at the consoles glanced up at him. "Baseball," he said.
    Jace straightened up and started running backward. Dan saw that he was on a treadmill. Jace reached up with his right hand and clutched at something invisible. Then he grabbed it with his left and threw it with a sweeping overhand motion.
    "How long's he going to be in there?" Dan asked.
    The technician looked up at him again. He looked like an Asian-American and he seemed very young to Dan. He made a tight smile. "Who knows? He might decide to play the whole World Series."
    Dan nodded ruefully. That was Jace, all right. He did things his own way and everybody else had to wait on him.
    After several minutes of watching a pantomime of baseball, though, Dan grew impatient. "Can't you call him out of there?"
    "Not me!" said the Asian. "He doesn't like being disturbed."
    "Then let me." Dan reached for the microphone on the console.
    "I've got a better idea," said the young man. He pushed his chair back and got to his feet. "Let me show you some of the other things going on around here. Jace will let us know when he's ready to see you."

    The executive offices of ParaReality were in the front of the single-story yellow brick building, where their long windows faced the carefully-nurtured lawn of Bermuda grass and the nodding palms and flowering hibiscus bushes that bordered the nearly-empty parking lot.
    Kyle Muncrief had prevailed upon United Telephone of Florida to construct a video conference center in his building for the private use of ParaReality Inc. He had it installed in a windowless interior room next to his own office, with a connecting doorway linking the two rooms.
    Now he sat at the head of the long polished table and spoke in conference with three of his key investors, each of them a life-sized image on the high-definition screens that filled three of the room's walls. The room was otherwise empty, except for Victoria Kessel, sitting at the foot of the table, out of the view of the three men in teleconferencing with Muncrief.
    "The baseball game is coming along extremely well," Muncrief was saying, with a big salesman's smile. His had unconsciously clasped around a nonexistent Louisville Slugger as he added, "You'll be able to play against anybody who ever appeared in the major leagues. And pick your own teammates, too!"
    "The major leagues of the United States, I presume!" said Hideki Toshimura. His pinched, puffy-eyed face not smiling.
    Muncrief conceded the point with a slight dip of his chin. "It'll be a simple matter to program the players of the Japanese leagues into the game. As long as you have the statistics, we can produce the player. Imagine Sadaharu Oh socking home runs again!"
    Lars Swenson, who happened to be in Zurich at the moment, asked, "Can the program be adopted to other games? Football, for instance?"
    "Certainly, certainly," Muncrief said easily, making a mental note to check with Lowrey if that might be possible.
    "He means soccer, Kyle," said Maxwell Glass, from New York.
    "Any game you like—virtually."