Free Death Dream by Ben Bova

air-conditioned house, Susan remembered all over again how important sex was to Dan. It was his only release, his only moment to unleash all the tensions and angers and fears that he carried inside him. In a way it was a sadistic game they played: the more frustration and anger that built up in him during the day, the more passion he unleashed at night.
    Only once had Susan forgotten how vital sex was to him and it had almost shattered their marriage. She had never made that mistake again. Susan loved Dan Santorini and she knew he loved her. But it had taken long years of careful, deliberate consideration, day by day, to rebuild the trust in each other that they had almost thrown away.
    He could forget everything while making love; she could not. Even so he could excite her to a pitch of arousal that made her wish there was nothing to remember. He responded to her whispered urgings and she responded to his touch, his lips on her throat, her nipples, her clitoris until they both came and she had to turn her head away to bite her pillow so she would not scream and wake the children.
    Then Susan lay on the bed, sheets twisted and sticky, body sweaty and shining in the faint red glow of the digital clock on the night table, panting as if she had just run ten miles. Dan lay beside her. She could tell him retreating into his shell again. He got embarrassed afterward and the more Susan told him how wonderful he had been the more flustered he became.
    "Another triumph for modern science," she whispered, half giggling.
    Dan's only reply was a grunt. Because he was ashamed. While making love to his wife a vision of Vickie Bessel's face had flashed through his imagination. And then he found himself fantasizing about Dorothy. After all these years he still thought about Dorothy.
    He loathed himself for that.

CHAPTER 7

    The door was always open so it was difficult to see the nameplate on it, which read: DR WILLIAM R. APPLETON—CHIEF, ADVANCED SIMULATIONS SYSTEMS.
    Despite the hefty title the office was small, almost threadbare. Dr Appleton's desk was standard government issue steel, painted olive drab, scuffed and dented from years of use. The two chairs in front of the desk were also old, steel frames with olive drab plastic cushions that were so hard they felt like concrete. The only other furniture in the office were rickety metal bookshelves packed with reports and journals and folders that threatened to spill onto the floor any minute, and a small table behind the desk chair on which sat a personal computer and a small row of hardbound textbooks. There was one window, off to the side, the only wall space that was not covered with shelving. It looked out on a concrete building that was almost identical to the one in which this office stood.
    Three men sat in Dr Appleton's office. Appleton himself was behind the desk on the creaking swivel chair, slim, slope-shouldered, paunchy, his receding hairline halfway up his scalp. He was in shirtsleeves, fiddling nervously with an unlit black briar pipe. His eyes were icy blue and behind the rimless glasses he wore they looked like a pair of pale moons gazing at the world.
    Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Martinez was also in shirtsleeves, starched and ironed so crisply that their creases looked razor-sharp. His blue Air Force jacket hung neatly from the back of the chair on which he sat. Martinez was a fighter pilot, a veteran of air combat in the Middle East, a commander of men. He was built like a welterweight contender, compact and solid, with square shoulders and a flat midsection. His face was square too, the blunt plain swarthy face of a man whose ancestors had toiled in the sun for generations before him. His eyes were the rich brown of the earth, steady and reliable. His lips were set in a tight belligerent line. Yet there were lines around his eyes and mouth that showed he knew how to laugh.
    The third man in the office was a physician and neurophysiologist, Chandra Narlikar: smaller in