Free Counterfeit World by Daniel F. Galouye

of the Grecian warrior and the turtle.
    But I soon tossed the pen aside, irritated over the defiant incomprehensibility of the sketch. My description of the drawing had suggested something to Avery Collingsworth, I remembered: Zeno’s Paradox. But I was certain that Fuller’s sketch had been meant to imply neither the paradox nor its resultant proposition that motion is impossible.
    Attentively, I turned over on my tongue the phrase “All motion is an illusion.”
    Then I realized there was one frame of reference in which all motion is an illusion— in the simulator itself! The subjective units fancy themselves operating within a physical environment. Yet as they move around they actually go nowhere. All that happens when a reactional entity such as Cau No “walks” from one building to another, for instance, is that simulectronic currents bias a grid and transducers feed the illusive “experiences” onto a memory drum.
    Had Fuller wanted me to recognize that principle in the drawing? But what had he been trying to say?
    Then I lurched from the chair.
    Cau No!
    Cau No was the key! It shone through in stark clarity now. The sketch was meant simply to suggest the word “Zeno”!
    In referring to the characters in our simulator, the Reactions staff had adopted the informal practice of identifying them by their last names and first initials.
    Thus, Cau No became “C. No”—almost the phonetic equivalent of “Zeno”!
    Of course! Fuller had had vital information to pass on to me. And he had employed the most secretive way of doing it. He had impressed it on a reactional unit’s storage drum. And he had left a coded message identifying the unit!
    I sprinted through the reception room, leaving a curious Dorothy Ford staring after me, frozen in the motions of restoring body to the sweep of her pageboy.
    I went bounding up the stairs, berating myself for not knowing which ID ward housed Cau No’s storage console.
    After scanning the wall indexes in two wards, I charged into a third—only to collide with Whitney and knock him over backwards. His tool box spilled its contents on the floor.
    “The Cau No cabinet!” I demanded. “Where is it?”
    He gestured over his shoulder. “Last one on the left. But it’s dead. I just wiped the circuits clean.”
    Back in my office, I braced myself against the desk and cringed before another vertiginous assault. Head pounding, perspiration filming my face, the drone of a thousand wasps drumming in my ears, I tried to hold back unconsciousness. When the room finally stabilized itself, I fell into the chair, exhausted and despondent.
    It was almost incredibly coincidental that Cau No should have been deprogrammed just minutes before I had solved the enigma of the drawing. For a moment it even seemed as though Chuck Whitney might be part of the general conspiracy.
    Impulsively, I called him on the intercom. “Did you say our Contact Unit had spoken with C. No just before he attempted suicide?”
    “Right. It was Ashton who stopped him. Say, what’s this all about?”
    “Just an idea. I want you to arrange to drop me into the simulator on a surveillance circuit for a face-to-face with Phil Ashton.”
    “Won’t be possible for a couple of days—not with all this reprogramming and reorientation.”
    I sighed. “Put it on a double shift basis.”
    I snapped off the 1C just as the door swung open to admit Horace P. Siskin, all trim and immaculate in a gray pinstripe and wearing the most cordial smile in his facial repertory.
    He came around the desk. “Well, Doug, what did you think of him?”
    “Who?”
    “Wayne Hartson, of course. Quite a character. The party wouldn’t have its foot in the administrative door without him.”
    “So I heard,” I said dryly. “But I didn’t quite jump up and click my heels over the privilege of meeting him.”
    Siskin laughed—a high-pitched but still lusty outburst that left me regarding him quizzically. He commandeered my chair and