Free Counterfeit World by Daniel F. Galouye Page B

sense.
    A tall, thin man stepped out of the next booth. He approached and I could see he was trembling. “Mr. Hall?” he asked uncertainly.
    Nodding, I scanned the typical hotel lobby setting. “Is anything wrong?”
    “No,” he said miserably. “Nothing you would appreciate.”
    “What is it, Ashton?” I reached for his arm but he drew back shuddering.
    Then he found words for his distress. “Suppose, in your world, a god dropped down and started talking with you.”
    I could appreciate his humble, awed perspective. I seized him by the shoulder nevertheless. “Forget it. Right now I’m just like you—a sentient bundle of simulectronic charges.”
    He turned half away. “Let’s get it over with. Then you can go back.” He jerked his head in an indefinite direction.
    “I didn’t realize direct contact would be this difficult.”
    “What did you expect?” he demanded scornfully. “A picnic?”
    “Ashton, we’re going to work out something. Maybe we can relieve you of your duty as a Contact Unit.”
    “Just yank me completely. Wipe me clean. I wouldn’t want to go on, knowing what I know.”
    Ill at ease, I hurried to the point. “I wanted to talk with you about Cau No.”
    “Lucky, deprogrammed devil,” he commented.
    “You spoke with him just before he tried to kill himself?”
    He nodded. “I’d had my eye on him for some time. I sensed he was going to crack up.”
    I stared intensely into his face. “Phil, it wasn’t just the meteors and the storm that set him off, was it?”
    He looked up sharply. “How did you know?”
    “There was something else then?”
    “Yes.” His shoulders fell. “I didn’t say anything about it. I was vindictive, spiteful. I wanted to let Cau No have full rein-wreck the whole damned setup. Then you’d have to wipe everything clean and make a second start.”
    “What was it that set him off?”
    The man hesitated, then blurted it out. “He knew. Somehow he found out what he was, what this whole rotten, make-believe city was. He knew it was only part of a counterfeit world, that his reality was nothing but a reflection of electronic processes.”
    I sat up stiffly. Whatever information Fuller had consigned to the Cau No entity, it had had that terrific an impact—enough to alert him to the fact that he was merely an analog human being.
    “How did he find out?” I asked.
    “I wouldn’t know.”
    “Did he talk about anything else, any restricted data that might have been impressed on his drums?”
    “No. He was just obsessed with the idea that he was—nothing.”
    I glanced down at my watch. And I regretted having allotted myself only ten minutes for this face-to-face. “Time’s up,” I said, heading back for the videophone booth. “I’ll drop down and see you again.”
    “No!” Phil Ashton called after me. “For God’s sake, don’t!”
    I pressed back in the booth, closed the door and watched the second hand of my analog watch creep up on the minute.
    With two seconds to go, I glanced out into the lobby. And I almost shouted at what I saw.
    Fighting a sickening sense of loss because I knew I couldn’t stop retransfer, I watched the familiar figure of Morton Lynch—an analog Morton Lynch—crossing the hotel lobby.

7
    I spent the rest of that afternoon figuratively cowering from the simulator. Now it was something fearful and ominous—an electronic ogre that had breathed purpose into its own soul and had somehow charged into my world to slay Fuller and seize Lynch.
    Eventually, it occurred to me that the Morton Lynch I had sighted in the analog hotel lobby might have been a reactional unit who only resembled him. It wasn’t until the next morning, however, that I realized there was a simple check I could make. With that objective in mind, I hurried to the ID indexing department.
    In the “Occupation” file I searched under “Security.” No entry. Under the theory that Lynch’s simulectronic vocation might be a near equivalent of his