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done by Dulwater rather than the police.
He didn t suppose anyone would be listening in, so he went upstairs and took a
quick hot shower, thanking God for the in-stantaneous water heater. He left
the light off in the bathroom, though he couldn t say why. Perhaps it was
because it felt like procedure.
He dried himself off and searched for clean and, above all, warm clothes.
There were a few other things he needed, but they were in his workshop. He
walked into Allan s room again, restless, unable to sit down. The yellow light
caught his attention. The screen was black, but when he nudged the mouse it
came to life, showing him the games menu from the hard disk. There were a
couple of good games there, and some which must have been new from the last
time he and Allan had played together.
Then Reeve saw the game Allan had loaded from the disk sent to him by Jim. The
game Allan couldn t get on with. It was called Prion.
Jesus, Reeve whispered. Prion, as in PrP, as in the bad chemicals which had
started this whole nightmare. His hand was fairly steady as he moved the
pointer onto Prion and double-clicked to load the game.
When the title screen came up though, it wasn t called Prion at all. It looked
like a fairly straight arcade game called Gumball Gulch, which is what Allan
had called it, Reeve recalled. Which screen was it Allan had said he couldn t
get past? Five? Six?
It took Reeve a while to follow the instructions and get into the game. As far
as he could tell, he was a turtle in the Wild West, just made sheriff of the
town of Gumball Gulch. In screen one, he rode into town and was voted sheriff
after killing the three bad guys who had just shot the sheriff to bust their
comrade out of the jail. In screen two, there was a bank robbery to foil. The
graphics, so far as Reeve could judge, were pretty good, as were the sound
effects, complete with voices.
After maybe half an hour, he was in screen four. In screen three he d had the
option of taking as deputy a one-legged drunk. Reeve had accepted Stumpy,
who now guarded the villains from the bank robbery.
Suddenly Reeve paused. What the hell am I doing? he asked himself. But he
kept on going.
Screen four was a difficult one. Reelection time was coming up, and Reeve s
popularity was only 40 percent, two of the bank robbers having escaped, and
one innocent bystander having been gunned down during the shoot-out. Reeve
granted a new license to the Brawlin Barroom, which pushed his popularity to
50 percent. But then the rowdiness factor increased, and soon the cells were
bursting. Reeve opted to take another deputy, a fresh-faced young kid.
This is Rio Bravo, he muttered.
The real trouble started on screen five. There was a mass breakout attempt at
the jail. Stumpy had the place locked tight with himself inside. He wasn t
letting anyone in, the sheriff in-cluded, which left Reeve outside with one
kid deputy, a restless populace, and a possible lynch mob. In a little while,
the escaped bank robbers would be coming into town intent on revenge. Reeve s
guns and ammo, of course, were in the jail.
And Stumpy was asking for the password.
Reeve tried a few obvious things, some only a Rio Bravo buff would know. Then
he sat back, arms folded, and did some thinking. Jim had changed the name of
the game to Prion. Why? Suddenly it became clear. As Marie Villambard had
said, Jim was a journalist from his head to his toes. He would have kept
files. He would have kept backups, and kept them well hidden.
Reeve knew now the purpose of the password. He typed in CWC, but it didn t
work. He tried Co-World, then PrP, then Prion to no avail. He tried Killin and
Preece. Nothing.
So then he tried Kosigin.
And suddenly he wasn t in Gumball Gulch anymore. The bottom of the screen told
him he was reading page one of twenty-eight. The print size was small; Jim had
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ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
crammed a lot in. Single-spaced, too. At the top was a message in bold:
I ll let you get back to the game soon, Gordon. I m assuming it s you reading
this, and if you are reading it then I m most probably dead. If I am dead and
if you are reading this, then you ve probably been sniffing around and I thank
you for your concern. The following may be of help. I d dearly love to get it
published. A friend called Marie in France may help; I ll give you her address
at the end. But first, I have a story to tell you&
And what a story. Reeve already knew it, of course, but Jim had more
information than anyone had suspected. There was the stuff about Preece s
history, his revolutionary shock-sex therapy, and Kosigin s hiring of
Alliance Investigative to dig up the details. Kosigin s blackmail of Preece
had been implicit, but Jim s report made it explicit by actually interviewing
two ex-investigators at Alliance who had worked on the job, as well as members
of the original research team headed by Preece.
Including a Dr. Erik Korngold.
Jim had had two very cordial meetings with Korngold. It was Korngold who had
admitted the blackmail. Preece had spoken to him about it at the time. But
then Dr. Korngold had turned up dead, leaving Jim pretty well stuck unless he
could get corrobo-ration. The only other scientist he knew of from the
original research team was Dr. Killin. So he d started pestering Killin, and
Killin had gone to Kosigin.
And Kosigin had decided the reporter had to be taken out of the game.
Jim s research was impressive and scary. He detailed countries around the
world where neurological diseases were on the increase, and showed how these
increases correlated to the introduction of CWC herbicides and pesticides onto
those countries farms. There were snippets of interviews with farmers and
doctors, agrichemical experts and environmentalists. Farmers everywhere were
getting more and more ill. Stress, the skeptics had said. But Jim had found
out different. And when the police did start to get curious about pesticide
side effects, CWC simply shifted spheres, concentrating on third world
countries.
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