There was much good-natured shivering in the line, but it was infused with laughter-until the beefy redhead stepped off the strip. There was a shiny metallic object half-buried in the sand, and she was stretching out to reach it. Somehow she overbalanced and took that one step.
Immediately, a flashing dark shape swooped, and a shark had her by the leg. Her face distorted horribly as a scream ripped out of her throat. The shark tried to carry her away, but now a zombie had her by the other leg. It pulled, its face lit by a hungry grin. There was a short tug-of-war, and the redhead lost.
"I'm gonna be sick," Ollie moaned. He looked at Gwen's smile and was alarmed. "My God, you really are sick!" She nodded happily.
It was near chaos. No one else stepped off the strip, but zombies and sharks darted toward the group, again and again. They were getting in each other's way.
Another scream from the rear as a teenaged boy threw himself flat. A great shark skimmed just over him. The boy huddled, afraid to get up. The walking dead were converging on the green strip... and when Ollie looked down, the green glow had faded almost to the color of the mud. He chose not to mention it to Gwen. The others saw nothing but sharks and zombies converging, reaching for them.
There was a sudden rumbling, and the ground began to shake. "Earthquake!" Tony yelled. Then his long jaw hung slack with amazement.
Because the buildings were tumbling back together. As they watched, sand and rock retreated from the streets, and tumbled masonry rose in the water to reform their structure.
A golden double-arch rose tall again, and a fistful of noughts sprinkled themselves across a sign enumerating customers, or sales, or the number of hamburgers that could be extracted from an adult steer.
Zombies were sucked backward through the water, into office buildings and stores and cars and buses. Bubbles rose from beneath the hoods of cars waiting patiently for a traffic light to change. Fully clothed pedestrians stood ready to enter crosswalks.
Then the water receded, and for a moment they saw Los Angeles of the ‘eighties, suddenly alive and thriving, filled with noise and movement. They were shadow figures in a world momentarily more real than their own. A bus roared past the group, and Tony choked on a powerful, unfamiliar, somehow frightening smell.
The narrator's forgotten voice had been droning on. "Now we come to the end of our journey to a lost world. We at Dream Park hope that it has been as entertaining for you as it has been for us. And now-" The lost world began to fade, and the green path flared bright as it flowed into a dark corridor. Lights came up, and when the narrator finished speaking it was in the neutral voice of the computer. "Enjoy the rest of your stay. Oh... is anybody missing?"
"The redhead," Acacia murmured. "Who came with the, ah, the lady who got eaten by the shark?" She sounded only half serious, but there was an answering murmur of inquiry. Gwen tugged at her sleeve.
"Nobody came with her, Acacia. She was a hologram." Tony elbowed her in the ribs. "Cas, she wasn't there till the trip started. I noticed." He grinned at her. "Faked out again, huh?"
"Just wait till tonight, Tony, my love," Acacia said sweetly. "It's all set up with the Park. You'll swear I'm there in the room with you..."
Chapter Three
THE LORE MASTER
Griffin heard the laughter as soon as he got out of the elevator. He peeked around the corner carefully. One never knew what might be prowling the fifth floor of the R&D building.
There didn't seem to be anything ominous lurking about, just an open door to Skip O'Brien's psych lab. Silence, then another gale of mirth. Alex walked softly across the hall and poked his head in.
A group of Psych Research assistants sat and stood clustered around a hologram of a seven-year-old boy chasing after a loping white rabbit.
"Stop!" the boy panted.
The rabbit pulled an oversized pocket watch from somewhere in its fur. Its whiskers twitched nervously. "Oh, dear, oh dear! I shall be too late!" It bounced along a tunnel into the darkness.
Griffin smiled, then laughed aloud. Synthesizer-assisted or not, the white rabbit spoke with Skip O'Brien's voice and ran with Skip's bouncy walk.
The rabbit disappeared from the field. The boy was gone a moment later. One of the techs diddled a switch, and the image cut to the boy falling through the air.
Alex walked around the group to the transmission booth. By the slanted observation window he found Melinda O'Brien.
Alex tapped her shoulder. "Looks like he's having fun."
The frown lines that had creased the corners of her mouth shallowed as she turned to him. "He always does, doesn't he, Alex?" She raised a cheek for him to kiss.
Melinda smelled like perfumed powder, as always. She was handsome in an angular way. She should wear her hair down, Alex thought, to soften the lines of her face. He'd never dared tell her that.
"It's good for him, Melinda. It's fun to watch, too."
She smiled for him and turned back to watch her husband.
In the field, an awkward white rabbit tumbled through space, mugging ferociously. In the transmission booth, Skip waved his arms and thrashed in mock-panic. The computer-generated rabbit animation cloaked him, following his body movements for reference.
Suddenly Skip looked straight at them and grinned. He hopped out of the booth and said, "Just be a minute. Let me grab my coat."
The other Psych personnel gave him a rousing round of applause, and Skip took a quick bow. He buttoned his jacket over his modest paunch, and slicked back a thatch of unruly blond hair. The hair was a good transplant that had cut ten years off Skip's appearance. "Let's go," Skip said cheerfully, and led the way.
"What was that about, Skip?"
O'Brien had reached the elevator doors. "Oh, yeah, that." He laughed. "We're going to rework the Gravity Whip."
The doors opened, and Skip turned to Alex. "Where to?"
"Gavagan's?"
Skip raised an eyebrow to Melinda, who nodded quickly. Skip punched the Gavagan's code into the selector. The door closed. A gentle sway told them they were moving.
"Why redo the Whip? It's still pulling ‘em in."
"Because it is there. Alex, the Gravity Whip is almost twelve years old. We can do a lot better now."
Melinda was genuinely curious. "That had something to do with your rabbit act?"
There was a clicking sound as their elevator cage switched rails. It began sliding sideways.
"Absolutely. We're going to rework the Whip for total Environment. Redesign the cars, add opticals, sound, texture. We've got a dozen scripts waiting for the special effects programs. Think of an ‘Alice in Wonderland' where the customer really falls down the rabbit hole, or a space trip where your gravity goes out at selected moments. Picture yourself as James Bond in that skydiving sequence in ‘Moonraker'-"
"Sounds good."
"-trying to steal a parachute before you hit ground! It gets better, too. We're working on ways to stretch that thirty seconds of free-fall time, psychologically."
He got a blank stare from Alex, and Melinda gave a wise, tired sigh.
"Psychological time perception is extremely flexible. Just to start, there's anticipatory time, time spent waiting for something to occur. There's experiential time, the apparent duration of involvement in a given set of events, and there's reminiscent time, or ‘recalled time' which is different from the other two due to the ‘storage key' phenomenon."
"Storage key?" Alex saw Skip marshalling a response, and realized his mistake. Too late; Skip was off and running.
"Do you know about Sperling's eight-second law? You always remember an eclipse lasting eight seconds. It's because eclipse watchers spend the whole time watching one thing. If you want your memory to store more than that you have to keep looking around. What we're doing with the Gravity Whip experience-"