‘Gates. Your name is Rameses Gates. Can you hear me?’
‘Come on, Dallas. What’s the next number in the sequence?’
‘Gates, answer me.’
‘Thirty-seven, Dallas. The answer’s thirty-seven. Dallas? Are you reading me?’
IV
Simworld: Elapsed Time
2 Hours 30 Minutes
Lying in the frozen interior of the electric car, Dallas opened his eyes and tried to remember. For some reason, a number came into his cold and aching head. Twenty-eight. What was the significance of that? But what did it matter now that he was dead and lying inside his tomb? Lying there like some sepulchral statue? One short sleep past, we wake eternally and death shall be no more. This living buried man, this quiet mandrake, rest. A voice followed this number.
‘Wake up, Dallas, wake up. The outer door’s opening. You’re about to enter the main facility.’
Until that moment he had not been afraid. But when he saw how close to a frozen death he had come, panic seized him and galvanized his almost rigid muscles. He had momentarily forgotten that this was still a simulation.
‘Get up, Gates. For Christ’s sake move. The door’s inside. The car’s going forward again. Dallas? Move now.’
For a brief second, Dallas had thought he was dreaming. But at last he recognized that this was Prevezer urging them both to action. Quickly he unzipped the polyethylene bag and struggled to his feet, his helmet forcing open the door on top of the electric car. And even as he climbed, then half-jumped, out of the car into the bright light of the main facility’s entrance hall, he recognized that he would have to devise something more certain than the voices of Prevezer and Simou to rouse him when it came to the real thing.
‘Dallas,’ he heard himself mumble as Prevezer and Simou cheered. ‘Back on-line.’
‘We’re about to lose your signal,’ said Simou. ‘Good-bye, Dallas, and good luck.’
Glancing around him he saw that the outer door of the facility had started to slide shut behind them. They had made it, although Gates had yet to stir from the floor of the car.
‘Thanks,’ he said.
Whatever Prevezer and Simou said next was lost as the outer door closed as silently as it had opened.
‘Gates, come on, we’ve got to move.’
The other man remained motionless. Dallas reached down and picked him up, grateful for the microgravity that made possible such a superhuman feat of strength. And not a moment too soon. Even as he carried Gates across the entrance hall and laid him against the airlock door that led into the rest and recreation area, the single inner door leading into the labyrinth opened, and the electric car disappeared into the Stygian darkness beyond. Then the entrance to the labyrinth closed again. No one — not even the First National security workers who handled the supplies of cryoprecipitate — was allowed beyond this door, which was itself protected by a number of safeguards: proximity detectors and mechanical vibration detectors that could activate lethal bolts of electricity. Anyone close to the car’s exterior as it entered the labyrinth would have been fried to a crisp.
Gates remained motionless on the ground, still wrapped inside the body bag. If not for the fact that it and his space suit were intact, Dallas might have suspected that he had already succumbed to the molecular disassembler. Instead Gates had clearly suffered some kind of hypothermic reaction which made it imperative that Dallas, who was himself chilled to the bone, get him warmed up as soon as possible. Dallas switched on the heaters in both their suits, filling them with hot air. Then he dragged Gates into the airlock and repressurized the chamber before opening the hatch that led into the R&R area.
Once Gates was out of the body bag, Dallas was able to see his life-support computer and read off the man’s vital signs. These were not encouraging: Gates’s core body temperature was down to only eighty-two degrees Fahrenheit — much colder than Dallas — while the heart rate was twenty per minute and the breathing rate just one every fifteen seconds. Perhaps having the virus had made him extra sensitive to the extreme cold. After all, body temperature had everything to do with surface blood flow and vasodilation. The only plausible explanation for what had happened to Gates, but not to Dallas, was that having P2 resulted in a quicker maximal vasodilation and increased cutaneous blood flow.
Feeling a little warmer now, Dallas took off his own helmet but decided not to remove Gates’s, so as to help hot air circulate inside the man’s self-contained environment. Searching the frost-covered plastic shielding on the other man’s face he found no indication of life and, had it not been for the vital signs displayed on Gates’s life-support computer, he might have assumed his friend was dead. It was clear that he was looking at a case of metabolic icebox.
What Dallas really couldn’t understand was why Prevezer hadn’t simply ended the simulation by now. Here was Gates, only just alive, with a hardly discernible heart rate and a core body temperature that ought to have told Prevezer something had gone badly wrong, and yet still the simulation continued. Dallas didn’t think it was possible for Gates to die in the simulation, but he hardly felt he could neglect his condition on the assumption that at any minute they would find themselves switched back into the Galileo Hotel and the real world. He had no alternative but to keep Gates warm and wait for his vital signs to improve.
Dallas stood up, stretched out a painful cramp in his leg, and suddenly found he badly wanted to pee. He recognized this was a sign of cold diuresis: vasoconstriction created a greater volume of pressure in the bloodstream, resulting in his kidneys pulling off excess fluid to reduce the pressure. A full bladder was another opportunity for his body to lose heat, so urinating would serve to help him get warm again. There was no time to find a washroom. Fumbling with numb fingers to open the codpiece on his space suit, he stumbled toward a corner of the R&R area to relieve himself. Besides, in the simulation, he didn’t much care how he left the R&R area, especially as he expected the simulation to end at any moment. But when he’d finished urinating and found it still remained in progress, he quickly checked on Gates and then went to find the galley, intent on making them both a hot drink.
V
‘You know, if you fire that thing,’ Prevezer said carefully, ‘your bullet will go straight through a human body and then shatter the window. We’ll all be killed when the room depressurizes.’
‘You let me worry about the gun,’ insisted Rimmer. ‘You just concentrate on doing what I tell you, friend. Besides...’ He collected a small bust of Galileo off the suite’s writing desk and launched it at the window. It bounced off the glass, ricocheted back into the room, and was neatly caught by Simou. Rimmer smiled and added redundantly, ‘Don’t you know anything? It’s armor-plated. After all, you never can tell when a meteorite’s going to give you a cold call from deep space. I thought everyone knew that. Or maybe you just haven’t stayed here before.’ He waved the gun at the bust in Simou’s hands. ‘I wouldn’t get any ideas with that thing, if I were you. Ronica will tell you that I’m the gregarious type. I like killing new people.’
‘Do exactly what he says, Sim,’ Ronica advised him.
Simou placed the bust slowly on the marble floor. Rimmer nodded his approval and then looked at the faces of the other two men in the room — Cavor and Prevezer — sizing them up for any resistance. Cavor understood this and felt certain that Rimmer would underestimate him. In which case he might stand a chance of disarming Rimmer.