Death Dream by Ben Bova

alligator boots poked out from the jeans' frayed bottoms. He almost seemed to be asleep or hypnotized into rigidity like some stooge for a stage magician.
    Dan knew better. "We're wasting time here," he said.
    "I'm thinking," said Jace, without opening his eyes.
    "Sure you are."
    Dan got up from the molded plastic chair in which he had been sitting and started to pace the lab, unconsciously gnawing on his lip. As usual, he had come to work in a short-sleeved white shirt, neatly pressed slacks and a sports jacket. He had quit wearing ties after a couple of weeks on the job, when he realized that no one wore a tie anywhere in Florida, except bankers and dark-suited missionaries. Now his jacket was hanging from a peg behind the door and his shirt looked rumpled and sweaty despite the frigid air-conditioning.
    This simulations lab was Jace's real office, his real home: a long narrow windowless room of bare gray cinderblock crammed with computers of every type and description from the refrigerator-tall Crays and the glistening new Toshiba 7700 to gray desktop models that had been worked so hard their keyboards looked moldy with grime.
    If a neat, orderly, well-scrubbed laboratory was a sign that no creative work was being done, then Jace's simulations lab looked like a whirlwind of innovation. Computers hummed. Their screens glowed with long streams of alphanumeric symbols that seemed gibberish to everyone—even most of the ParaReality staff—except Jace and Dan. Cables and connecting wires coiled across the desks and tables, snaked along the floor, hung from jury-rigged ceiling supports like dark pythons waiting to ensnare the unwary traveler in this electronic jungle.
    Dan stopped in front of the largest of the display screens. It was fully six feet tall, from its floor mount to its top, slanting slightly backward like a full-length mirror. An intricately detailed picture of Babe Ruth showed frozen on the screen, grinning at Dan out of his wide fleshy face, gripping a heavy baseball bat in both his big hands and resting it against his left shoulder. Dan could see the nubbing on the Babe's sweatshirt sleeves, beneath the short-sleeved Yankee pinstripes. The wood grain of his massive Louisville Slugger was clear and beautiful. He could read the label on the bat.
    He turned back to Jace, still rigidly aslant the chair, eyes closed, chin on chest.
    "Well, it's not the graphics," Dan said, heading back toward the inert scarecrow.
    "Tell me something I don't know."
    Dan had dealt with Jace's moods for years. Usually bright, brassy, full of piss and vinegar, when Jace ran into a problem that he could not solve he withdrew into himself, into the private little world inside his own skull.
    "We just need more brute power," Dan said. "That's all there is to it. Otherwise the imagery's going to keep looking fuzzy."
    "What're we up to now?" Jace mumbled.
    "Five and a half gigaflops." Five billion five hundred million floating point operations per second. Dan had paralleled both the Crays and the new Toshiba to achieve that much computing power. And still the background images in the baseball simulation looked fuzzy, cartoon-like, not even close to the crisp realistic imagery that Jace was insisting upon. "And Muncrief said no more hardware?"
    Kyle Muncrief had almost screamed at Dan earlier that morning. In the three weeks Dan had been working for ParaReality Dan had seen Muncrief, strangely enough, only at his own home when Kyle popped in a few times at breakfast and offered to drive Angela to school. Angie loved the attention and had even started calling the man Uncle Kyle.
    That morning, though, after deciding with Jace that the baseball simulation needed more computing power, Dan had gone up to the quiet paneled offices in the front of the building and asked Kyle if he had a few minutes.
    Muncrief was on the phone, but he waved Dan into his office and pointed a finger like a pistol at one of the upholstered chairs in front of his broad