“Did you get my message about the figures for Meechum?”
“Yes, thanks.”
“Called him yet?”
“Not yet. I just wanted to check through them with you first. Remind me what they were about, would you?”
Judy looked at him strangely for an instant, but turned to her keyboard, tapped in a code, and brought a file up onto one of her screens. “It’s the statistical correlations that Borth had done for the tests that we ran last week,” she said.
Ah, yes, it came back to him now. To impress one of Feller & Faber’s moneyed clients, Borth had commissioned a marketing analyst to massage the data from some test runs of “proto-animations” (i.e., primitive creations that had not evolved inside a full simulation yet) in such a way as to suggest that the buying patterns of real supermarket customers were already discernible. It was mainly fiction and wishful thinking, but the client was happy. Also, it would be good publicity material to slip into the interview with Meechum.
His memory refreshed, Corrigan asked Judy to get ahold of Meechum and went into his office. Inside, he stopped and looked around at the walnut-topped desk with its onyx penholders, shelves of reference books and reports that he liked to keep handy, diplomas and pictures framed on the wall. . . . Already, the sights of familiar things were triggering more memories and associations. The dream was beginning to fade at last; he could get back to being himself, and on with the important business at hand. There was a memo board with some cartoons and other clippings that, on the whole as he looked at them, struck him as somewhat immature and slightly silly for the office of a prospective technical director in this kind of operation. He made a mental note to get rid of them that morning. Also, on a shelf of a wall unit close by, was the figurine of an Irish leprechaun that cousin Jeff had given to Corrigan and Evelyn as a wedding gift during their honeymoon visit to Ireland. He frowned at it, puzzled. He was certain that Evelyn had put it on the window ledge in the den back at the house. What was it doing here?
Then the call tone sounded from the comm unit on one side of the desk. “I’ve got Ed Meechum,” Judy’s voice called through the open doorway.
“Okay.” Corrigan activated the screen, then hesitated, confused by the display of icons and options that it presented. After a few seconds Judy turned and leaned across to peer in at him.
“Aren’t you going to take it?”
“Er . . . I’m having a block today. What do I do?”
“Just hit Enter. It’s on Auto Accept.” She said it in the same tone that she might have used to tell him that turning the wheel steered the car.
“Oh, right. . . . Ed, hi.”
Meechum’s features appeared on the screen: lean, toothy, and with thinning hair, but at the same time healthy and vigorous, with a pink-skinned, open-air complexion. “How’s it going, Joe? Got some news for me?”
“Yes. We’ve got the figures. Want me to copy them through?” The eerie thing was that he remembered saying something like this before. How could the “dream” explain that? . . . Unless he had somehow projected it into the dream in anticipation, because he knew he was due to call Meechum. How could one stupid dream have gotten him feeling as rattled and confused as this?
“Great,” Meechum said. “How do they look?”
“Oh . . . I haven’t really had a chance to go through them closely, Ed. But from what Borth says, they look like what you wanted.”
“Me? Hell, it’s you who’s been pushing them on me, Joe.”
“Oh, yes. Right.”
“I’ve had Frank Tyron on me as well this morning, wanting to get a plug in about the new version of the interface hardware,” Meechum went on. He winked conspiratorially. “But I remembered what we agreed yesterday.” Corrigan had no idea who agreed what yesterday. “You’re all set for filming at four o’clock. Is that okay?”
“How long are we talking about?” Corrigan asked.
“For the interview?”