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is less than an hour. So the twelve years that you're so hyped up about works out at about three weeks. .
. . Hell, Lilly, you're a scientist. What we're going through is a unique experience. Three weeks isn't a lot
to exchange for it."
Lilly, hunched over the opposite side of the small corner-table, sipped her coffee and sighed. Corrigan's
words had had some effect. At least she was listening. She indicated their surroundings with a glance and
a motion of her head. "So this is all an accelerated dream. We can afford to sit here and talk about it. It
isn't losing us much."
"If we sat here for the next hour, it would be a whole eighteen seconds out of your life," Corrigan said.
Lilly fell quiet for a moment, reflecting on that. "You people might have told us," she said.
"Tyron didn't mention it when you were interviewed in California?"
Lilly shook her head. "They didn't tell us a great deal about it at all."
"Maybe they did tell you after you got to Pittsburgh," Corrigan said. "But then somebody sprung this
memory suppression, and it got lost with the rest."
Corrigan felt more at ease for the first time in days. It seemed that he had saved the project and would
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have good news to report the next time Zehl contacted him. The thing now was to get Lilly back into
playing her role normally. He made a conscious effort to discharge the atmosphere by being casual,
resting an elbow on the edge of the table and draping his other arm along the back of an empty chair next
to him.
"Out of curiosity, what gave it away?" he asked her.
"You mean how did I see through the simulation?"
"Yes."
"Oh, not because of any one thing that you could put a finger on. Lots of little things."
"But there must have been something that clinched it."
Lilly stared into the distance and tried to think back. "I think it was cracks in a sidewalk," she replied at
last.
"You're joking."
"No. . . . I do remember a couple of days in Pittsburgh before it all goes blank when the group from
California that I was with first arrived. There was a briefing and some preliminary tests."
"Okay."
"Well, I spent some of my free time wandering around, taking in the sights. I like the older, East Coast
cities they're all so much alike in California. Anyway, I was standing watching something in one
particular small street it's not all that far from here that had lots of old, cracked paving stones in the
sidewalk, and I noticed that the pattern of the cracks near the base of a lamp outside an antiques store
looked like the coastline of Labrador."
Corrigan shrugged. "What about it?"
Lilly drank from her mug, frowning with the effort of trying to keep clear what had happened around that
time. "Soon after that it all gets lost. That was when the intensive tests began, and we were supposed to
have had the breakdown and the rest of it. . . ."
"Yes. Go on."
"Much later, after all the therapy and rehabilitation, when I was out and about again, I ended up one day
in that same street. The stones were still old and cracked, so they hadn't been replaced but the pattern
wasn't there." She raised her eyes and looked across at Corrigan. "And that was when a lot of other
strange things that I'd been noticing started making more sense. It was a simulation. The system had the
data to create realistic views of that street; it knew that the street had old paving stones, and that old
paving stones would have cracks. So it put cracks in them. But it didn't put in the right cracks."
Corrigan looked at her, astonished. "And that was it?"
"That was it."
He sat back, nodding. All for the want of a nail . . . "I noticed similar things from time to time, too. I put
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it down to my own faulty memories." He shrugged, as if accepting the need for some kind of explanation.
"That was what all the authority figures in my life had been telling me for years."
Lilly looked at him doubtfully over her mug. "You know, for someone who was involved from the start,
there seems to be a hell of a lot that you don't know," she remarked.
"I'm not really in any better situation than you," Corrigan said. "We talked a lot about the pros and cons
of suppressing the surrogates' memories, but as far as I was always aware, the decision was not to go
with it. So what must have happened is that top management of the project set up another group to
implement it secretly. . . ."
"But I thoughtyou were project top management," Lilly interrupted.
Corrigan waved a hand. "Okay, maybe I should have said company top management. There were all
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