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month. The days when they all flew coach. They couldn't even afford business class.

    And he remembered how he would come home, exhausted from the long flight, and the first thing he would see when he got to his apartment was that damned stainedglass flower on the door.

    And Meredith, in those days, was partial to white stockings, a white garter belt, little white flowers on the snaps with

    "Tom?" He looked up. Cindy was at the doorway. She said, "If you want to see Don Cherry, you'd better go now because you have a ten-thirty with Gary Bosak."

    He felt as if she was treating him like an invalid. "Cindy, I'm fine."

    "I know. Just a reminder."

    "Okay, I'll go now."

    As he hurried down the stairs to the third floor, he felt relieved at the distraction. Cindy was right to get him out of the office. And he was curious to see what Cherry's team had done with the Corridor.

    The Corridor was what everyone at DigiCom called VIE: the Virtual Information Environment. VIE was the companion piece to Twinkle, the second major element in the emerging future of digital information as envisioned by DigiCom. In the future, information was going to be stored on disks, or made available in large databases that users would dial into over telephone lines. At the moment, users saw information displayed on flat screenseither televisions or computer screens. That had been the traditional way of handling information for the last thirty years. But soon, there would be new ways to present information. The most radical, and the most exciting, was virtual environments. Users wore special glasses to see computer-generated, threedimensional environments which allowed them to feel as though they were literally moving through another world. Dozens of high-tech companies were racing to develop virtual environments. It was exciting, but very difficult, technology. At DigiCom, VIE was one of Garvin's pet projects; he had thrown a lot of money at it; he had had Don Cherry's programmers working on it around the clock for two years.

    And so far, it had been nothing but trouble.

    The sign on the door said "VIE" and underneath, "When Reality Is Not Enough." Sanders inserted his card in the slot, and the door clicked open. He passed through an anteroom, hearing a halfdozen voices shouting from the main equipment room beyond. Even in the anteroom, he noticed a distinctly nauseating odor in the air.

    Entering the main room, he came upon a scene of utter chaos. The windows were thrown wide; there was the astringent smell of cleaning fluid. Most of the programmers were on the floor, working with disassembled equipment. The VIE units lay scattered in pieces, amid a tangle of multicolored cables. Even the black circular walker pads had been taken apart, the rubber bearings being cleaned one by one. Still more wires descended from the ceiling to the laser scanners which were broken open, their circuit boards exposed.
    Everyone seemed to be talking at once. And in the center of the room, looking like a teenage Buddha in an electric blue T-shirt that said "Reality Sucks," was Don Cherry, the head of Programming. Cherry was twenty-two years old, widely acknowledged to be indispensable, and famous for his impertinence.

    When he saw Sanders he shouted: "Out! Out! Damned management! Out!"

    "Why?" Sanders said. "I thought you wanted to see me."

    "Too late! You had your chance!" Cherry said. "Now it's over!"

    For a moment, Sanders thought Cherry was referring to the promotion he hadn't gotten.
    But Cherry was the most apolitical of the DigiCom division heads, and he was grinning cheerfully as he walked toward Sanders, stepping over his prostrate programmers. "Sorry, Tom. You're too late. We're fine-tuning now."

    "Fine-tuning? It looks like ground zero here. And what's that terrible smell?"

    "I know." Cherry threw up his hands. "I ask the boys to wash every day, but what can I say. They're programmers. No better than dogs."

    "Cindy said you called me several