Death Dream by Ben Bova

president. The stitches felt slightly rough in his hand. The ball had the proper weight and solidity. Great stuff, he said to himself.
    Jace was waving his bat, waiting for the pitch. He's probably loaded the game in his favor, Dan thought, knowing Jace. He doesn't like to lose. Well, what the hell, Dan thought. It's only a game. Taking a deep breath, Dan swung his arms over his head, kicked his left leg high, and threw as hard as he could.
    The crack of the bat sounded like a pistol shot. The ball rifled past Dan's ear, a solid hit into center field. Jace pulled up grinning at first base as the fielders got the ball back to Dan. And another Jace came up to the plate, bat in hand, an identical toothy grin on his long angular face.
    After four Jaces had batted, three hits and a long fly ball that resulted in two runs scored, Dan let the ball drop out of his hand.
    "That's enough," he called down to Jace.
    "Don't you want a turn at bat?"
    "At this rate I won't get to bat until Christmas!"
    "Okay, okay! You bat, I'll pitch."
    Dan envisioned Jace pitching against him, saw himself striking out ignominiously. He felt the slightest tendril of an asthmatic wheeze in his chest, as if somebody had run a sheet of sandpaper along the inside of his lungs.
    "I've had enough," he said.
    "Come on," Jace called from the batter's box. "We're just getting started."
    "I'm having trouble breathing," Dan half-lied. "My damned asthma's starting up." It was an excuse and he hated it but he also knew it always worked.
    Jace scowled, narrow-eyed, but said, "Terminate."
    Dan lifted his helmet visor. They were standing in the bare chamber again.
    "You just don't have the competitive instinct, do you?" Jace said.
    Dan shrugged. "You've got enough for both of us." They returned the helmets and gloves back into the control booth.
    "You can see what I'm up against," Jace said as he squeezed past the technicians in the narrow booth and opened the door to the hallway outside. "If I get good definition on the players, the background goes flat. Try to sharpen up the background and the players get fuzzy."
    Following him, Dan asked, "What're you using?"
    "Got a pair of Cray Y-XMPs and a brand new Toshiba Seventy-seven Hundred that's supposed to put the Crays to shame. But I think you gotta talk Japanese to the friggin' Toshiba to get it to do what you want."
    "That was a Toshiba I saw in the computer center?"
    "They're not in the pit," Jace snapped. "I've got 'em in my lab, out back. I don't share my machines with the rest of the slobs."
    "Oh."
    "We don't lack for equipment, Danno. It's not like the friggin' Air Force. Muncrief bitches and complains about the cost but he comes through for me. Anything I want, just about. That's how I got you, pal. But he's been getting antsy lately. Keeps moaning about the money."
    Dan had worked with Jace for nearly ten years at the Air Force laboratory in Dayton, the quiet guy in the shadow of Jace's brilliance. No one noticed Dan, except their boss, Dr Appleton. Dan had been just another electronics technician, a civilian working for government pay, when Appleton had teamed him with the wildly eccentric Jason Lowrey. Their task: to make flight simulations as realistic as actual combat missions. To train fighter pilots to fly and fight under brutally vivid lifelike conditions—in the safety of a laboratory on the ground.
    The answer was virtual reality: simulations that are as utterly lifelike as human ingenuity and high technology can make them.
    "I wanna create worlds where you can't tell the difference from reality," Jason Lowrey had proclaimed to anyone who would listen. "I wanna build whole universes of nothing more than electrical impulses fed into your nervous system. I wanna be God!"
    Jace didn't look much like God, Dan thought as he followed his old buddy down the corridor to his cubbyhole of an office. Didn't smell much like God, either.
    "Jace, when's the last time you took a shower?"
    Lowrey interrupted his