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air, hissing as it vanished. I stared after it for a moment and then turned toward the nearest obelisk, extending my hand to touch its frosty surface.
    The monolith was almost transparent, a shadowy form trapped inside it. Almost afraid of what I’d find, I reached out and scraped the frost away from the surface first with my hand and then, when that became too cold, my forearm. I continued to work frantically as the shape became almost distinguishable beneath the frost.
    With a gasp I recognized who I was looking at. I stopped and stepped back, gulping air like a fish out of water. There, below the surface was Sam, an impossible grimace of torment frozen on his plastic face. A face that could never have had such an expression on its countenance.
    My scream, my impossible scream rattled through the darkness, echoing back.
    “Your time has come,” a voice behind me whispered.
    I turned to see an impossible monstrosity in front of me, one huge eye surrounded with clawed tentacles, standing on grasshopper legs. It reached a slime-covered appendage toward me.
    My blood thundered in my ears. I dropped to the ground and clutched my chest where a heart seemed to be bursting. My vision darkened and the tentacles gripped my throat, tightening, tightening.
    Ralph Crocker
    I have been shot at by, but never shot from, a gun.
    Yet, like most jet users, I have a good notion of what that circus act must be like because abusing this drug makes a guy feel ballistic. My whole body seemed to pour into my view goggles, zip along fiber optical lines, and flow directly into the SupeR-G site. I left my body at the speed of light and entered a world that seemed real, more real, than the day-to-day one in which I lived.
    The sideband code of a skilled programmer flowed into my mind via the VG. Once in my brain, it produced colors brighter and more intense than reality; I could hear sounds too high and too low to physically detect in real life; I could smell things I could never smell in the living world; my body became invincible and tireless — whatever the coder put into that sideband I became.
    That jet can be habit forming is an understatement. Jet’s more real than life. That’s why there are so few ex-jet heads and so many dead jetters. The drug was habit forming to the unth, and most ex-users were ex-users only because they were dead.
    A voice floated from nowhere, echoing in my head with the coder’s prologue. “You are in Vietnam, 1970. You are the pilot of a Bell Model 209, Single-engine, AH-1 Huey Cobra helicopter gunship.
    You have just received word that a squad is under attack and you are to provide air assistance for it. There is heavy ground fire from the Viet Cong. Your chances for success are low. Good luck.”
    Abruptly I was in the pilot’s seat of the chopper, sitting above and behind the gunner who manned the lead cockpit slightly below me. The air was hot and smelled of the new plastic interior of the aircraft whose blades thumped above my head.
    Artificial memories flooded my mind and took residence in my synapses. I “remembered” everything from the synthetic past of my new life role, from time spent in basic training to the period that I had learned how to fly the Cobra gunship that thundered around me.
    Now, according to my new memories, I was in the middle of a flight that I had trained hard for, battling to keep the people of South Vietnam free — though as of late I was beginning to have doubts about this later point, wondering if it was more propaganda than fact, drilled into us by our commanders and an American culture still reeling from Korea.
    I pushed those thoughts from my mind, guiding my gunship northward, hugging the muddy river below us so the rumble of our rotors was masked by the heavy jungle foliage hurtling by below. As we approached the bend in the river, I strained at the control column to keep the aircraft on its winding course over the water. Black clouds to the west silently flashed