IT WAS THE THIRD TIME THAT JOHN Wilson Heffer had taken a feelie. The previous times, he had only been able to afford a twelve-hour quickie, but since his promotion and the raise that had gone with it, he had found himself in the position, subject to a certain adjustment in his spending habits, to splurge on the whole weekend package. He had been living out the life of Billy the Kid for the past twenty-eight hours and still had another twenty to go, culminating in the famous gunfight with Pat Garrett. Of course, history had been somewhat rearranged for the purpose of the feelie. In this version Billy survived and Garrett was ceremoniously carted off to Boot Hill by weeping whores and the mariachi band from the cantina. The idea of a feelie in which the subject died was unthinkable to Heffer. Only the most perverse entertained the desire to go through the experience of simulated death, and although there were rumors that it did circulate on the underground market, snuff software was extremely illegal.

Even with his raise and his scrimping, Heffer might not have been able to come up with the money for forty-eight hours in the Billy the Kid experience if it hadn't been on the weekend discount list. In the last couple of years, western adventures had fallen from favor, and very few new ones were being made at all. Public taste had changed, and the majority now went for psychedelic space fantasy, the incredibly violent Supersoldier series, and, of course, the fifty-seven hundred varieties of sex scenario that were in the catalog in a section all to themselves. John Wilson Heffer was a traditionalist. He prided himself that he had no time for trends and fads. He still liked the hot sun and the cool dark saloons and the wide-open spaces of the Old West. That wasn't to say that the western fantasies weren't without their share of both sex and violence. In the past twenty-eight hours, he had killed six men, made love to four women, two of them at the same time, drunk three bottles of whiskey, and won four hundred dollars in gold from three pistoleers and a dude in a fancy vest who had just come in off the stage. Unfortunately, he'd had to shoot two of the pistoleers in order to walk away with his winnings. Of course, there was considerable telescoping in feelie fantasy. He was under no illusion that the real Billy the Kid had ever accomplished so much in a single day. Heffer had no objection to that. He wasn't offended that a certain plausibility was sacrificed to cost effectiveness and customer satisfaction. All in all, he was fairly satisfied with the subjective sensation that he was the baddest desperado in all of Lincoln County.

He was also aware, however, that hardly anything was perfect. In this case, it was the software. There was a serious imbalance in the sensory inputs. The audio was normal enough; but the olfactory and the tactile were way up, while the visual was right down, indistinct and muddy. The daytime on the streets was all glare and shimmer, while the nights in the saloons were dark, out of focus Rembrandts where he had to rely on impression rather than actual sight.

No matter how deeply he went into the fantasy, a small, objective part of his mind always remained apart from the adopted identity. It simply watched and observed. It was that part of him that was determined that he should say something once the experience was over. The feelie really wasn't good enough. Sure, he was enjoying himself, but that was hardly the point. It was a matter of principle. Once they'd laid you out in the plastic cabinet that was just a little too much like a coffin, connected the electrodes, and put you under, it was too late. You couldn't come out of the indream to complain about the software quality. All that should have been checked out up front. The discount notwithstanding, he had paid a small fortune for this weekend, and he wasn't about to tolerate a poor visual and overpowering smells. He was going to demand a refund.

It had been the smells that had hit him first. His own smell was less than pleasant: a mixture of acrid sweat, old leather, gun oil, and hot metal. The catalog had neglected to mention that Billy the Kid appeared to bathe on something like an annual basis and only shaved maybe once a week. That posed a bit of a problem for the normally fastidious Heffer. He had experienced nothing like this when he had spent twelve hours as Bat Masterson. Masterson had been extremely clean and had changed his shirt no less than three times in the course of the fantasy. Walking into the cantina had been the worst. As he had come through the batwing doors, the wave of stale beer, rank cigar smoke, and the sweat of men as filthy as himself had all but knocked him off his feet. He had been quite unable to enjoy the way the place had fallen silent and the piano player had stopped playing. The unwashed smell of the mexicali whores, which they couldn't disguise even with liberal amounts of cheap perfume, had all but made him gag.

The overloaded tactile inputs, on the other hand, were something else again. They gave everything a strange edge that, although uncomfortable at times, could also be extremely exhilarating. During the gunfights, when the Colt Peacemaker-an accurate replica of the Kid's own custom-made weapon, the one with the unusual curved, eagle-beak handle-bucked in his hand, the sensation made him feel close to godlike. And the women. In that area, he had no complaints about the tactile overload. Heffer's therapist had told him on a number of occasions that he was too much of a prude to truly enjoy himself, but in this instance, he had broken out and gone mindlessly wild. When he climbed the stairs with a saloon girl on each arm, he was moved to a previously unattainable level of physical delight. They were like a pair of bright-eyed, golden-skinned animals, sinuous and sensual, with swirling manes of jet-black hair. They giggled and they did things to him, and he, as Billy the Kid, accepted it as his due tribute. Their mouths, their hands, the smooth heat of their inner thighs working on him in turns and together, had taken him to places that he had never been before. He even managed to lose himself so completely that he had forgotten about their lack of personal hygiene and his own fear of disease. What the hell, he had told himself. You can't catch a retrovirus from an electronically induced illusion no matter how bad she might smell.

Billy the Kid/Heffer drank and whored through the long afternoon. In a feelie, the fictional principal never slept, and there were no bad aftereffects. The recipient, on the other hand, technically slept all the time; although his or her brain was racing, the body was under the impression that it was enjoying deep, untroubled REM sleep. Garrett was coming at sunset, and the whole town knew it. A hot, lazy tension was building. Little kids played in the street, antagonizing scorpions with burning twigs. Tongue-lolling dogs stretched out flat in patches of shade under the wooden sidewalk. Someone somewhere was playing a guitar, a mournful Spanish dirge in a minor key, all about love, betrayal, and murder. "The Flowers of Evil." Heffer found that he could understand the lyrics even though he normally couldn't speak a word of Spanish. Inside the cantina, the men of the town sat with their tequila and their slices of lime and watched him. He was the marked one. He was the one who might be dead before the darkness gathered. They watched him for any slip, a word or a look, a shake of the hand, anything that might be a sign of weakness or fear. Billy the Kid/Heffer laughed at them. He had the wild confidence of the young, reckless, and drunk. Pat Garrett, badge or no badge, wasn't going to be a problem.