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* Title : #025 : SWEET DREAMS *

* Series : The Destroyer *

* Author(s) : Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir *

* Location : Gillian Archives *

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CHAPTER ONE

"Many men build dream castles. Only a fool tries to live in one." -HOUSE OF SINANJU

Anyone could die, but to die well, my dear, that was what he wanted.

Dr. William Westhead Wooley watched himself say these words on his 19-inch television screen. A drop of blood formed on the lips of his television image, first fuzzily, then in red clarity. The body lay across the floor of a well-lit laboratory. The president of the university was there on television, tears in his eyes. Other faculty members were there too, heads bowed.

"We never appreciated Dr. Wooley," said Lee (Woody) Woodward, director of college affairs. He choked back a sob. "We never really comprehended his genius. We treated him like just another physicist in a market glutted with physics doctorates."

Janet Hawley was there on the screen too, as blonde as ever, as pretty as ever, as buxom as ever. In her anguish, she ripped a corner of her pale green blouse and just for a moment, William Westhead Wooley, dying, saw the rounded edge of a pink nipple above the sloping cloth of the nylon half-bra.

The Edgewood University faculty lost its sharp outlines, the television image faded, and bedroom walls began to replace suits and faces. The red blood on the lips melted away and the television image now showed Dr. Wooley on clean white sheets in a smoking jacket with a pad of paper, hearing a knock on the door.

The bedroom had several similarities to the one in which Dr. Wooley sat, with electrodes taped to his temples, their wires leading to the back of the 19-inch screen, set like a giant square eye atop plastic enclosed circuitry.