by Mick Farren
Gibson snapped his fingers.
"Just like that?"
Smith smiled. It was the first time Gibson had seen any crack in the cold efficiency. "Just like that. Sometimes they arrive intact and sometimes they don't. Sometimes they come out at ground level but other times they materialize in the middle of a mountain or a thousand feet up in empty air."
"You sound like you don't particularly care."
"We don't lose any sleep over it."
Something occurred to Gibson. It was one of those thoughts that one immediately regrets thinking. "You say that everyone's human, more or less?"
"More or less, except those who aren't."
"Are you?"
Klein laughed. He must have seen Gibson's expression in the mirror. "Don't worry, we can't turn into the Dunwich Horror right before your eyes."
Gibson turned to Smith for help.
"This is more than making my head spin."
"That's because you have no real grasp of the multidimensional universe."
"Perhaps you'd like to explain it to me?"
Smith frowned. "Not really. I don't have the time, and you don't have the math."
Gibson was starting to come out of his shock, and the repeated double-talk was starting to make him angry. "You call this answering my questions?"
Smith did her best to placate him. "I'm not trying to be difficult. It's just that you keep asking questions that only show you don't even understand the fundamental principles. I mean, you probably think that when I'm talking about another dimension, I'm referring to things that are-" She gestured airily to beyond the car window. "-over there somewhere."
"Well, aren't they?"
Smith shook her head. "Quite the reverse; thousands of dimensions exist at once in the same relative space."
"So how come we aren't knocking into each other all the time?"
"Because different dimensions exist at different levels of reality, at different wavelengths if you like. Like the different channels on a TV set if it helps to think of it that way."
Gibson nodded. "I understand wavelengths. One zigs and the other zags so the twain never meet. There seems to be quite a lot of meeting of the twain, though. I mean, you guys are here."
French half smiled. "He's really quite smart for a primitive."
Gibson scowled. "That's what Custer said about Sitting Bull."
Smith ignored the exchange. "In normal times, the worst that happens is a degree of leakage."
"But these aren't normal times."
Klein snorted. "There's leakage all over the place. Things are getting real messy,"
Gibson was thoughtful. "So, when you travel from one dimension to another, it's really a matter of tuning, of changing wavelengths?"
"You could look at it that way."
"How do you do it?"
"How do you do what?"
"Travel from one dimension to another?"
Smith shook her head as if talking to a child who amazed her with its relentless questions. "There are dozens of ways, maybe hundreds. They range from primitive, animalistic energy rites to the most sophisticated subpartical-"
French quickly cut in. "You think you should be telling him that?"
Smith looked surprised. "I'm hardly giving him a course in how to do it."
"I think all that Gibson really wants is a reassurance that we aren't monsters disguised as humans."
French was right, but Gibson greatly objected to the way that he said it.
Smith spread her hands. "Back in our own dimension, we're as human as you are. There are certain minor changes that take place when we go through transition. Local adaptation is part of the process; it's integral to the dimension crossover. It quite literally comes with the territory. Much depends on subjective perception but, all in all, we are all very similar, certainly not monsters."
Gibson didn't sound quite convinced. "Just our brothers on another wavelength?"
"Right."
"That's a relief."
"I thought it might be."
Gibson looked at Smith. She really was a good-looking woman. "So what I see is what I get?"
"Quite."
"And how do you see me?"
"The adaptation process is really a two-way street. It allows us to interface in all the normal ways."
Despite his confusion, Gibson managed to raise a flippant grin. "And does normal interface include sex?"
Smith's eyes became steely. "It's possible, but try anything with me and I'll break it off."
They were back in the Holland Tunnel. In a couple of minutes, they'd be in SoHo, and Gibson decided it was time to concentrate on psyching himself up as far as he could in preparation for whatever might be coming next. He didn't doubt that their destination would deliver a whole new set of shocks and surprises. They were passing the Four Roses Bar on Canal Street, and he was forcibly reminded how badly he needed a drink. Damn but he could use a shot before they got to where they were going. He had half a notion to ask Klein to pull over, but then he pictured the three streamheat-even if they could be persuaded to stop at the bar, which he didn't imagine they could- marching into the Four Roses, with their neat uniforms and whitebread-clone good looks, while the disco lights flashed and James Brown pumped out from the jukebox. They'd clear the place. The clientele of the Four Roses, as Gibson remembered it, would assume that the trio were some new kind of narco task force and instantly vanish for parts unknown.
They turned up Lafayette and then doubled back on Broome Street. Finally they turned into Greene. The Cadillac slowed to a stop in front of a loft building with no lights showing.
Klein turned off the engine. "This is it."
Smith looked at Gibson.
"Stay put until we're sure there's no problem."
Although apparently deserted, the place was covered by what, even to Gibson's untrained eye, had to be a considerable screen of discreet security. Two heavyset thug types in dark suits flanked the totally unremarkable entrance, like the doormen of some clandestine nightclub. Two others, junior mob in leather jackets and those stone-washed jeans that were so big with Italians, were stationed under the streetlamp on the other side of the street. Every so often, one of them would mutter something into his cupped hand as though he was holding a small transceiver. A black van with darkened windows and Virginia plates was parked at the curb.
Smith, Klein, and French looked round carefully. It was only when they seemed thoroughly convinced that everything was in order that they started to make a move. Smith fixed Gibson with an I'll-only-say-this-once stare.
"We're going to get out of the car and walk directly to the door of that building. Don't worry about the two men standing there. They have orders to let us through. Whatever you do or whatever happens, don't stop. Don't stop for anything. Do you understand?"
Gibson nodded. "I keep going, no matter what, until I'm inside the building."
"Okay, let's go."
They were out of the car and walking smartly across the sidewalk. From what Smith had said, Gibson wouldn't have been too surprised if the air had suddenly been filled with tontons macoute paratroopers in Ray Charles sunglasses. As it was, nothing happened at all. One of the men in the entrance pushed open the street door and they were inside. Two more security goons waited in the small lobby, inner-circle Nation of Islam with faces hard enough to cut glass. The Nine seemed to draw their muscle from the most diverse sources. While Gibson and the three streamheat waited for the elevator, they were inspected at length by the cold black lens of an automatic surveillance camera. A second camera inside the elevator gave them an equally thorough going-over. The walls of the car were lined with armor plate, and no less than three very complex electronic locking devices were mounted on its sliding doors. Gibson didn't find the level of security exactly comforting. It was nice to be protected, but it also indicated that those who occupied the building appeared to consider themselves to be in some considerable danger.
Gibson wasn't exactly sure what he'd expected to s
ee when he stepped out of the elevator, but what confronted him when the doors slid back certainly wasn't it. The major surprise was the absolute normality. The black-glass reception area could have belonged to any trendy SoHo office space: an overly hip real-estate broker, a young, happening rock 'n' roll lawyer; a model agency. The wall behind the designer Swedish reception desk bore the legend Group Nine in a foot-high, slickly corporate typeface. Only two things didn't fit the contrived image of Lower Manhattan yuppiedom. One was the large framed William Blake print. The fiber-optic sculpture was okay but the Blake was a tad too mystic. The other was the thick steel door that led to whatever else the loft might contain. This was simply incongruous. It belonged in a bank or on the bulkhead of a nuclear submarine. No amount of interior decorating could disguise the fact that it could probably withstand a concerted attack with thermite and explosives.
A sleek young woman with straight, Nordic blond hair was sitting behind the reception desk. She stood up when Gibson and his escort came out of the elevator.
"Mr. Gibson?"
"That's me."
"We've been expecting you."
The black rollneck sweater and learner skirt showed off a slender thoroughbred figure that could have been featured in Vogue.
"If you'd like to follow me, the members are waiting for you."
"The members?"
"Please follow me."
She walked over to the massive steel door and tapped an eleven-figure code into a keypad on the wall beside it. The big door slid back absolutely silently, no mean feat of precision engineering considering that the door proved to be almost a foot thick. What the hell were these people using for money? He'd only seen the tip of the iceberg so far, but already the tab was up in the millions, Move important, what were they scared of? The area beyond the door was closer to Gibson's imagining than reception had been. He'd expected the extremely strange and now he was unquestionably getting it. He found that he'd stepped into some weird-science hybrid of NORAD and the Temple of Thoth. It had to be the next best thing to visiting another planet. Even the air was far from normal. There was an almost vibrant metallic bite to it, as though it had been filtered through some run-amok comfort system.
The receptionist smiled back at him as though she'd read his thoughts. "You're in a controlled and sterile biospace, Mr. Gibson. It's heavily over-oxygenated and, of course, the equipment gives off a lot of ozone."
Of course.
"It takes a little getting used to at first but, after a while, you don't really notice it, and the extra oxygen gives you so much more energy. Of course, you can't smoke."
Of course.
"The only places that you can smoke are in the designated areas. I can't stress this strongly enough, Mr. Gibson. Smoking outside the designated areas is extremely dangerous."
Message received and understood.
"I was out of cigarettes anyway."
The receptionist was leading Gibson and his streamheat minders down the central aisle of a very large loft. So large, in fact, that it must have run all the way through to the other side of the block. On one side of the central aisle, there was an area that looked for all the world like a compact version of NASA mission control or possibly the launch center of an MX-missile complex. Lines of computer workstations were arranged in semicircular rows facing the big board, a multiple split-projection display the size of a small cinema screen. The main display was a simplified map of the world according to Mercator. This was surrounded by a bank of smaller displays, some twenty in all; the majority of these small screens showed the layouts of familiar cities-New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles, Beirut, Jerusalem, Tokyo, Rio-but others were showing places that Gibson didn't recognize, either by name or configuration.
The large map was dotted with a hundred or more blood-red points of light. In the main they corresponded with the major centers of population, but here and there there were dots in some of the most inaccessible spots on the face of the Earth. There were two in Antarctica, two more in remote parts of the Andes, three up the Amazon, and no less than six in the Australian outback. Here and there, two or more dots had merged to produce irregular shaded areas that resembled the blemishes of an unpleasant disease. The planet on the big board looked sick and infected, and Gibson knew in his heart that this wasn't just an error in design. The big board was plotting some very bad news. He searched out Haiti. It was one solid red island. The area of Tibet was similarly shaded.
Gibson transferred his attention from the display screens to the people who sat hunched over the rows of computer terminals. Most were the kind of shirt-sleeved, crew-cut young men one might expect to find at a military installation; there was also a sprinkling of beards and rock-band T-shirts that might be more in keeping with MIT or Caltech. Right in the middle, however, there was a shaved head and a saffron robe. What the hell was a Buddhist priest doing running a state-of-the-art computer?
Something else caught Gibson's eye. He paused in midstride and leaned over the shoulder of one of the operators in the back row and looked at his terminal. The characters that were traveling from the bottom to the top of his screen, green and orange out of black, were completely alien, like nothing that Gibson, who prided himself on being pretty well traveled, had ever seen before.
The receptionist immediately snapped him to heel. "Please don't linger, Mr. Gibson. The members are waiting."
The other side of the aisle was even more fantastic. Gibson didn't even recognize the components. A circular area of floor, about twenty feet across, had been surfaced in what looked like either black marble or some sort of plastic substitute. Lines of a red substance were inlaid into the marble like giant symbols or possibly even a huge printed circuit. A pair of sturdy translucent pillars, some two feet in diameter, stood in the center of the marble circle and extended almost to the roof. They were sunk into gold floor settings, and they terminated in two large gold spheres. Inside the pillars, a dimly glowing, green-tinged liquid energy writhed and undulated, making the pillars look like two giant lava lamps arranged side by side. The space between the pillars appeared to pulse with an indistinct shimmer like the heat haze on a blacktop in the afternoon sun. Although there were no people in this part of the loft, the whole area seemed to be alive with abnormal and unearthly energy.
At the end of the aisle there was a pair of double doors. Gibson was a little relieved to see that they were simple mahogany with plain brass fittings. It pleased Gibson that they hadn't been constructed to withstand a small nuclear attack. They were, however, flanked by two more young women in leather skirts and black rollnecks. Unlike the receptionist, though, these women had sidearms strapped around their hips in military-police style, white webbing holsters. The overall effect was not unlike an old sixties Matt Helm movie, and it added a definite touch of the absurd to what had previously just been outlandish and impossible.
Gibson's party halted in front of the doors. Smith raised a hand. "This is where we part company."
Gibson was too overawed by the place to think much about the streamheat. If anything, he was glad to be rid of their certain superiority and condescension.
"Yeah, okay. Thanks for pulling me out of the shit back there in Jersey."
French nodded. "It was nothing personal."
With that, the three of them turned on their heels and walked back the way that they had come.
The receptionist exchanged curt salutes with the two guards.
One of them turned and opened the right-hand door, and the receptionist indicated that Gibson should go in.
After the bizarre combinations of technology in the outer area, the inner room was more like something out of the Middle Ages. The space was dominated by a long conference table of solid dark wood. Its top, polished to a mirror finish, was empty apart from a foot-high gold pyramid and a long, very old double-handed broadsword. Gibson wasn't pleased to note that the blade was pointed directly at him. The lights were dim, going on gloomy, and the walls of the chamber were hung wit
h deep-purple drapes. The only concession to the modern world was a smaller version of the big board outside, mounted on the wall at the head of the table where he might have expected a heraldic coat of arms to be given pride of place. The screen showed the same map of the world with the same scattering of ugly red dots.
"Welcome, Joseph Gibson, enter freely and remain only from your own choice."
Casillas and three other men were seated at the far end of the table. It had been one of the others who had spoken in greeting and who now held out a hand indicating the single chair that had been placed at his end of the table.
"Please be seated."
The lone, isolated chair was too much like the kind of seat that might be offered to a prisoner who'd been hauled before the Inquisition. Gibson sat down in silence, inwardly reminding himself that this wasn't fifteenth-Century Spain but New York in the 1990s. Just beyond the purple-draped walls there were the crowds on West Broadway; the bars, nightclubs, and bustle of downtown in full swing. Men and women were out there going about the everyday business of looking for lovers, copping drugs, getting drunk, hustling for status. There were people in nearby buildings watching TV, making themselves snacks, or fucking. There was probably at least one individual getting mugged within a matter of blocks. Life was going on as usual, in blissful ignorance of interdimensional conflict and impending disaster. It was a reminder that didn't provide much comfort. For Gibson, reality had become this purple room, and he didn't like that one little bit.
The man who had greeted him was seated on Casillas's right. He was black, thickset, and completely bald. From the lines etched in his face, Gibson could only guess that he was at least in his early seventies, but everything else about him gave the impression that he was as strong as an ox. Indeed, that was the overall feel of the man: the old bull, the unquestioned monarch of his herd. Visually, he was easily less plausible than the ancient Hispanic. He was dressed in a silver, three-button mohair suit with narrow lapels, a black shirt, and a white tie. The outfit was completed by blue mirrored aviator glasses. He looked like either the venerable star of a Motown singing group or a retired Detroit pimp. When he spoke, there was the faintest trace of a French accent. For almost a minute he looked at Gibson; then he loudly cleared his throat.
