by Mick Farren
As soon as they were in level flight, and the seat-belt sign was off, Gibson stood up and started to explore the possibilities of the aircraft. The speed made it virtually impossible for him to sit still. The first thing that he discovered was a smaller rear cabin that was taken up by an enormous circular water bed and a second projection TV. When he saw it, Gibson laughed out loud.
"Jesus, it really is a flying whorehouse."
Janine stepped through the connecting door behind him."The ex-prince had very distinctive taste."
Gibson looked along a shelf of videocassettes beside the bed. They were mainly S amp;M porno punctuated by Clint Eastwood and Sylvester Stallone movies. "I don't think that even Elvis would have gone for decor like this."
He prodded the yielding surface of the water bed. "Did you work for the prince? "
Janine laughed and shook her head. "Definitely not. From what I heard, he expected things from his cabin crews that were far beyond my job description. I work for the charter brokers. The day after tomorrow I'll be dressed like a butler, serving cognac to a Japanese electronics mogul in a walnut-paneled Learjet that looks like an English stately home on the inside."
Gibson sat down on the bed. "That seems like a waste."
Janine reverted to formality. "Would you care for a drink, Mr… Hoover?"
Gibson looked at her with a who-are-we-trying-to-kid expression. "Hoover?"
"I was given strict instructions to not know who you were. The passenger list reads 'J. E. Hoover and party.' "
"I was starting to think that I'd been totally forgotten."
"Actually, I used to have nearly all of your records."
"Used to?"
"I still have them…"
"You just don't admit it in polite company anymore?"
"You did rather screw up, didn't you? I mean, telling the whole of Madison Square Garden to eat shit and die and then stalking off the stage was hardly a great career move. I was there, you know."
"I did worse than that."
"Yes, I read about it."
Gibson wasn't sure if her expression was sympathetic or just professional. "Maybe I'll have that drink now."
"Scotch?"
"How did you know?"
"I told you. I used to be a fan. You gave up drinking Rebel Yell bourbon and switched to good Scotch because the hangovers weren't so bad. I read that in the big Stone Free interview."
"The one with me on the cover."
"I'll get your drink."
With that, she was gone.
Gibson lay back on the water bed, producing a medium swell. He'd never really liked water beds. They made him feel seasick when he was drunk, and after his first couple of experiences with them he'd dismissed the whole concept as an overpromoted Californian aberration. Janine returned with his Scotch. "If you want anything else, just ring."
Gibson nodded. "Indeed I will."
After she'd gone, he muttered under his breath, "You know how to ring, don't you? You just stick out your finger and push. "
Outside the window a night-flight ghost world of moonlit cloudscape drifted past. For the first time, he realized that it was either a full moon or a close approximation. In New York, you tended not to be aware of the night sky. He picked out the movie High Plains Drifter from the shelf of cassettes, fed it into the VCR that was attached to the projection TV, lit a cigarette, and settled down to let Clint keep him amused for the next hundred minutes or so.
Just as the movie was coming to an end with Clint destroying the whole town without ever once telling anyone his name, Smith looked into the rear cabin. "I think you'd better come out here."
Gibson sat up. "What's going on?"
Smith looked at the screen with an expression of distaste. "The captain has just told us something."
"What?"
"You'd better hear it for yourself."
Gibson followed her into the main cabin. The captain was standing there looking a good deal less than happy. "I've just been telling your companions that I believe a strange aircraft is shadowing this flight."
Gibson pushed his hair back out of his eyes. He was about at the point where he'd believe anything. "What kind of aircraft?"
"That's a part of the problem. It has a radar configuration like nothing I've ever seen before. Its progress is also extremely erratic."
Gibson looked round for Janine. She seemed to have secreted herself in the galley. "What exactly are you trying to say?"
"I've never encountered a UFO, but this thing does tend to conform to a lot of the reports that I've read."
Gibson closed his eyes and took a deep breath. "Are you trying to say that there's a flying saucer following us?"
Captain Donovan looked very uncomfortable. "Those aren't the words that I'd choose."
"But they're close enough for rock 'n' roll."
"Right,"
Gibson turned to Smith. "You know anything about this?"
Smith shook her head, at the same time giving a hard look that indicated that he should keep his mouth shut. "Absolutely nothing."
Gibson peered out of one of the cabin windows. Donovan indicated that he was wasting his time. "You won't see anything. Whatever it is has been staying between twenty and thirty miles behind us. It maintains approximately the same altitude, but there are wild fluctuations in its airspeed, and it keeps executing these crazy zigzag patterns that would be quite impossible for a normal aircraft."
Gibson turned angrily from the window. "Does anyone want to tell me what the fuck is going on?"
Smith moved toward him. "We don't know what's going on."
"The hell you don't."
Smith glanced at the captain. "Could you give us a few minutes to talk in private?"
"Of course, but, if you do know something about this thing, I'd be grateful if you'd let me in on it."
For the first time, Gibson saw Smith showing signs of stress. "Please, Captain, just give us a few minutes."
Without a further word, the captain turned and went back to the flight deck. His calm and patience seemed to be fading fast. Gibson's was totally in shreds. The Methedrine was gnawing at his nerves, and nothing would have pleased him more than to hurl something at the wall and start screaming. He could see no reason why anyone should retain their cool when they were thirty thousand feet over the North Atlantic being chased by a UFO.
As soon as the door had closed behind Donovan, Gibson rounded on the three streamheat. "Somebody had better start coming up with some answers pretty damn fast."
French raised a warning hand. "Can the crew listen in to our conversation?"
Smith shook her head. "No, they can't. I had the plane checked out for privacy before it was chartered. Its previous owner was particularly obsessive about privacy."
Gibson's anger continued to build to a flareup. "I don't give a damn what the crew can hear or can't hear. All I want is some answers, and I want them now."
Smith fixed him with a cold stare. "Don't throw a tantrum, Joe. We don't know everything. This is as baffling to us as it is to you."
"I wonder why it is that I don't believe you?"
"Maybe because you're a paranoid on amphetamines."
Gibson could feel himself becoming terminally ratty. "Or maybe because you're lying through your teeth."
Smith faced him. "You have my word. We know nothing about these things. Except that they turn up in just about every inhabited dimension with which we've ever had contact."
"You have them in your dimension?"
Smith nodded. "We not only have them but they also seem to be stepping up the frequency of their appearances. In recent years, it's gone as far as hands-on experimentation."
Gibson's eyes narrowed. "Kidnapping? Genuine abductions?"
Klein nodded. "Kidnapping."
"I thought that was just tabloid bullshit."
"Way up all over in the last five years."
Gibson clutched at a straw. "But they don't generally attack expensive private jets?"
<
br /> Klein jerked the comfort of the straw from his grasp. "They've downed a few military interceptors."
"Yeah, but isn't it usually two guys called Vern and Bubba out fishing in the swamp who get themselves carried off by a gang of little green men? They have large heads and they stick tubes up Vern and Bubba's nostrils."
Klein didn't crack a smile. "Green skin, large heads, and slanted almond eyes. The reports are very common."
The Methedrine made it all too easy to take the situation at face value. After everything else that had happened in the last twelve or so hours, why shouldn't he be chased by a UFO? Gibson couldn't help an involuntary glance out of the window, to the rear of the plane, as if, at any minute, the UFO would come into view. "So are we in any danger?"
"It would seem unlikely. There are virtually no reports of these things being overtly violent without provocation. There are, of course, literally millions of people, aircraft, boats, even cars and trucks, that have simply vanished into thin air. They could be UFO victims. The shame of it is that we have so little data."
"You're a cheerful bastard."
Klein made a gesture with his hands. "You wanted to know the facts."
Smith looked at Klein. She was plainly not amused by his talking to Gibson. "While you're giving out all of this information, have you considered what story we're going to feed the captain?"
Before Klein could answer, the captain himself came through the door to the flight deck. "I'm sorry to interrupt you, but, if you go to the starboard windows, whatever this thing is should become visible very soon. It's been steadily closing on us for some minutes and should be alongside any time now."
For Gibson, everything else ceased to matter. What Smith, Klein, and French intended to say to the captain became irrelevant. What weird ideas Donovan might be entertaining were equally unimportant. He went to the window, pressing close to the glass to see as far as he could. In a minute or so he'd know whether he was going the same way as Vern and Bubba. There was a strange sense of detachment. Events were now so far beyond his experience and control that he couldn't even feel fear. All he could do was watch and wait. The others had also moved to the windows. Janine was in the cabin, standing beside him. Donovan had returned to the flight deck.
At first, it was almost nothing, a smudge of red light a long way off in the darkness. It was, however, changing fast, growing and expanding. The single red light split into a dozen or more tiny pinpoints that formed themselves into a circle, a spinning ellipse like a ruby necklace thrown through the night sky. The sky itself had also started to change, distorted by a shimmer like heat haze, except how could there be heat shimmer thirty thousand feet over the ocean in the dead of night? Then came the cathode flicker of distant, silent sheet lightning that seemed to judder clear to the horizon. Against the flare of the lightning, it was possible to see that there was a dark shape contained within the ring of red lights, an ovoid that was black as a hole in the heavens. And then it was no longer black. The dark of the shape turned deepest purple. But this was only another phase. Both the sky and the purple shape grew lighter. The sky was an eerie blue. Not the blue of the dawn but a cold, unholy, alien color, as though the atmosphere had become suffused with chill metallic energy. The ovoid continued to take on color. Now it was a violet glow, streaked with veins of liquid gold like the circulatory system of a god. The spinning red lights were also going through a metamorphosis. They grew from simple glowing points to large misshapen globules of throbbing power. For some seconds, they whirled at high speed and then extended laterally and merged into each other to form a continuous band girding the ovoid.
Klein was slowly shaking his head. His voice was an awed whisper. "It's amazing. It's like it's powering up for something, progressively raising all its energy levels."
As far as Gibson could tell the UFO was twice, maybe three times the size of the jet, and it rode in the air some hundred feet off their right wingtip, matching their speed and maintaining a constant distance.
He glanced at Klein. "What do you think it's doing? Taking a look at us?"
He found that he also was whispering. Klein was transfixed. "Who the hell knows?"
For more than a minute, the UFO seemed quite content to maintain its distance. Then it started to swing closer. At the same time, it glowed brighter, a relentless surge of energy that hurt the eyes. Damaging raw power, now brilliant white and bright enough to blind, was filling up the sky. The interior of the cabin was brighter than day. The terrible light took over everything, hard radiation that seemed actually to be streaming through the very fuselage of the aircraft.
"God help us!"
It was Janine who had spoken, but a similar thought had to be on everyone's mind. Gibson felt himself blacking out and then, with no perceivable transition, he found he was picking himself up from the floor. The others were doing the same.
Donovan came into the cabin. He looked shaken. "Are you all okay?"
Smith answered for them. "It would seem so. What happened?"
Donovan frowned. "I don't know, but the UFO has vanished without trace and we seem to have lost ten minutes."
"Who was flying the plane during this lost ten minutes?"
"No one. We were all out cold. We really ought to be in the sea by now, but as you can see, we're not."
Smith faced Klein and French. "This isn't good. Anything could've happened in ten minutes."
She turned back to the captain. "Are we where we're supposed to be?"
"If there's nothing wrong with the instruments, we're on course and on schedule."
Smith avoided Donovan's eyes. "I don't quite know how to put this, Captain Donovan, but are we also when we're supposed to be? Is there anything at all on the radio or radar that might not exactly be consistent with the late twentieth century?"
Gibson raised an eyebrow. Did Smith know more about UFOs than she'd admitted?
The captain gave her a hard look. "If you mean did we pass through the Twilight Zone and come out in ten million years B.C., no, we didn't. Everything seems normal."
"Did you check the commercial broadcast bands?"
"I got an FM rock station out of Thunder Bay. Bruce Springsteen as usual. No Glenn Miller or speeches by FDR. There are, however, three military jets out of an RAF base in eastern Scotland on an intercept heading for this position."
"What does that mean?"
"I imagine their radar must have picked up that thing and they're scrambling to investigate. People get nervous when a UFO shows up and closes on a commercial flight that immediately goes off the air."
French stepped into the picture. "Do you have a story ready, Captain Donovan?"
Donovan looked coldly at him."What do you mean by that?"
"I mean that, when we land, you're going to be asked a great many questions if, as it seems, this UFO has caused enough of a flap to get fighters up in the air."
"If you're thinking of asking me to forget the whole thing, that's out of the question. The radar sightings and the instrument readings during the time we were out are all on the flight recorder, and I can't pretend that entire episode didn't happen, much as I'd like to. Right at this moment, my first officer is on the radio trying to explain how we went off the air.
"What about the visual sighting? Are you going to tell them about that?"
Gibson had to admire the sheer gall of the streamheat. Minutes earlier, they'd been knocked out by a UFO and they were all but trying to blackmail the captain into keeping quiet about it. Donovan was silent for a very long time. When he spoke, it was with a cold distaste. "No, I don't think so. I'll leave it as a purely electronic phenomenon. All of the crew will almost certainly be up for drink and drug tests and psych examination as it is. I see no reason to make our lives even more difficult."
He paused and looked hard at Smith, Klein, and French. "Why do you people fill me with a deep and instinctive distrust?"
Smith put one hand on her hip and faced the captain. "That's a good question, Captain
Donovan. Why do we?"
French backed her up.
"Maybe that's something else that might be a good idea to keep to yourself if you don't want the airline and FAA shrinks climbing all over you."
Donovan thought about that and answered with the expression of an honest man who finds himself compromised. "I take your point."
He turned to go back to the flight deck. In the doorway, he glanced back. "I'll be very happy when all of you are off my aircraft."
The White Room
THE TV FINALLY went off in the white room in the very exclusive clinic. The lights followed five minutes later. Joe Gibson lay in the darkness too drugged to move. He didn't miss the TV. How many back-to-back game shows and reruns of M*A*S*H could he watch? He didn't even miss the light. In the darkness, he could let his imagination wander and create pictures. In the light, he was clamped into a sterile reality with the TV as the only escape. Not that his imagination worked too well after Nurse Lopez had administered the shot. It was sluggish and had difficulty grasping on to entire concepts; fragmented images and disjointed words and phrases were mostly all it could manage. Right at that moment, two words, a name, kept going round and round in his head. The words were Gideon Windemere. He couldn't put a face or a personality to the name. It stood alone, unconnected to events or memories. Gideon Win-demere.
Deep in his mind, though, in the area that the drug tried so hard to suppress, and even to obliterate, a single tenuous link remained. The name came from somewhere in the lost memories, the ones that the doctors wanted to take away from him, the memories they claimed had never happened and were making him sick. He groped around, fighting the drug and going as deep inside his mind as he was able, Gideon Windemere. There had to be something else, something tangible to which he could anchor the name and force it to start making sense. Gideon Windemere?
