by Mick Farren
He was well aware that his first move had to be a reduction of the medication that was constantly being pumped into him. Even if he didn't have a coherent plan, he knew that he had to cut down on the drugs just to have a chance of formulating one. It was impossible to do anything about the the daily shots, but the pills that came three, sometimes four times a day were another matter. It was comparatively easy to fake swallowing a pill and then hide it in your mouth. Subsequently, getting rid of it was the hard part. Patients were always trying to lose, hide, or otherwise avoid their allotted medicines, and it was the major battle of wills between patients and staff; the staff had become very skilled at spotting those who were doing it and ferreting out their systems of disposal. A grid in the toilet bowls of the individual rooms even circumvented that obvious method.
After almost a week of thinking about it, Gibson decided that he'd come up with a new and, as far as he knew, original dodge that he might well get away with. He started dropping hints during the therapy sessions that, when he first woke up in the morning, he had fleeting memories of his real life but they were too mixed in with his dreams and, like the dreams, he quickly forgot them. He kept this up until, just as he'd hoped, Kooning suggested he keep a pencil and paper at his bedside to jot down these fragments while they were still fresh in his mind. This was exactly what he wanted. Writing materials were strictly controlled inside the clinic, and a patient had to be given the specific permission of a doctor before he could keep them in his cubicle. It was this permission that Gibson had been working toward and, within ten days of starting his campaign, it was this permission that Kooning gave, firmly believing that it was her own idea. He was taken to the administrative office, where he was issued two cheap Papermate ballpoint pens and a yellow legal pad. As he'd hoped, the pens were identical. He'd use one to write and the other, with the ink tube removed, as a receptacle for the pills that he didn't take.
From the moment he'd received them, he carried the pad and pens everywhere with him, and the staff quickly came to accept that it was his particular idiosyncrasy. Although he couldn't use West's principle of demonstrating that he was being cured as a means to get out, it was still useful to win himself a little slack. The staff thought that Gibson was making progress, and they didn't bother to watch him so closely. He was able to ditch the pills out of his hollow pen all over the clinic without anyone noticing him.
His covert reduction of his medication had the immediate effect of allowing him to think a great deal more clearly. He no longer stared mindlessly at Ghostbusters cartoons, the Chipmunks or reruns of Mork and Mindy. He began to make a careful, step-by-step analysis of his situation. One of his first thoughts in this new frame of mind was darkly hopeful. Why was he in this exclusive and expensive clinic at all? As far as anyone could tell in this world of so many changed details, he was an indigent bum. If that was the case, why the hell wasn't he locked up in Bellevue like any other penniless crazy? Someone had to be picking up a fairly major tab for his incarceration in this place, and it had to be safe to assume that whoever was doing this knew who he was, what he'd done, and that he wasn't raving mad when he swore that he'd just returned from another dimension. His newly reclaimed powers of reasoning led him to a single conclusion. There was someone out there who knew all about him and who was keeping him locked up here to insure his silence. If he could get out and find this person, there was at least the chance that he could beat the truth out of him about what had happened to his life.
Chapter Seven
"DOES DRESDEN KNOW about him?"
Gibson didn't recognize the voice he was hearing as he swam up through the black sea, except that it had the officious, suspicious tone of a cop.
A second voice answered the question. "Of course Dresden knows about him. He's the replacement for Zwald."
Gibson knew the second voice. It belonged to Klein. He sounded tired. The cop voice was that of a man who couldn't leave it alone. "What happened? He's the wrong color."
Gibson knew that they couldn't be talking about him. How could he be the wrong color?
Klein's voice answered again. "The trans was rough, we had to use an unorthodox access point."
"How can he be a replacement for Zwald if he's the wrong color?"
The Klein voice started to sound impatient. "It really isn't my problem. We found him, we brought him, but something went wrong in the trans. Nothing can be done about it, so quit busting my balls."
"He's going to stick out like a sore thumb."
"I know he's going to stick out like a sore thumb, but that really isn't my problem. I've done my bit and the rest is up to Dresden."
Gibson was aware that he was lying on something hard. It felt like a concrete floor. He opened one eye and wished that he hadn't. Everyone around him was blue.
Klein's voice changed, urgent and warning. "Put a cover on it, it looks like he's coming round."
Gibson opened his other eye. He seemed to be in some kind of cavernous garage or workshop. A dozen or more people, both men and women, were moving around, and the majority of them were wearing the streamheat dark-blue jumpsuits with the same silver insignia at their throats. The disturbing part was that their skins were varying shades of the same blue.
Klein was standing over him, looking down. His skin was now tinted a soft aquamarine. "Are you okay?"
Gibson decided to play it traditional. "Where am I?"
"You're in Luxor."
' "The car was on fire,"
"That was a transition illusion."
Gibson struggled into a sitting position. His muscles ached. "How long was I out for?"
"About an hour."
Gibson stared down at his hands. They were also very pale blue, but much lighter than Klein's skin or anyone else's. "Why have we all changed color?"
Klein looked mystified. "What do you mean changed color? "
Gibson gestured at the other people in the place."Everyone's blue. I'm blue, you're blue. Everyone's turned blue."
" You look a little strange but everything else seems normal."
Gibson started to get agitated. "Everyone's fucking blue."
"I think this might be a perception problem."
"You're telling me that I'm seeing things?"
Klein sighed. "Transition can produce some strange effects. Things become changed. You're in another dimension and what you're seeing is just a product of both your brain and the transition. "
"My suit, too?"
The black suit in which Gibson had left London was now spotless white, as though it had been bleached. Klein shook his head. "No, the suit really did turn white."
"This is too weird for me."
"Just relax. You'll be okay."
Gibson started to take notice of his surroundings. He found that his first impression of a cavernous parking area fell well short of actuality. The place could have been an aircraft hangar, except that aircraft hangars weren't constructed from raw unfinished concrete and their roofs weren't supported by thick steel-reinforced pillars. It was hard to tell the true size of the underground installation beyond the basic impression that it was very large indeed. Brightly lit areas where intense beams of light blazed from overhead grilles alternated with pools of impenetrable shadow. In one of the nearest pools of light, a work detail in green rubber suits, filter masks, and protective goggles that made them look like invading Martians were hosing down a large white car, removing a gray film from its bodywork similar to the one that had coated the Cadillac after the UFO attack. It was no ordinary car wash. The hose they were using was made of jointed stainless steel, and the substance that gushed from it under high pressure seemed more like a gas than a liquid. Where it hit the car it splashed and smoked, and Gibson had a suspicion that it was causing the smell of ammonia in the air. The car wasn't a Cadillac, either; in fact, it wasn't like any car that Gibson had ever seen before, big and bulky like something out of the late forties or early fifties, a Tucker or maybe an overgrown De Soto, with fins and a ra
diator grille that belonged on a jet fighter.
"Is that our car?"
Klein nodded. "Changed a bit, huh?"
"Why couldn't it just stay a Cadillac?"
"Because it's also been through transition. It would be fairly pointless if it still looked like an Eldorado from your dimension."
"What is this place?"
"It our main base and access point in this dimension."
"You have something like this back on Earth?"
Klein shook his head. "We maintain a much larger presence here. The politics of this dimension are very unstable."
Other big baroque cars were parked in a group farther down the area as well as a handful of sinister black paramilitary vehicles like bulky Batmobiles with armor-plate, slit windows, and exterior-mounted heavy machine guns. A pair of cumbersome, old-fashioned helicopters also stood nearby, like ugly sleeping insects, with their rotors folded back and canvas covers over the Plexiglas cockpit canopies. Klein wasn't exaggerating when he said that the streamheat maintained a presence here.
A squad of armored men carrying automatic weapons marched past where Gibson was sitting. Their dark-blue body armor was made up of irregularly shaped plates of some thick porous material that protected their torsos, thighs, and upper arms. The helmets they wore were polished and cylindrical, with a stylized sunburst insignia on the front and vestigial metal crest at the back that might have had its roots in some sort of feathered headdress. Taken as a whole, the ensemble made them look not unlike high-tech Aztecs. As they tramped by in step with the measured stamp of steel-shod boots, Klein didn't pay them the slightest attention. Instead, he looked down at Gibson.
"You feel any better?"
Gibson nodded. "A little."
"Did you hallucinate a lot coming through?"
Gibson pushed his hair back with his fingers. "A lot? Yeah, I'd say a lot. I turned into a burning meteor and then I fell into a black sea."
"It can be rough the first time. Can you stand?"
"I don't know."
"You want to try?"
"Sure, why not."
Klein reached down and took Gibson's arm. Gibson tried standing and found that it wasn't too difficult. He momentarily wanted to vomit but that quickly passed.
"Where are Smith and French?"
"They've gone on ahead to report."
Gibson was startled by a shout from one of the cleanup crew working on the white car.
"Superior in proximity!"
A group of five people were coming toward Gibson and Klein at a brisk, businesslike pace. Two of them were what Gibson was already thinking of as regular streamheat, in the plain blue jumpsuits, and two were the military form, in the slab-honeycomb armor and pre-Columbian helmets. Gibson didn't have to be told that the fifth guy was some sort of officer. The extra gold on his collar, the cape thrown over his shoulders, and the arrogance of his bearing made it immediately obvious. If that hadn't been enough, the way that the cleanup crew came to attention and even Klein formally stiffened rammed the point home.
All through his life, Gibson had always experienced a problem with authority figures. When someone started telling him what to do, his natural reaction was surly hostility. Sometimes he believed this hostility had been one of the major forces in shaping his life, and if it hadn't been built into his personality by either nature or nurture, he might have become president instead of a rock 'n' roll degenerate. He saw that it wasn't going to be any different in a new dimension. While the streamheat officer was still twenty yards away, Gibson knew that they were going to inevitably clash.
Klein muttered quickly out of the corner of his mouth. "This is Superior Dresden and he's the head of this section. Watch out for him. He's hard as a diamond and cuts as deep."
Superior Dresden was the kind of Nordic blond god that Hitler would have instantly used as a model for the Aryan superman. Why were all these streamheat so goddamned perfect? If anything, Dresden was even more perfect than the lower ranks like Smith, Klein, and French. Did they practice selective breeding back in the streamheat dimension? Even Dresden's attitude came straight out of the SS academy. He looked Gibson up and down as though he was an inferior piece of merchandise, and Gibson responded by striking a pose of dumb insolence. After the cursory inspection, Dresden turned his attention to Klein.
"Is this the one?"
"Yes, Superior Dresden, this is Joe Gibson."
"Why is he so pale?"
"There were some problems with the trans. He took it hard."
Dresden thought about this. "It will be best if he goes straight to the apartment."
"Should I take him personally, Superior?"
Dresden nodded. "Yes, you take him, you've come this far with him."
"What about my debriefing from the previous mission?"
"Smith and French are already covering that. You can turn in your report later."
He looked Gibson up and down once more and still didn't like what he saw. "He's not particularly impressive, is he?"
"He's something of a legend in his own dimension."
Dresden let out a short exhalation of breath that seemed to indicate he would never cease to be amazed by what went on in other dimensions, and Gibson, already sensitive to being talked about as though he wasn't there, reached the limit of his tolerance.
"Listen, friend, you may have people jumping around here like you were second cousin to God, but I'm not from around here and I expect to be extended the common courtesies. You know what I'm talking about?"
Dresden's face clearly demonstrated that he wasn't accustomed to being spoken to like that. He glared balefully at Gibson.
"Do you know who I am?"
Gibson grinned and looked Dresden straight in the eye, refusing to be intimidated.
"Yeah, I know who you are. Your name's Dresden and supposedly you're the big wheel round here. Trouble is, that doesn't do too much for me. I'm Joe Gibson and I didn't want to come here; I'm also not a part of your Boy Scout troop and wouldn't advise trying to treat me like I was. I've put up with a great deal in the last few days and I'm really in no mood to be pushed around."
Dresden held his gaze. "I don't like your manners, Gibson."
"That's funny, I was just thinking the same about yours."
"You may regret this." With a curt gesture of dismissal, Dresden turned back to Klein. "Take him directly to the apartment and then report back to me."
As Dresden and his escort marched away, Klein looked at Gibson and slowly shook his head. "You shouldn't have done that. Superior Dresden is vindictive and has a long memory. He won't let an insult like that pass."
Gibson stuck out his lower jaw. "I've dealt with power-crazed assholes before. I can take my chances."
Klein nodded. "You may well have to." He took Gibson by the arm and steered him down through the huge space of light and dark. They passed a gang of laborers humping large wooden packing cases from off the back of a big, old-fashioned semitrailer. The laborers, who wore baggy tan coveralls, were uniformly short and dark, with lank black hair and Prussian-blue skin. Maybe there really was something to this idea of the streamheat practicing selective breeding. If their society as a whole, back in their home dimension, was organized anything like their interdimensional secret police, it had to be a fascist anthill. It wasn't at all encouraging to think that he'd been forced to throw in his lot with a bunch of fascist ants. He couldn't dwell on the concept, however; some more immediate thoughts required his attention.
"What's this apartment Dresden was talking about?"
"We maintain a number of anonymous apartments throughout the city for the use of our people when they need to blend in with the native population. You're going to stay in one of them until your situation has been rationalized."
"Rationalized?"
"You'll be briefed when the time comes."
"And who'll do the briefing?"
Klein almost smiled.
"Superior Dresden."
Gibson's face fell
.
"Oh, shit."
"Maybe that'll teach you to put a curb on your mouth."
They turned right at a point where a formidable chain-link and razor-wire fence cut off access to the rest of the area. Gibson couldn't read the red-and-white signs that were posted at regular intervals along the fence, as the text seemed to be in the same alien script that he had seen on the keyboard of the Cadillac's computer, but the red lightning bolts on each sign made the message pretty clear-the fence was electrified. Through it he could see figures, both tan and dark blue, moving around among rows of bulky, tarpaulin-shrouded shapes. For what was supposed to be a covert organization, the streamheat were amassing themselves quite a mess of materiel here in Luxor.
Gibson and Klein entered a tunnel or corridor, Gibson wasn't sure which; ever since he'd woken up from the transition, he'd had the feeling that he was underground, although he wasn't absolutely certain why. They seemed to be passing through the administrative hub of the base; the rooms and cubicles that opened onto the tunnel/corridor were filled with men and women in blue jumpsuits who were either shuffling papers or bent over computer monitors. In one large room, a line of operators stared at a hundred or more purple-and-white, postcard-size monitor screens that had to be a part of some Big Brother surveillance system. Gibson made a mental note of that-you never knew when the streamheat might be watching. It was also along this tunnel/corridor that Gibson caught sight of himself in a mirror. What he saw was enough of a shock to stop him dead in his tracks. His features and figure were much as he had last seen them, but practically everything else had changed. He was pale blue, a very pale blue. Even accepting the fact that he was temporarily seeing a world of people with blue faces, he had become extraordinarily pallid, not a healthy robust blue like Klein and Dresden and all of the others he'd seen since his arrival in Luxor, but a faded-unto-death, corpselike pastel. If anything shocked him more than the color of his skin, it was the way that his hair had changed: it had bleached out like his suit, white as the driven snow. It was also considerably shorter and brushed back into the pompadour of a fifties greaser.
