by Mick Farren
"I'm fucking Eddie Cochran in negative!"
Klein looked a little guilty. "I was intending to tell you about that later when we got to the apartment."
"Tell me what exactly."
"You're extremely pale. You seem to have lost a lot of pigment in the transition."
"This isn't an illusion like the blue faces?"
"I'm afraid not."
Gibson's expression turned from shocked to suspicious. "What's that supposed to mean?"
Klein took a deep breath, as though steeling himself before delivering the bad news.
"You're pretty much an albino."
"An albino? I don't want to be an albino."
"There really isn't too much we can do about it."
"So much for blending in with the native population. I'm going to stand out like a sore thumb."
"In actual fact, you may not."
"The place is loaded with albinos?"
"Luxor has more than its fair share of strange people. Their development of nuclear energy was extremely sloppy and, on top of that, they've had three limited nuclear wars, so there are a lot of quite weird-looking folk walking around."
"So you think I won't be that noticeable."
"I'm hoping not."
"This is getting ridiculous."
The two of them waited at the door of an elevator. When they stepped inside and Klein pushed the buttons, they started going up.
"Where are we headed for?"
Klein glanced up at the ceiling. "Ground level."
Gibson nodded. He was pleased that his sense of being underground had been correct. It was good to know that one's instincts were functioning properly.
The entrance to the streamheat's underground base was concealed in a derelict warehouse in the middle of what seemed to be an abandoned industrial park. The sky was a metallic gray, and the smell of coming rain was carried by a brisk wind.
As they emerged into the daylight, Gibson looked around in disbelief. "This is another dimension? Shit, we could be back in Newark."
Klein smiled knowingly. "You'll find a lot of similarities."
A street ran past the front of the warehouse that looked as though it hadn't been used in years. The surface was cracked and littered with garbage that was breaking down into a uniform organic mulch that fertilized the rank grass growing up through the cracks.
Gibson looked up and down the street for some form of transportation but could see nothing. "So how do we get to civilization? I hope you don't think I'm going to walk."
Klein shook his head. "You won't have to walk. We're going to take a taxi,"
Gibson looked surprised. After all they they'd been through, the idea of a cab ride seemed a little prosaic. "A taxi?"
"Sure, a taxi. Did it ever occur to you that cabs are an ideal means of transport?"
Gibson shrugged. "I'd never really thought about it. They certainly come in handy when you're drunk."
"We own one of the local cab companies. As well as giving us a line into some of the Luxor crime families, the cabs provide an inconspicuous way of moving around the city. Nobody ever looks twice at a cab."
Gibson scanned the street again. "So where is this cab?"
"One will be along in a moment to pick us up."
In confirmation of his words, a red-and-green vehicle appeared at the far end of the street, carefully steering around the heaps of debris and rusted-out shells of abandoned cars. Except for some minor details, it looked for all the world like a '52 Chevy. When Gibson got into it he found that the interior of the cab was the interior of a cab. He could have been back on Earth. The-armored steel and Plexiglas between the driver and the passengers may have been a little more intense than the anti-theft screens in New York cabs, but not by much, and he wouldn't have thought too much of it if he 'd climbed into the same vehicle on Fifty-seventh Street. If the protection that cabbies thought they needed was any indication, Luxor had a major problem with street crime. Gibson also discovered something that didn't make him happy at all. The back of the cab was plastered with the usual warning stickers and advertising signs, and these brought Gibson face-to-face with what seemed to be another and very serious failure of the transition.
"I can't read this stuff."
Klein's eyebrows shot up. "What?"
Gibson pointed to the various signs inside the cab. "It all looks like it's written in Martian. I can't read a word of it."
"That is a major problem."
"You're not kidding. I don't really relish the idea of being an illiterate. How can I even tell which is the men's room?"
Klein shook his head. "I don't know what to say. Transition is supposed to take care of things like basic reading skills."
"Is there anything that can be done?"
"I don't have a clue. I've never come across anything like this before. I guess you could try learning it the hard way."
Gibson was getting angry. "Give me a break, will you? I'm not about to learn to read all over again." A thought hit him like a thunderbolt. "Am I going to be able to speak the language?"
Klein looked worried. "I sure as hell hope so. All we can do is see what happens."
"Suppose I said something to the cabdriver?"
Klein shook his head. "He's one of us. He'd understand you anyway. You don't seem to have any problem with our language."
"You're talking your own language?"
"I have been ever since you woke."
"So what do we do?"
"We'll just have to wait until you're in among the natives."
"Might it not be a bit late by then?"
"That's a chance we're going to have to take."
"Fucking great."
"I'm sorry."
"Sorry really doesn't cut it in a situation like this."
Gibson turned and looked out the window. Driving into Luxor was depressingly like driving into any city anywhere. The cars that they passed were a little strange, and the design of the suburban homes was unlike anything he'd seen before. They were flat-roofed, ranch-style houses that might have come from some early-fifties, Popular Mechanics vision of the future. Those, however, were only details, and the drive was really no stranger than coming into, say, Moscow or Istanbul. At some point in the past, Luxor must have been extremely prosperous and indulged in a towering, skyscraper school of architecture that seemed to view the act of constructing a building as the creation of another monument to itself. The buildings that reared into the air, some for fifty and sixty stories, were loaded down with spires and gargoyles, flying buttresses, and heroic statues and reliefs. It was clear, however, that the good times were long gone. The imposing towers were filmed with soot and daubed with unreadable graffiti at street level, and the broad avenues were choked with traffic belching black unfiltered exhaust fumes probably thick with every toxin known to man. The monorail rapid-transit system that crisscrossed the streets at the third-floor level was in such a state of serious neglect and disrepair that its decay was obvious to Gibson at very first glance, and he resolved not to use it unless absolutely necessary,
It seemed that Luxor's population was growing too fast for the city to cope, and the groaning infrastructure was in the process of going down for the last time, drowning in a sea of humanity for which it had never been designed. The sidewalks were crowded with pedestrians, and although the bustle of busy city was still in evidence and well-dressed people were going about their business while new gleaming cars crawled through the near-gridlock, there were also ample numbers of those who clearly had nothing to do except lean or loiter or shuffle aimlessly and panhandle the passing stream of the more well heeled. Every couple of blocks, a drunk could be seen stretched out on the sidewalk or sleeping it off in a doorway, or a pair of winos would be huddled together, sharing a bottle in a paper bag. Many of the intersections they passed had their share of skittish hookers trying for the quick daytime trick, and, all in all, the newcomer was left in no doubt that Luxor had hit hard times.
If Luxor h
ad economized on anything, it certainly wasn't law enforcement. One of the first things that Gibson noticed was the massive police presence. Although it seemed like a perfectly normal day with nothing special going on, there were cops everywhere. Foot patrols, pairs, and even trios of officers in helmets and flak jackets and with bulky submachine guns slung under their arms stood on street corners and prowled the sidewalks while the bums and hookers and guys selling stuff out of suitcases melted away at their approach. Even the more affluent citizens avoided looking straight into their hard, expressionless faces. The city's police cars were equally formidable-more of the slab-sided, huge black Batmobiles with the fins and the armor and the firepower, just [ike the ones that Gibson had seen parked underground in the streamheat base. As their cab inched along through the logjam of traffic, one of the black juggernauts slowly passed them.
Gibson glanced at Klein. "It can't be any picnic for criminals in this town."
Klein was also looking at the armored police cruiser. "They don't make a bad living, believe me."
Law enforcement wasn't confined merely to street level. Black helicopters buzzed overhead bearing what had to be police insignia, slowly circling, constantly observing the streets and rooftops below. They were bulky, slow-moving machines with round Plexiglas cabins like something out of the Korean War.
Klein offered a token explanation. "They're cop-crazy here."
"So you guys should fit right in."
Klein ignored him. "They have four separate police departments in this city alone, plus assorted unofficial thug squads."
Gibson continued to watch the police car as it pulled ahead. "You really brought me to a dandy vacation spot."
An architect had once told Gibson that when a city lost its pride, it covered itself in billboards. If the size and quantity of the ones in Luxor were anything to go by, the town had no pride left at all. Every piece of available space seemed to be given over to advertising. Billboards were everywhere, some of them a full block long. The techniques of selling in the United Kamerian Republics were by no means a fine art. Giant, scantily clad, garish women with big breasts and electric smiles held up various cans, bottles, and packages or else sprawled across cars, cookers, and TV sets without too much real relationship to whatever particular product they might be pitching. It appeared that in Luxor they believed that just about anything could be sold by sex. Gibson had never seen such expanses of blue skin in his life, and he wasn't sure how he felt about it. He was a little confused about having erotic responses to blue women. There was, however, one consolation. A good percentage of the blue bikini babes were offering packs of cigarettes.
"So they still smoke here in Luxor?"
Klein nodded. "Sure they do. Most of the natives have one going all the time. By pure dumb luck, they stumbled across a cure for cancer back in what, in your world, would have been the nineteen-thirties."
One of the main exceptions to the parade of blue bimbos was a set of billboards that featured huge black-and-white portraits of a good-looking man in his forties with brush-cut hair and a winning smile. Under the photograph there was a simple short slogan in red type that Gibson was, of course, unable to read.
After they'd passed five of the signs, Gibson pointed the next one out to Klein. "Who's that?"
"That's Lancer."
"Who's Lancer?"
"He's the president, Jaim Benson Lancer, the thirty-second President of the UKR."
"So why all the billboards? Is it election year?"
Klein shook his head. "They don't have real elections here anymore."
"So what's with all the advertising? The president's out selling beer in this dimension?"
"It's just an inspiration message to the people reminding them that JBL loves them and they love him."
"If they love him so much, what does he need all these cops for?"
"That's the weird thing about the United Republics. Lancer's been in power for ten years, and during that time, things have gone from bad to worse, but the more he screws things up, the more the population seems to adore and idolize him. Somehow, he's managed to completely detach himself from his disastrous administration."
They crossed a big intersection where a massive gilded statue of an idealized naked man with fountains dancing round his feet threatened to hurl a golden thunderbolt straight up the avenue and into one of the more affluent areas of the city that Gibson had so far seen. After five blocks however, the affluence dwindled to a neighborhood of genteel decay. The cab turned into a street of tall, reasonably well-kept apartment buildings and pulled up in front of one about halfway down the block.
Gibson glanced at Klein. "Is this it? Are we there?"
Klein nodded. "This is it."
They stepped out of the cab and Gibson looked up at the front of his new temporary home. It really wasn't all that different from his place on Central Park West, maybe a little down-market but basically the same kind of structure. A similar blue-and-white awning led up to the front door, and as he walked into the paneled lobby it was easy to picture Ramone, his New York doorman, standing there.
The streamheat apartment was on the fifteenth floor, and that was where the resemblance to his New York home ended. The place was small, dark, and dingy, with tiny cramped rooms and narrow slit windows, most of which looked out on a blank air-shaft. It was also crowded with heavy, fifties-style furniture. Most of the space in the living room was taken up by a massive three-piece suite, upholstered in green leather that showed the marks of wear and even the scars of cigarette burns. Klein turned on a light, but it did nothing to improve the place's appearance. The walls were a dirty parchment yellow and the carpet an all-purpose excremental brown. Neither seemed to have been properly cleaned in the last decade.
"It's hardly the Plaza."
"It'll do for the moment."
Gibson sniffed. "You don't have to live here." Then he realized that he was only assuming this. "You won't be living here with me, will you?"
Klein shook his head. "No, I won't be living here. You'll be here on your own until other arrangements can be made."
Gibson raised an eyebrow. "Aren't you afraid that I might take a powder?"
The idea of Gibson walking out didn't seem to bother Klein at all. "Where would you go?"
Gibson nodded. "You have a point there."
They moved into the single bedroom. The double bed and a wardrobe like an upright coffin built for two hardly left enough floor space for the two men to stand in comfort.
"This is the kind of apartment where junkies come to die."
"It'll have to serve."
"Maybe if we got rid of some of the furniture?"
"I wouldn't bother thinking about redecorating. I doubt you'll be here long enough."
Gibson looked around. The place still seemed to be inhabited. There was certainly someone else's stuff strewn all around. "Who used to stay here?"
"Another agent. He was just transferred out."
There was a quality to Klein's voice that made Gibson suspect he was hiding something, but he decided that it was probably pointless to call him on it, and they returned to the living room. If Gibson had learned one thing during his acquaintance with the streamheat, it was that they were masters of keeping their mouths shut. He noticed a large TV set in the corner in a solid mahogany cabinet. Now what the hell was TV like in Luxor?
"So what happens now?"
"I have to return to the base and make my report."
"What about me?"
"This is your apartment for the moment. Relax, make yourself at home. I think you'll find there's everything you'll need."
This was all going a little swiftly for Gibson. "Wait a minute. You're just going to leave me here?"
"I don't have any orders to stay here and baby-sit you, if that's what you mean."
"What do I do about food and stuff?"
Klein shrugged. "The place is well stocked. I guess more will be sent in when you need it."
"Don't I get some
kind of emergency number? Some way I can contact you people if there's a problem?"
"If there's a problem, we'll know about it."
Gibson remembered the bank of postcard-size monitor screens in the streamheat base. "You'll be watching me?"
Klein's face was blank. "I don't know what exact arrangements have been made for your security."
"So I just wait here and amuse myself?"
"You'll be contacted." Klein was at the door and on his way out. "I wouldn't recommend roaming the streets or anything, but otherwise you're free to do what you like. I believe alcohol has been provided."
Gibson's lip curled. "Then I'll be all right, won't I? I mean, that's all the poor old drunk needs, right?"
Klein ignored him. "Drop the deadbolt on the door after I've gone."
The door closed behind Klein, and Gibson was suddenly all alone. After about twenty seconds, the realization of this crashed in on him like a physical blow and he had to say it out loud to himself to make sure it was real.
"You're on your own in another dimension."
The idea was almost impossible to accept.
"You're on your own in another fucking dimension."
Suddenly something inside him crumpled. He no longer had Smith, Klein, and French hurrying him from one place to the next, or Windemere providing him with at least the illusion of protection. He now had nothing but his own resources, and that was frightening.
"Jesus Christ, boy, what have you gotten yourself into?"
He went into the kitchen of the apartment and found that, as Klein had said, the place had been fully stocked. The cupboards and refrigerator were full of brand-name goods that must have been brought through from his own dimension. Whoever planned his menu, though, had some strange ideas about what he ate. They seemed to assume he lived on a steady diet of Wonder Bread, peanut butter, Cap'n Crunch cereal, Dinty Moore beef stew, and Chef Boyardee ravioli. Although he wondered about the motivation and even the method that had brought him this bonanza of junk food from home, he was pleased to see it. He was in no shape to be struggling with unreadable cans of whatever they ate here in Luxor. He imagined he would come to that soon enough if the streamheat decided he was to stay in this dimension for a while, but in the meantime he'd do his best to chow down on what was there and not complain too much. He did wonder where the food might have come from. Did the streamheat maintain supplies of cheap supermarket provisions from a variety of dimensions for eventualities like this or had the stuff been transed in specially for him? That scarcely seemed possible considering the speed with which he'd been brought there, unless, of course, they'd been planning to bring him long before he'd known about it.
