by Mick Farren
He was relieved to find that the promised alcohol had also been provided. In the cupboard over the sink, he discovered three fifths of Johnnie Walker Red Label, and there were also two six-packs of Bud Light in the big, old-fashioned refrigerator. He opened a beer and poured himself a very large shot of Scotch. He raised his glass to the empty air in a silent toast to whomever might be watching and then set off on a detailed exploration of the apartment and its contents. The previous tenant appeared to have left in a great hurry: his clothes were still there, along with a number of books in the local language, discarded magazines, and newspapers. Gibson even discovered a clutch of local soft porn in which blue couples cavorted across pages of implausibly cheap color printing. It wasn't long, however, before a certain uneasiness started to set in. The deeper Gibson delved, the more he came to believe that the "other agent" had not just moved out in a hurry-the signs seemed to indicate that he had simply vanished. His razor, toilet articles, and a selection of medications were still in the bathroom, and there was even a signet ring on the edge of the sink, as though a man had taken it off and placed it there while he was washing his hands and then never put it back on again. Gibson inspected the medicines with an experienced eye and found that one jar contained some thirty or so yellow pills that looked uncommonly like Valium. He was almost tempted to take a couple but decided that it might be wiser to stick to Scotch for the moment.
On a table beside the bed he found a pile of what appeared to be political leaflets, the kind of handbills that were printed up and passed out on the street by radical and fringe groups trying to make their point. They carried a less than flattering drawing of President Lancer and a slogan in a loud, violent typeface. Gibson sat down on the bed and studied the flyer. What had this guy been, some kind of agent provocateur worming his way into the confidence of local dissidents? Looking at the man's stuff, Gibson couldn't believe that he'd been regular streamheat like Klein or French. The man was too much of a slob. His shoes lay on the floor were he had dropped them, and there was a half-eaten plate of food in the refrigerator that he seemed to have been saving. His very smell was still in the place, a mixture of dirty socks and cheap cologne that simply wasn't streamheat in any shape or form. Perhaps he'd been some hired-on local operative or maybe another unwilling import from another dimension.
The most disturbing find came as Gibson was taking a closer look at the TV. He spotted something down beside one of the carved legs of the baroque forty-inch set and went fishing for it. It turned out to be a wallet, and beside it, further under the TV, was a set of keys. Unease turned to outright spookiness. There was no way that any rational man left an apartment under his own steam without his wallet and keys. He flipped open the wallet and looked inside. This was the biggest shock yet. All it contained was a thick wad of the local currency and a single ID, and the picture on the ID showed a face that was close enough to Gibson's that it could have been his brother. His brother, that is, before the transition had turned him into an albino. Gibson closed the wallet and walked as calmly as he could to the kitchen and poured himself an even larger shot than the last one. As he drank, he looked around the ceiling wondering if the streamheat were watching him and had been all through the discovery of the wallet. Even as he looked, he knew that searching for the camera or whatever they might be using to spy on him was totally pointless. In his own dimension they had spy cameras so small that they were virtually indetectable, and at least the same had to be expected of the streamheat.
Once he calmed down from the initial shock, Gibson started to think seriously about what this new set of developments might mean. It could hardly be a coincidence that the last person to inhabit the apartment looked almost identical to him, so what the hell was going on? Was it some Prisoner of Zenda deal where he'd been shipped in to replace… and there that theory faltered. Without answers to questions like who and why, there was hardly any point in going on with it. Maybe if he could have read the print on the ID card, he might have learned something about his near double, if nothing more than the name he'd been using. Detective work was close to impossible when one was a functional illiterate. The only other theory that came close to holding water was that the streamheat were sticking it to him for some mysterious reason of their own, and that the wallet, the apartment, and everything else were the props in some weird, rat-maze, behavioral experiment in which he was the rat. The whiskey was starting to go to work, and some of his fear was turning into slit-eyed belligerence. He glared at the supposed cameras that might be looking down at him from the kitchen ceiling.
"What are you trying to do, you bastards, bust my balls or just drive me crazy?"
He turned to the fridge for another beer and noticed for the first time a package wrapped in greaseproof paper, way in the back of the vegetable crisper. More of the last guy's leftovers? He had a sudden urge to get rid of it, to throw out all the crap left behind by this mysterious look-alike. How would that grab any watching streamheat?
"Mark it down as symbolic cleansing of the new territory, you cocksuckers."
Hell, for all he knew, they might be broadcasting this as a nature show in the streamheat dimension. Inferior Species Under Stress. Earth People Are Funny. Interdimensional Candid Camera, even. Smile, Joe, you're on. How superior did those bastards really think they were?
His fingers closed around the package of what he thought were leftovers, but instead of encountering something that felt like semifrozen mush, they touched hard cold metal under the paper. He quickly tore off the wrapping and found to his amazement that he was holding a gun. Gibson's first reaction was to immediately put it down on the small kitchen table. The cold metal was burning his fingers. Was this another part of the game? If indeed the streamheat were running some game on him, it seemed like a dangerous play-or did they see him as such a weakling that even armed, he wouldn't be dangerous?
He gingerly picked up the gun again. As guns went, it was a nice piece. A Luxor model that was not unlike a Colt.45 automatic. He fumbled around the bottom of the butt until he found the release for the clip, and slid it out. The gun was fully loaded. Suddenly feeling cold sober, he clicked it back into place. Gibson had never had any luck with guns, and since the notorious Incident with the roadie, he'd sworn them off altogether. He'd even refused the gift of a Saturday night special that Jerry Lee Lewis had tried to press on him at some drunken party following the Grammies, to the point where Lewis had started roaring that he was a worthless faggot. It took a certain kind of willpower to stand there and have Jerry Lee Lewis call you a faggot in front of the assembled music business, and Gibson had actually taken a warped pride in his own forbearance. Now here he was, in this filthy kitchen, clutching a big Mike Hammer automatic and wondering what he was going to do with it.
After about a minute, he decided that he wasn't going to do anything, at least not immediately. He poured himself a third drink and went back into the living room, taking the gun, the wallet, and the keys with him. For a long time he stared at the photo in the wallet but no inspiration came. It was only when he became convinced that the exercise was futile that he turned his attention to the bundle of cash. It would have been nice to know just how much it was worth, but, not even being able to read the numbers on the bills, it was impossible to tell. And then a thought struck him: he could read the numbers on the bills. A large brass sunburst clock hung right in front of him on the living room wall, flanked by two faded sepia prints of storms at sea. It was about as ugly as a clock could get but it had numerals that, as far as he could see, worked in exactly the same way as numbers worked back home, nine single characters and then ten, eleven, and twelve expressed as double digits. Even if there was some weird factor that he didn't know about, like the hours in Luxor were longer or shorter, it didn't matter. He knew the first rudiments of their numerical system. He suddenly felt incredibly pleased with himself and went to work figuring out the denominations of the various bills in the roll. It didn't take him very long to calculate that th
e bundle was just shy of two thousand of whatever unit passed as currency in Luxor. What he didn't know was whether this made him a rich man or would merely enable him to buy a cup of coffee and a sandwich.
The next thing to catch his attention was the TV. It occurred to Gibson that there was no need to go out mingling with the natives to find out if he understood the local language; all he had to do was switch on the set and watch for a while. Now he really was thinking for himself again, and it was like a breath of fresh air after having been told what to do for so long. He knelt down in front of the set, looking for the on/off switch. It turned out that Luxor could only manage two channels of black-and-white TV, One was showing a game show that, allowing for the natural culture shifts between dimensions, looked a hell of a lot like Family Feud. The main difference was that a comparatively normal family-albeit of ultramarine complexion-seemed to be competing against one composed of total freaks. He remembered how Klein had told him about the amount of radiation that was loose in this dimension. The genetic damage that must have been sustained by this family of four-Mom, Pop, and two kids-was nothing less than awesome. Pop was a standard pinhead, tiny pointed skull balanced upon a beefy, overdeveloped body, while Mom was a circus fat lady of five hundred pounds or more who had also been liberally endowed with facial hair. One lad was a dwarf, twisted and misshapen with a face so filled with hate that he seemed on the perpetual verge of apoplexy; the second, a tall and gawky girl, had a face filled with nothing: two eyes and a rudimentary slit of a mouth were the only truly defined features in a blank blue moon of a face. The audience was howling its approval as the family of normals whupped the freaks hands down. It appeared that the humiliation of the handicapped was real big laughs in Luxor. In addition to this insight, the game show offered Gibson two other crucial pieces of information. He quickly found out that according to his perception, the citizens of Luxor spoke colloquial American English. Their accent was a little weird but it was nothing that Gibson couldn't handle. He wondered if they really did speak English here and all the stuff he'd been told about how transition gave you instant linguistic skills was bullshit and deliberate lies. He only had Klein's word for any of it.
"I mean, in a goddamned parallel dimension, why shouldn't the parallel people speak parallel English?"
It didn't explain, however, why he was unable to read their parallel writing, but he was learning very quickly that it was wise to stay away from these interdimensional brain twisters. They only confused him and ultimately made his head hurt. Better by far to stick to practical puzzles while he was on this mental roll, like the fact that the huge scoreboards at the far end of the game-show set not only showed the contestants' amassed winnings but also demonstrated the relationship between the cash prizes and the merchandise that was being given away. A car that looked not unlike a mid-fifties Studebaker was equated with a prize of ten thousand. That meant the two thousand sitting in the wallet wasn't a fortune but was quite enough juice to ease him out of trouble. He even learned the name of the currency. In Luxor, they wheeled and dealed and probably also lied and died for the almighty kudo.
The moment that he knew the value of the bundle of bills in the wallet, alarms started going off in Gibson's head. It could hardly be an oversight that the streamheat had set him up with an apartment in Luxor that came with an almost adequate fake ID, a decidedly adequate amount of walking money, a supply of booze, and a gun. In his experience, the streamheat didn't go in for oversights of this magnitude. So, if it wasn't an oversight, what was it? Were they hoping he would do something? Knowing the contempt in which they held him, he could only imagine that they expected him to take the money and the gun and go out and get drunk. It was crazy. Or was it? Maybe they expected him go to out and get drunk and then get arrested. That made a little more sense, and Luxor certainly had enough cops to bring him in if he were to cause a disturbance. The next question was why. By now, a theory was starting to develop. In the event of being arrested, he would almost certainly use the look-alike's ID, and that would mean an official report of some kind. Gibson frowned. Was he being set up as some sort of alibi for his double, creating the illusion that the man was in the local drunk-tank while, in reality, he was out doing something nefarious at the streamheat's bidding? Bringing Gibson across the dimensions seemed one hell of an elaborate way to set up an alibi unless, of course, it was going to be one hell of a crime.
Gibson poured himself another drink. Conjecture was making him weary. He realized that he was now at the point where he didn't believe anything that the streamheat had told him unless it was confirmed by another source. That meant doubting almost everything he'd heard about Luxor and challenging every supposition. He slowly sipped his Scotch and let the warmth course through him. The trouble with the intellectual rigor was that it was too much like hard work. He flipped the TV to the second channel to see if this might provide some new insight or inspiration, but all he got was an ugly and violent cop show in which, without too much benefit of plot, officers in heavy body armor blew away the bad guys with a selection of shotguns and automatic weapons. Gibson supposed that it was inevitable that this kind of show was popular in Luxor. Cultures that were big on law enforcement in reality were usually big on it as entertainment as well. He noticed that a large proportion of the bad guys in this show were genetic freaks, dramatically evil versions of the family on the game show. Gibson sighed. Was this how they siphoned off mass frustration, by turning up the hate against the atomic mutations?
"Jesus, this really is the fifties."
The cop show gave way to local news, and Gibson discovered that news presentation in Luxor was primitive, not unlike the old movie-house newsreels, with grainy photography, military band music, and a strident voice-over. The lead story was about the preparations for the president's forthcoming visit to the city, and it featured footage of Lancer riding in an open car, smiling and waving at a cheering crowd. Gibson instinctively didn't like Jaim Benson Lancer. The man was too handsome and too smooth, too many teeth and too much boyish hair. Gibson operated on the principle that anyone who looked so good just couldn't be trusted.
Gibson yawned. He had lost track of how much Scotch he'd poured into himself, and his eyelids were starting to droop. His sense of time was shot, but it was getting dark outside and the TV wasn't helping any. One channel was showing some grim movie about a bunch of chronically depressed peasants trying to eke out a living in some bleak, radiation-blasted rural hell, sort of Little House on the Nuclear Wasteland, and, on the other, an equally dour family drama, set in a apartment almost as wretched as the one that he was in, made him think of a version of the Honeymooners in which the humor had been replaced by raging angst and miserable screaming kids. He wondered if he ought to sleep or if he was in danger of psych attack in Luxor. Even though it meant taking the word of the streamheat, he had to assume that he was at least marginally secure. He couldn't spend the rest of his life staying awake because he was afraid of what might come at him out of his dreams. Whatever their ultimate intentions for him, he couldn't see that he would be much use to the streamheat either as a ringer or a rat in a maze with his brain fried by nightmares or crazy from exhaustion.
It was at some point around that thought that his eyes closed of their own accord and he went out into a merciful blackness without dreams, either good or bad.
The next thing he knew was that he was wide awake, and something was coming out of the TV at him.
The White Room
"IT'S INTERESTING THAT you always talk about this imaginary show-business career of yours as a failure."
"I rucked up at the end but it wasn't a total failure. There was a period when we were the biggest thing there was."
"So what went wrong."
"I guess we got too crazy."
"Can you be a bit more specific."
Gibson's face creased into a sly grin. "Does it really make that much difference? I mean, it's only a fantasy, right?"
"Why don't you tell me abo
ut it anyway?"
"What's the point?"
"Stay with it. The creation of an extremely vivid full-life fantasy such as this can frequently be a way in which we hide a very serious trauma."
Gibson was back in session with Dr. Kooning. Dr. Kooning had started treating him like her star patient. His hours with her had been increased. Instead of an hour a day, Monday through Friday, she'd bumped his hours up to a double deal on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, with the regular single on Tuesdays and Thursdays, a total of eight hours a week on the couch, although Gibson still refused to lie on the couch. Even though Gibson was doing his best to make nice and try to produce what would pass as a plausible recovery, the idea of lying on the couch still gave him the horrors. Eight hours a week of pouring out his soul to Kooning wasn't exactly appealing, either. He would much rather have spent the time talking to John West. Although West was definitely a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic, he had some paranoid conspiracy theories that were world-beaters. He was dropping hints that he was, in fact, a top-rate intelligence operative who, after an attempt at resigning, had been confined in the clinic to be driven demonstrabty mad so no one would believe him if he was ever in a position to tell what he knew. He was also the only person since Gibson's return who unreservedly accepted the story of his adventures in Luxor and the dimensions he'd fled to after the debacle there.
