by Mick Farren
"You knew Kennedy, too?"
"Jack Kennedy wasn't an asshole. Except maybe for his need to jump on anything that breathed. That was neurotic behavior."
Nephredana snorted derisively. "That's kind of rich coming from you."
Slide flashed his sinister snaggletoothed grin, and his inhuman slit eyes blazed with a brief humor. "I'm a demon. I've got an image to maintain."
He turned back to the road. They were now running on a fairly empty highway that led out of the downtown district of government buildings and big business and possibly out of the city altogether. The Hudson was humming along at a speed that, from the way the streetlights flashed by outside the windows, must have exceeded 150 miles an hour, but its motion had a deceptive, almost dreamlike quality, a lack of vibration that made it feel as if they were in some sort of simulator rather than a real nuts-and-bolts vehicle.
Gibson leaned forward and asked the obvious question. "So what happens now? Are we going someplace or are we just on the run like Bonnie and Clyde?"
Gibson half expected Slide to launch into a detailed account of how he ran with the Barrow Gang and helped Bonnie with the poems that she sent to the newspapers. In this case, Slide either resisted the temptation or he had never met the gangster twosome, because he actually came up with a straight answer.
"We're getting out of this fucked-up dimension while the getting's still good."
Gibson glanced nervously out of the rear window. They might be going fast enough to outrun a police car, but the LPD also had helicopters.
"The cops are going to be looking for us in the worst possible way."
Slide dismissed this with a shrug. "There's a whammy on this car that's going to make it very difficult to find."
"Are you sure about that?"
"Listen, kid. The cops are the least of our worries. In a matter of a few hours, this city is going to be one great big radioactive parking lot. Although the UKR doesn't know it yet, the Hind-Mancus have decided to use the confusion created by Lancer's murder to launch a sneak nuclear attack. Fifty of their flying wing atom bombers are coming up hard on their failsafe points right now."
Gibson had a good deal of trouble adjusting to this new piece of news. "You're putting me on?"
"The hell I am. I'm not just getting out of this dimension for the sake of your health. This whole place is going to blow."
"Unbelievable."
Slide shook his head. "Not really. The same thing nearly happened in your dimension. I know for a fact that some of the politburo wanted to do exactly the same thing except that Khrushchev put his foot down."
"Are the Kamerians so blown away by the assassination that they can't defend themselves? Can't they stop the bombers?"
Slide grimaced. "Sure, they'll have fighters in the air and their SAM batteries will be on full red alert. The League's going to lose most of its bombers but some are going to get through. Some always do, and some are quite enough."
Nephredana was unwrapping a stick of gum.
"So where are we going to be when the shit hits the fan?"
"Back at the Hole in the Void."
Nephredana rolled her eyes. "The Hole in the Void? Does that mean you're going to go on another hundred-day drunk?"
Even Gibson, with his record of wretched excess and current bemused state, couldn't help but stand awed by a being who could routinely contemplate a three-month, nonstop binge. Slide, however, was shaking his head. "No hundred-day drunk this time round. Things are so delicately balanced right now that we're all going to have to stay on top of it."
Nephredana frowned. "It's really that bad?"
Slide nodded. "It's really that bad."
Gibson was starting to come out of shock and move back into confusion. "I'm grateful for being rescued and everything, but I really could use a certain amount of filling in as to what's going on. I mean, I seem to have just come out of an assassination conspiracy that I still don't fully understand, and now you're telling me a nuclear war is going to break out and we're going to someplace called the Hole in the Void. You've got to realize that I'm feeling a little ragged at the edges after all this."
Slide turned away from the road again and gave Gibson a hard look. "So I not only have to save your sorry ass, I also have to explain what's going on because you're too dumb to figure it out for yourself?"
"I wouldn't put it quite that way but…"
"But you'd like to know what the deal is."
"I'd feel a lot better."
"I wouldn't count on that."
"I was afraid you'd say that."
"So where do want me to start?"
"This nuclear attack is quite inevitable?"
Slide nodded. "Quite inevitable. Accept that and then put it out of your mind. This isn't your city or your country or even your dimension. You may find the death of all these people regrettable, but there isn't a damn thing you can do about it. Regret it and move on. Screw this dimension, in fact. What can you do with a place that has a supermarket chain called Hitler's? There's plenty ahead for you to worry about."
"That's not so easy to do."
Slide made a take-it-or-leave-it gesture. "You don't have time for the luxury of guilt or trauma. Concentrate on what happens next."
"The Hole in the Void?"
"The Hole in the Void."
"What is this Hole in the Void?"
"It's a bolthole, a refuge for us demons, an anomalous place in a fold between the dimensions. A few of us old boys created a safe hideout there, a place to go when the regular time stream gets too hairy. It'll give us a breathing space, you dig?"
Gibson shook his head. "Not really, but I expect I'll find out when I get there. I assume the present situation qualifies as hairy."
"Megahairy."
"How do we get there?"
"Right now, I'm looking for a soft spot where we can trans through."
Gibson could only assume that a soft spot was something akin to the transition point at Glastonbury that he and the streamheat had used to get to Luxor. Slide and his gang seemed to have a much more casual attitude toward moving from one dimension to another than anyone else he'd encountered on his travels.
"So what about the conspiracy? Why did the streamheat want to get rid of Lancer?"
Slide winked and tapped the side of his nose confidingly.
"You're making the mistake that everyone else makes. Conspiracies are hatched in the shadows and, like anything else in the shadows, they frighten people. The temptation is to imagine that they are much bigger and better organized than they really are. Most of the conspiracies I've ever become involved in have been a mess. They're usually uneasy alliances of individuals with a lot of different goals and motivations. Nobody tells the truth, and the internal fighting usually starts well before the deed's been done. Nothing I've seen of this one has caused me to think that it was any exception to the general rule. The way I figure it, the Luxor natives who were in on it were pretty straight ahead.in just wanting to off the president and seize power. Their mistake was that they were too greedy. They only had their eyes on the prize and they didn't pause to wonder how Hind-Mancu, the big rival superpower, might react."
"This is Raus's bunch?"
Slide nodded. He was looking at the road again, driving with one hand and taking a cheeroot from the pocket of his duster coat with the other. He lit it with the same snap of his fingers that he'd demonstrated for Gibson and Windemere in Ladbroke Grove.
"I don't think Raus himself was the same as all the rest. Anyone who keeps Balg penned up in his basement probably has a much more complicated game plan. When the dust settled, though, he probably expected to be crowned king."
"And the streamheat?"
"Those bastards? That's the hard one. The one thing you can count on is that they're lying ninety percent of the time, with a dime of truth to keep you off balance."
"So what's the truth in this instance?"
"The truth? It's probably some floating crap game or movable f
east; it usually is around the streamheat. What's their euphemism for getting their faces into other folks' business? Constrainment of chaos? A poke here, a prod there, a dirty little deal in a back alley or a banana skin on a crucial sidewalk, the odd cosmic manhole cover removed, and they think they're playing fucking God, but all they're really doing is screwing things up worse than they're screwed up already. The thing you gotta remember about the streamheat, kid, is that they're basically a bunch of semisavage sons of bitches whose physics peaked too early. A whole bunch of us, the ones who knew what was what back then, should have gone in there in 1427 and wiped out the lot of them. A culture that stumbles across atomic weapons while it's still making sacrifices to the Sun God needs to be nuked themselves, right back into the Stone Age. But no, don't interfere, we all said. Let them work out their destiny. Well, no more, kid, total the swine and work out the destiny later. The problem with the streamheat is that, despite all the crap they give out about interzone cooperation, they're really the tool of a culture that's still as mad as hell that it can't predict the future. That's why they always try to pretend that they can. All their computers, their logic engines, their behavioral projections, societal convection rolls, Lorenz's butterfly, and all the other paraphernalia, it's all just chicken entrails and burned goat bones when you get down to it. All their efforts really only prove that they don't have a plan, they don't have an overall strategy. They run around in a frenzy being personally offended by the chaotic unpredictability of the universe and trying to fix it so it'll be the way they like it. When they fail, as they almost always do, they become even more hysterically convinced that they are fighting some kind of holy war against the forces of havoc, randomness, and disorder. It makes about as much real sense as human sacrifices to the Sun God."
Gibson blinked. This whole new assessment of the streamheat took a little digesting. "What did they really hope to achieve in Luxor by killing Lancer and pinning it on me?"
"They probably thought that they could install Raus as the head of a puppet government and have the UKR under their control, although I do wonder how they expected to control someone who kept Balg in his basement. Anyway, that's what the lower ranks seem to have believed, the ones you were dealing with like Smith and Klein. The fact that it now looks like the whole of the UKR is going to get dixie-fried as a result of the assassination puts a slightly different complexion on things."
"You actually think the streamheat engineered this nuclear attack that's coming?"
Slide nodded. "Sure do. They've got the UKR so heavily infiltrated it'd be kinda dumb not to assume that they've done much the same thing to the Hind-Mancu on the other side. They probably suggested the sneak attack in the first place."
Gibson was at a loss. "But why? What would they have to gain from nuclear devastation?"
Slide took his hand off the wheel and jerked a thumb in the direction of Nephredana. "Didn't she explain death-moment energy physics to you?"
"Sure, but…"
"So work it out for yourself. Think about all that death."
"A huge burst of energy?"
"Right on the money, a huge energy bonanza. Which, in light of recent reports that they have the means to catch and store DME, seems to make a lot of sense from their point of view. Plus they have the added bonus of a lot of random print-through in other dimensions that they probably think they can exploit to their own ends."
"And you figure that Smith and the others didn't know about this?"
"Never tell the minions what they don't need to know."
"I've been getting more than my fair share of that."
"What did you expect?"
"That's the problem. I didn't expect anything. I didn't ask to be a part of this in the first place. What is it with me?"
Slide laughed. "What is it with you? You want me to tell you?"
Gibson was becoming a little unnerved by the way that Slide kept turning his head away from the road to talk to him. At speeds around a hundred and a half, it seemed to verge on the suicidal unless Slide was driving by some kind of telepathy.
"I'd be delighted if you'd tell me."
Slide grinned. "You, Gibson? Hell, you're a very special person. You're a veritable crossroads of coincidence, a repository for untapped mischief, a catalyst for confusion."
"I am?"
Nephredana popped her gum. "Lighten up on him, Yancey. He's had a hard day."
"He asked."
Gibson nodded. "That's right, I asked."
Slide started counting off Gibson's problems on the five fingers of his free hand. "First there's all this business of your opposite number in Luxor being a potential presidential assassin."
"You believe that? Couldn't that have just been something else that the streamheat cooked up?"
Slide shook his head. "I tend to doubt that. I think it falls within the ten percent of truth. If it didn't, why would they mess with you at all?"
"You think they pointed Casillas and the Nine at me in the first place?"
"I'm sure they did. That's why I came to London to check you out."
"So what about this massive aura that I'm supposed to nave?"
"You could say that it kinda falls into chicken-and-egg territory, so to speak. Does shit happen to you because you've got the aura or do you have the aura because shit happens to you? There's also the point that the streamheat may well have been hedging their bets over your filling the Four Requirements of the Prophecy of Anu Enlil."
Gibson had the sinking feeling that the cosmic opener was busy on yet another can of worms. "What the hell is the Prophecy of Anu Enlil?"
"Nobody told you? I'd have thought Abigail Voud would have filled you in. She's big on stuff like that."
Gibson sadly shook his head. "No, nobody told me. So what else is new?"
Slide turned to Nephredana. "How does the text go?"
Nephredana recited from memoiy. " 'And a man shall come among them, a man who was a leader of men but who fell from the favor of his followers, a man who crossed the great divide and, arriving in the country beyond, took up arms and slew the king of that country.' Those are the Four Requirements, you want me to go on?"
Slide nodded. "Yeah, get on to the part about entering the Realm of Gods."
Nephredana picked up the thread. " 'And, taking flight, he came with companions to the place between worlds where the Portal was made known to him and he entered the Realm of Gods where the Sleeper lay and he spoke with the Sleeper of the time that He might wake.' "
Gibson frowned. "That's all very fancy, but how does it apply to me?"
"Leader of men, right?"
Gibson laughed in amazement. "The last thing that I've ever been is a leader of men. "
"Anyone one who can fill Madison Square Garden has to be a leader of some kind. Young men all over the world were copying your clothes and your walk, your haircut and your sneer, even your brand of sunglasses. Think you weren't a leader? And you certainly fell from favor, you can't deny that. You've moved from one dimension to another, and as for killing the king…"
At that moment, Yop Boy cut in with a warning. "Lights up ahead, boss."
Yop Boy must have had extraordinary eyes, because Gibson couldn't see a thing. Slide, too, who nodded in reply. "I got 'em."
Yop Boy was still peering into the darkness. "Looks like a cop roadblock. I guess they must have penetrated the whammy."
Slide grinned back at Gibson. "Watch this, kid."
Slide seemed to find an extra surge of power somewhere inside the car. Up ahead, four police cruisers were drawn across the highway, completely blocking the four lanes. Uniformed figures were clustered around the cars, and Gibson could imagine the tension and the weapons clutched tightly in their hands. The Hudson was charging straight at them. It no longer felt as though they were riding in a simulator. The car was vibrating wildly.
Slide glanced at Yop Boy. "We got a power window?"
Yop Boy nodded. "Anything we want. Full banshee halo if we need it."<
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Slide's grin was truly demonic. "Ha!"
He hit a number of buttons on the car's control panel, and the Hudson was immediately enveloped in orange flame. At the same time, there was a hideous howling from outside the car.
Gibson looked round in alarm. "Are we on fire?"
Nephredana shook her head. "Just scaring the hell out of these cops."
It was certainly working. Through the flame envelope in front of the windshield, Gibson could see the cops leaving the cars that were blocking the road and running for their lives. The cars remained, however, and it looked as though the Hudson was going to plow into them and total itself. Then, as Gibson watched in complete amazement, an unseen force lifted first one car and then a second clear into the air and threw them violently aside. It was as though they were the toys of a giant, invisible, and very petulant child who had hurled them away in a fit of pique. One landed on its roof about twenty yards on down the road while the other arced straight up, turned over, took a nosedive into the hard shoulder, and folded up like a concertina. The Hudson raced through the gap that had been left in the roadblock, and, as they flashed past the police cruiser that was lying on its crushed roof, its gas tank exploded and it burst into flame. The fire envelope that surrounded the Hudson was suddenly gone.
Slide was chortling. "Did you see those guys run?" He glanced at Gibson. "Do you know what that was, kid?"
Gibson shook his head. "Never seen anything like it."
"Threw a banshee halo round the car."
"Was that difficult? "
Slide made a dismissive gesture. "Piece of cake. Unpotentialized psychic power. All you gotta do is focus it and it'll do what you want. There's always plenty of loose spook energy around. Most of it's too stupid to do anything for itself except maybe condense into a half-assed apparition and make a few moaning noises, but if you give it a focus, it'll go the whole nine yards for you. Nothing spook energy likes better than to be given something violent to do."
Gibson slipped down in his seat and closed his eyes. Slide, on the other hand, seemed to treat running a police roadblock as no big thing. He went back to the previous conversation as though nothing had happened.
