by Mick Farren
All through the drive, Gibson had been bracing himself for the unexpected, but none of his fears or imaginings had prepared him for what happened next. For the briefest instant, the surrounding countryside was lit up as bright as day. It was as though the bomb had gone off, but then, as quickly as it came, the flash faded into retinal aftershocks and the very nature of the light itself began to change. Both land and sky took on brilliant emerald radiance as though a vast green fire had suddenly blazed at the core of the Earth. The horizon started to curve upward. It was like giant hands were attempting to roll the actual fabric of the landscape into a giant tube. Perspective was shot to hell by the curvature of this distortion, and Gibson reflexively grabbed for a handhold as the visual distortion tilted him sideways. Then the Cadillac started to vibrate. At first it was a smooth tremor, but it rapidly became more violent and erratic, and as Gibson was bounced up and down in his seat he became quite convinced that something was wretchedly wrong and the car was going to shake itself to bits. Then the buffeting stopped, and all that remained was a high-pitched whistle.
Klein's voice floated to him from a long way away. "We have groove lock."
With no apparent acceleration, the Cadillac started to move forward. It seemed to be floating down a huge emerald tunnel of merging earth and heaven. For the first fifteen seconds, the tunnel remained absolutely straight, and, still with no feeling of motion, the Cadillac began picking up speed. Suddenly the tunnel abruptly curved.
French voiced the general alarm as the Cadillac began to slide into the curve like a surfer entering the pipeline. "This isn't right."
"It's got to be a power plant or something throwing a stress pattern."
"It'd take more than a power station to produce a stretch-out like this."
Klein, who was no longer steering the car, just letting it take its own course, pointed through the windshield. "There's the culprit."
A glowing disk of bright white light surrounded by a blue aura had appeared in the area of sky that was contained by the unnaturally curved horizon.
Gibson's jaw sagged. "I don't believe it. Every time I step outside the house, I'm set on by UFOs."
Despite the tension, Klein grinned. "Maybe you should stay indoors,"
A second white UFO with a blue aura appeared beside the first. Gibson turned anxiously to Smith. "What can we do about this?"
Smith looked at him blankly."Your guess is as good as mine. It's like I told you on the plane, UFOs are way outside our field of expertise."
The first disk held its position, but the second one dropped into the path of the Cadillac. It was coming rapidly toward them.
French stared at it, transfixed. "This looks unpleasantly like the start of a strafing run."
A strange detachment had taken hold inside the car. Gibson knew that he should have been convulsed with terror, but he wasn't. He was frightened, but there was a distance to the fear. The environment had become so unreal that it was hard to relate to the idea that they were under attack by hostile UFOs. It was something that just didn't happen. The worst part was the unreal quiet. Events silently drifted. With no outside sound except the high-pitched whine, the UFO seemed to be floating at them through a vacuum. It rose and fell slightly but kept getting bigger and bigger, and with no idea of its size and no intelligible perspective, it was impossible to judge how far away it was and how soon it would be upon them.
Gibson shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "Can't we take some kind of evasive action?"
Klein shook his head. "Once you lock the groove, you give up all control. You're on a cosmic railroad."
Gibson groaned. "Mystery train and out of control."
A bright point of ruby-red light detached itself from the disk's leading edge. It zigzagged toward them. Gibson shut his eyes. He was certain that it was an alien missile. He opened them again just in time to see it explode short of the car. He wasn't even sure that it was an explosion. For a brief instant the world as he could see it turned scarlet, and then it returned to the way it had been. All that remained was a column of glittering vapor. The Cadillac plunged into it, and where the car came in contact with the mist a blue-gray deposit was left behind on the bodywork.
Gibson looked at the others. "I think we're okay."
Smith was peering suspiciously at the blue-gray deposit on the outside of the windows. "Don't speak too soon, we've no idea what this stuff may be doing to us."
The UFO lifted slightly and passed over them. As it did, their hair stood on end and Gibson was aware of an acute electric tingle running through him. He twisted around in the backseat and peered out of the rear window. The UFO seemed to be turning in preparation for another pass. Gibson was surprised to see the amount of room the UFO had to maneuver in the weird, enclosed sky. The emerald world beyond the car's windows was starting to slowly corkscrew along its length, like an Escher drawing in which the normal rules of spatial relationships had been canceled and comparative distance made no sense at all.
"I think it's coming back!"
The UFO had completed its turn and started to drop again. Two more ruby points of light detached themselves from the white disk, but, once again, they exploded short in two more brief, silent flashes of red. Again, they were apparently unharmed, but now the original UFO had started dropping from its previous vantage point and was coming at them, seemingly joining the attack, if indeed it was an attack.
Klein glanced out of the side window and grunted a warning. "Uh-oh. Here's an added complication."
Three more UFOs had appeared on the scene, coming in from the right-hand side of the car, following the up curve of the landscape, and moving in a tight triangular formation. They were completely different from the white disks. These had the traditional flying-saucer configuration that resembled the detached top of a Victorian streetlamp, the central turret with its circle of portholes, the conical skirt, and the three hemispheres on the underside.
Gibson shook his head in amazement. "Adamski saucers."
Smith looked at him sharply. "What's an Adamski?"
"Not what, who. Adamski was a guy back in the early fifties who wrote a bunch of books claiming that he'd been abducted by aliens. He had photographs of flying saucers exactly like these."
"What happened to him?"
"Nobody believed him. They said his photos were fakes and everyone assumed that he was running a con. I guess in the end he just kinda went away."
The saucers headed straight for the two white disks, and revolving golden stars flashed from their turrets. The disks immediately took what seemed to be frantic evasive action.
"What are these new guys? The cavalry?"
The white disks ran an evasion pattern of short dashes and abrupt changes of direction, doing anything to get away from the golden stars. Finally they seemed to concede defeat. They broke from the engagement and began climbing away. The saucers went up after them. Inside of a second, all five of the strange craft had vanished. Inside the car, there was a general sigh of relief. Gibson wiped his face. Somewhere along the line, he'd broken out in a cold sweat.
"So what the hell have we been watching? The war of the worlds?"
There was no time for discussion, however, or even answers. The curve in the emerald tunnel was straightening out, and the Cadillac accelerated to a dizzying speed. After a moment of blur and shimmer the lights went out and Gibson was in a darkness more complete than anything that he had ever experienced before. His first assumption was that he'd died. He'd become discorporate. He was in limbo between dimensions. He put a hand up to his face and was somewhat amazed to find that his face was still there.
Smith's voice came from right beside him, "Turn on the headlights,"
After the total darkness, the headlights were blinding, and when Gibson's eyes finally adjusted, he found that they were stationary in what appeared to be a large underground chamber, the walls of which were constructed from huge slabs of solid rock, each one larger than the car itself.
"The pyramid, I presume?"
Klein rested his hands on the steering wheel. He looked drained. Slowly he shook his head."I guess we're going to have to get out and take a look around. Whatever the transfer mechanism is, it's going to be incredibly ancient, and we're going to have to teach ourselves to operate it."
French handed out flashlights, and the streamheat left the car, gingerly avoiding the residue of the strangely ineffective UFO weapons that was all over the exterior surfaces of the Caddy. They started a detailed examination of the walls and floor of the chamber, searching for the key to the dimension bridge. Gibson also climbed out, although, having no idea of what the others were hunting for, he took no part in the search. He looked slowly around the chamber. The air was cool and dry, and his boots kicked up a fine powdery dust as he walked. It was as if no intruder had entered the place in centuries. The walls were by no means as bare as they had first appeared. Large areas were covered in carved reliefs in a style that could have easily been the fountainhead of both Egyptian and Aztec art. Directly in front of the car there was a complicated circular sun symbol that, as far as Gibson could tell, seemed to contain stylized diagrams of the Solar system and a lot of other stuff that made no sense to him but looked equally impressive.
As Gibson approached the thing, Smith called out a warning. "Don't touch anything. We have no idea if this stuff is just decorative or if it has some practical control function. "
Gibson walked back to the car. He was quite grateful to have nothing to do and was more than content to take the time to try and gather his wits. The madness in which he was embroiled was turning into his moment-by-moment normality at a speed that was shocking. It did seem to be true that the human mind could adapt to just about anything. Given the right combination of time and intensity, even pure terror could be unconsciously tuned down to little more than a constant background noise.
It was forty minutes before the streamheat, going over the stones of the chamber inch by inch with flashlights, like archeologists in Tut's tomb, came across the first clue to the operation of the transfer. It was Klein who made the discovery. He slowly straightened up with a satisfied sigh. His voice echoed hollowly, reinforcing the feeling that the chamber was a huge stone sepulcher. "I think I've found what we're looking for."
He placed the flat of his hand carefully on a spot on the wall about three feet above the floor, and a fine tracery of delicate, glowing lines that greatly resembled a highly elaborate printed circuit appeared on an area some six feet square. In rapid sequence, he touched a series of points on the tracery, and a section of the stone wall melted away, leaving a low doorway in the solid rock-a doorway that, according to the regular terrestrial rules of both life and physics, simply shouldn't exist. Gibson expected the streamheat to go through it immediately, and he had started toying with the idea of following them when he saw that Smith and French were waiting while Klein walked to where Gibson was standing by the car. His face was very serious.
"This is an ancient mechanism and it almost certainly will require an energizing procedure before it will work for us. The energizing techniques needed to make dimension crossing are the most closely guarded secrets of our people. We'll be going through them in the room beyond that doorway. We'd like you to stay in the car and not try to follow us or observe it in any way. Can I trust you to do that?"
Gibson nodded. "I get the feeling that if I don't say yes, Smith and French will have a few more drastic ideas for stopping me learning the secret."
Klein smiled wearily. "You got it."
"I probably wouldn't understand what I was seeing anyway."
"That's why they're letting me do it my way. Do I have your word that you'll stay in the car?"
Gibson nodded again. "I'll stay in the car."
Klein walked back to the others. For some time, Gibson had been noticing that Klein was a little different from the other two. Where Smith and French had a tendency to act like well-programmed automatons, Klein demonstrated a degree of wit, humor, and a certain lack of respect for authority. On the journey out of London, however, it had gone deeper than that. His handling of the car and his being the first one to get the chamber to give up its secrets seemed to indicate that he was the tech specialist of the trio. When the going got bizarre, Klein apparently got going. Gibson was growing to trust him, and he hoped the trust was justified.
The streamheat vanished through the doorway, and Gibson settled himself in the front seat of the car. He knew that the big one was almost upon him, the actual shift to another dimension, but he tried not to think about that. It actually wasn't easy to worry about something that he couldn't even visualize. Instead he concentrated on wondering what was going on in the room beyond the chamber.
The word "procedure" was so ambiguous that it could mean virtually anything, but, with the image of Windemere's energizing ritual so fresh in his mind, Gibson couldn't help wondering if what the streamheat were doing was anything along the same lines. They were such creatures of logic, programs, and systems that it was hard to imagine them in any kind of sexual context, but he couldn't stop himself from conjuring images of the variations that could be achieved by two men and one woman. He was very tempted to sneak a look into the other room, but the thought of how the trio might react held him back. He'd given his word to Klein, and even though the world had him pegged as a degenerate, his word was his word.
Whatever Smith, Klein, and French were doing in the side chamber, it took them just over half an hour by the dashboard clock in the Cadillac, and when they came out, it wasn't only Klein who looked drained. They were all showing signs of strain, and they appeared to be avoiding each other's eyes.
Gibson looked at them questioningly. "So what happens now? When do we make the move?"
French scowled at him. "Any moment now, so shut up."
Smith gestured to Klein. "Kill the headlights."
The Caddy's headlights went out and darkness was again total. And then things started to appear. Glowing silver tracery, more of the delicate circuitlike designs, spread quickly across the walls of the chamber, dancing from stone to stone like fine lines of living mercury, covering the interior of the room like geometric, speeded-up vines. It was as if they were inside some huge ancient computer that was rapidly powering up, section by section. The sun symbol at the end of the room also came to life, shining with a golden light. It slowly began to rotate, and the planetary-system diagrams contained inside it also turned on their axes. It quickly grew much brighter than the silver circuitry on the walls, a huge moving mandate, so magnificent that it had them staring open-mouthed.
It was about that time that the Cadillac became transparent.
They'd started out watching the spectacle that was unfolding inside the chamber through the windows of the car, but suddenly they could see it through the bodywork. It was as though the car had lost all substance. Gibson put out a hand. It still felt solid but there was nothing to see. Now the sun symbol was moving. Originally they had been looking at it head-on, through the windshield, but now, without any perceivable transition, it was above them. They were looking at it through the roof of the car, and it was rapidly expanding, becoming a ceiling and then a blazing sky, stretching to an impossible horizon that immediately started to drop downward, producing absolute disorientation. The gold sun seemed to be passing through them, and at the same time they were falling. Gibson felt sick. His body, the car, and everything around him was being impossibly stretched. He had no shape, and the signals from his nervous system made no sense at ail. He was falling headfirst and fast. There was no sign of the others, and he couldn't even locate the car. All that surrounded him were sheets of golden flame. He was riding the flames but still falling. He was a streak of flashfire, a burning meteor. He was spiraling, leaving a trail of gold, a downward helix lighting up the void. He knew that it couldn't last. He was going to burn out. There was no travel to other dimensions. This was the end. He no longer had a body. He wasn't going out in a blaze of glory, he was a blaze of glory. The pai
n was monumental. The screaming in his ears shut out everything else. A black sea was beneath him and he was plunging toward it. He was falling and falling, down into the dark sea. Once he hit the water, it wouldn't matter anymore.
The White Room
THE IDEA OF escaping from the very exclusive clinic had been in the back of Joe Gibson's mind ever since he'd first been brought in, but he didn't really start thinking about practical ways of achieving it until he'd been there for about a month. It wasn't that he didn't want to get out of the place and back on the street to find out what had happened to his life, but it was complicated, and in those first weeks there had been only the briefest periods when the medication had left him in any mental shape to follow through even the simplest progression of logic. It was really his conversations with West that initially triggered his determination to figure a way to get out and stay out.
He realized almost immediately that it was impossible for him to follow West's advice and convince the staff that they were curing him. He increasingly suspected that it wouldn't be too hard to con Kooning into believing he was retrieving parts of his "real" life. Unfortunately the most perfunctory check would reveal the deception. He couldn't remember his "real" life because he had no "real" life to remember, and he couldn't be cured because there was nothing wrong with him. His only hope was a full-blown, go-for-broke escape.
The escape itself shouldn't be too difficult. Physical security in the place was fairly lax. The staff relied so heavily on drugs to keep the patients in line that they'd become lazy. They simply didn't expect a patient seriously to attempt a breakout. The hard part would be staying out. Once on the street, he was a man with no name. He had no ID, no money, and he didn't see himself taking up mugging or bank robbing to survive. The few days between his return to Earth and the freak-out that caused the cops to grab him and turn him over to the boys in the white coats had thoroughly convinced him that somehow all trace of him had been wiped out. He'd even tried to contact Windemere, but he also seemed to have vanished without trace. During that first forty-eight hours at the clinic, he'd actually welcomed the drugs. There was only so much that a man could take.