by Mick Farren
"There is one thing. What's your cover story when we get to Crown Electrical? I mean, do you have a job there or are you just going to wing it on the strength of wearing the work clothes?"
"I have a job there. I'm due to start this morning."
"Isn't that asking for trouble? Surely the local equivalent of the FBI or whatever are going to be checking on all newly hired employees and stuff like that."
This time French's smile was grim. "By the time they start doing that kind of checking, I'll be a long way away."
They drove across town for about fifteen minutes, but Gibson, not having even the foggiest idea of the geography of Luxor, had no idea where they were going. They left the residential neighborhood and passed through an area of industrial buildings. All along the route there were the signs of a city waking up and starting the day. Lines of gray-faced workers waited for buses while others thronged the roads in their own almost uniformly run-down cars. For anything but the closest examination, Gibson and French fitted right in with nothing to make them stand out from the crowd. During the last five minutes of the trip, they were diverted by a number of police sawhorse barriers and temporary detour signs. They were obviously near an area that was being kept clear for the presidential motorcade.
The Crown Electrical building was a square brick structure and, apart from the fact that it overlooked the open space of Craven Plaza, was totally unremarkable. There were probably a thousand commercial buildings just like it in the city. French parked and locked the car, and he and Gibson walked to the staff entrance just like any other poor bastards on their way to work. The act of punching in went without a hitch, even though Gibson hadn't punched a clock since sometime in the sixties when, as a struggling rock 'n' roller, he'd worked in a bakery before the advent of fame and fortune.
He and French rode up in the elevator together with two other characters in the same tan overalls. One of the characters nodded in a routine way to Gibson. "How you doing, Zwald? Heard you went out sick."
Gibson fought down panic and nodded back. "I must have ate something that didn't agree with me."
"That's a bitch, ain't it. You still look a bit under the weather. You want to take it easy."
Gibson grinned. "I'll sure do that."
To Gibson's relief, the two men got out on four and he and French continued to the sixth floor on their own. As soon as the elevator door closed, Gibson let out a long sigh. "I could have done without that."
"You're doing fine, just hold it together."
Gibson blinked. As far as he could remember, it was the first time that he'd ever heard French utter an encouraging word.
They emerged from the elevator, turned right, and went through the fourth door they came to. As French had predicted, there was nothing behind it apart from a large dusty storeroom containing a half-dozen or so empty boxes. French immediately went to the window and looked out; then, apparently satisfied that all was as it should be, he turned to Gibson and pointed at the radiator against the wall. "Look down behind that radiator and see what you can find."
"The radiator?"
"Just do it."
Gibson gingerly reached down the back of the radiator. He had once heard a story about how, in Australia, they had something called the funnel web spider whose bite could kill a grown man in a matter of seconds. Since the coming of modern civilization, the funnel web had taken to living behind radiators in hotels, factories, and apartment buildings. He hoped there was nothing similar in Luxor. His fingers touched wrapping paper. A package of some kind was hidden down there, long and narrow. When he lifted it out, he could feel its hard metallic contents: it contained either curtain rods or a broken-down rifle.
"Is this Zwald's gun?"
French nodded. "It's been hidden there for over a week."
"You want me to unwrap it?"
"No, come and help me with these boxes."
French was walking a packing case over to the window. As Gibson brought more, he arranged them into a low wall in front of the window so they formed a perfect sniper's nest. Gibson scratched his head. He didn't know if it was a side effect of the hero serum but the modest exertion had made him sweat. "Did we really need to do that?"
French was pushing up the window. "Got to make it look right."
Gibson moved over to the window and looked out. Crowds of spectators were already lining the motorcade route where it passed through the square of sooty green that was called Craven Plaza. On the right-hand side of the square, there was a low rise dotted with scrawny trees and, at the far end, a bridge that carried the monorail tracks over the streets. Motorcycle cops formed knots on every corner, and patrolmen on foot were strung out all along the route. The sinister, black, armored police cruisers were prowling up and down like grim headwaiters making final adjustments to the place settings before a banquet. Gibson gave thanks for the hero serum, which was keeping him from imagining every law-enforcement officer that he could see storming up to the sixth floor of Crown Electric to get him.
French was tearing the wrapping from the rifle. It came in five basic parts, clean, brand new, and covered in a thin film of gun oil. He quickly snapped together the barrel, the trigger mechanism, and the skeleton stock. He'd fitted the scope sight and banged in the clip with a final flourish, and then, to Gibson's horror, he knelt in the firing position and experimentally sighted the rifle out of the window.
"For Christ's sake don't do that, someone will see you."
French shrugged and lowered the gun. He placed it on a packing case beside him. "You worry too much."
Gibson shook his head as though he couldn't quite believe French. "Damn straight, I worry. How long do we have to wait here?"
French took the pistol out of the pocket of his overalls and placed it on the packing case beside the rifle. Now both weapons were handy for use.
"Lancer isn't due for another hour."
"Jesus. What if someone comes up here?"
"I locked the door behind us."
Gibson's mouth was very dry. "I think maybe this hero juice is wearing off, I'm starting to feel a little jumpy."
"I'll give you another shot in about forty-five minutes so you don't falter when the moment comes."
Gibson lit a cigarette. "It's going to be a long hour."
While Gibson chain-smoked, French sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the window with one hand on the rifle. There was something almost Zen about his level of calm, as if he had the ability to just turn himself off until he was needed.
In the plaza below, the crowds were growing larger and the cops had completely closed off the streets along which the motorcade would pass and those feeding into them. A loud metallic clack made Gibson start. French had jacked a round into the breech of the rifle.
Gibson dropped his latest cigarette onto the floor and ground it out with his heel. "What do you need to do that for?"
"Just force of habit."
"Now I'm so far in, how about explaining something to me?"
"What's that?"
"How does all this, the plot against Lancer and everything, fit into the battle against Necrom? How does it help?"
"It's a matter of stability."
Gibson was quite suiprised that French was willing to talk to him. He supposed that with all the preparation complete, there was nothing to lose. "Stability?"
"The waking of Necrom will produce an era of violent chaos across the dimensions. Our only hope is to maintain the maximum areas of stability that we can sustain. Behind the combination of Lancer and the current oligarchy in Hind-Mancu, this dimension is already drifting toward chaos."
"So Lancer has to go."
"It would seem so."
"Will Raus be any better?"
French shook his head. "I doubt he'll even weather the scandal of the assassination. A junta composed of police and military officers will be in power inside of two months. Then we'll have some stability."
"The Kamerians aren't going to like that too much, are they
?"
"That's hardly the point, is it?"
This seemed to end the conversation, and Gibson turned back to the window. Something about the plaza below had started to bother him, a nagging feeling that somehow it seemed familiar. After worrying it around for a while, he dismissed the thought. It was probably the effect of the drug. Wasn't it time for another shot? He put this to French, and the streamheat produced a small junkie kit in a flat stainless-steel box. Gibson normally hated needles but in this case he would make an exception. The hero serum really did make the fear go away. French filled the syringe and indicated that Gibson should roll up his sleeve. "You know that this stuff can be highly addictive if used for an extended period?"
Gibson sighed. "All I need is a brand-new drug habit."
French smiled. "I wouldn't worry about it. After today, you won't be able to get any more, so you can crave all you want but it won't be more than a wistful memory."
French's tone led Gibson to suspect that he was speaking from personal experience.
Gibson lit yet another cigarette. The first of the two packs was almost empty. "Shouldn't Lancer be here by now?"
French nodded. "He's late. Lancer's famous for being late. He'll probably be late for his own funeral,"
French was sighting the rifle again, resting it flat along the stacked-up packing cases. Gibson couldn't see the point of this. It seemed like such a needless risk. "I wish to hell you wouldn't do that."
French looked at him as though he clearly thought that Gibson was an old woman. "Relax, will you? Don't you know people never look up?"
"Cops look up on a gig like this."
"Let it go."
Gibson couldn't let it go. "Anyone would think you were going to do the thing for real."
There was the sound of cheering, out of sight, away down on one of the side streets.
"He's coming!"
French tensed, hunching into the rifle.
Gibson knew that something wasn't right.
The motorcade came round the corner. Four motorcycle policemen led the way on bikes as big as the biggest Harley Davidsons back on Earth, They were followed by two LPD cruisers, and a closed black car not unlike a Cadillac Coupe de Ville of the early sixties. After that came the president, riding in the back of a long, black, open-topped limo with Secret Service men or the equivalent riding the running boards. More motorcycles roared alongside the cars in low gear, belching black, unburned fuel. President Lancer was waving, acknowledging the cheers of the crowd. He was slim with an easy debonair stance and a shock of light-brown hair. His wife was beside him; she was wearing a pink dress. The motorcade was taking the curved road that ran diagonally across the plaza and on down to the underpass at the far end.
The pink dress did it. Gibson knew what wasn't right.
French was aiming the rifle.
The plaza was so familiar because he'd seen it all back on Earth. He'd seen it in newspapers, in newsreels, and on TV. The Zapruder film. It hadn't been in Luxor, it had been in Texas. It wasn't indentica] but it was damned close. The motorcade had made it complete. The underpass, the grassy knoll to the right. Dealey Plaza.
"Stop!"
Gibson made a grab for French's pistol.
"Stop!"
French fired. "There are certain events contained in the time stream that cannot be avoided. The bottleneck theory."
Parallel worlds and parallel events,
"Stop!"
Inevitable.
French worked the bolt and fired again.
The president jerked forward.
Unshakable destiny.
Simultaneously there were more gunshots that seemed to come from the grassy knoll.
A pink halo briefly surrounded the president's head.
How many shooters were there on this thing?
The president jerked back.
French fired a third time.
Gibson had the pistol. He knew and was consumed by rage. The streamheat were still lying to him. He was set up. He was the dumb bastard who could be conned twice. He was the fall guy and they were going to turn him into Lee Oswald!
"I'm going to kill you, you motherfucker!"
French turned. The rifle was pointed at Gibson.
The White Room
WHEN GIBSON HAD first been brought to the clinic, the medical staff had seemed determined to bury his so-called rock-star fantasy beneath an impenetrable layer of mind-numbing drugs and mental dislocation. Now, as the weeks turned into months, Dr. Kooning appeared determined to dig it all up again. She was particularly fascinated by the incidents that had destroyed his career. One day, hardly able to disguise her glee, she had let slip that she believed he was experiencing auto-destructive delusions of grandeur. From her excitement, he gathered that she believed that this was some big deal.
The pattern for the sessions was normally set by the first question. First, Kooning would read her notes, then remove her glasses and look at him. Gibson didn't like it that she wore the same round Himmler glasses as Rampton.
"You talk about a chain reaction of events that put an end to your career…"
Gibson was not in a particularly good mood. He was beginning to believe that his wholesale avoidance of the prescribed pills was setting up a serious psychochemical imbalance in his metabolism. The problem was that the shots continued, which meant he was actually only getting one half of the intended medication, and God only knew what that was doing to him over the long term. He'd found that he was waking up feeling increasingly ratty. He was also heartily sick of the sessions with Kooning. There had to be some finite limits on how much you could talk about yourself, especially when you had long since ceased to be your favorite topic of conversation. Escape was more and more on his mind.
"I thought we'd agreed that the whole thing was just a neurotic fantasy."
"I'd still like to hear about it,"
"The downfall?"
"It seems to be the thing that you're least willing to talk about."
"Is that really surprising?"
"It might prove to be a lot easier than you think."
"There isn't really that much to it. I fucked up. I fucked up by abusing the audience and walking off the stage at the Garden, I fucked up on the Letterman show by being drunk out of my mind. I went on the Woody Allen Show after doing coke and mescaline and took it into my head to mouth off about how I was the reincarnation of Ivan the Terrible and what the country needed was a good, old-fashioned autocratic tyranny, which was obviously the gig for me because there was absolutely nothing that I couldn't excel at if I put my mind to it, and how I'd end up ruling the world and the inner planets. I've seen the tape; my last words to Woody before they dragged me off were I'm Joe fucking Gibson, Master of the Universe, and don't you forget it."
Kooning's eyebrows had shot up like a pair of twin tilt signals on a pinball machine. "Woody? The Woody Allen Show?"
"In my reality, he was a talk-show host."
In fact this wasn't true but he was so tired of talking to Kooning that he had started slipping in selected pieces of fiction. As far as he knew, Woody Allen was the same in the reality he was in as in the one he'd come from. In fact, it had been Oprah Winfrey who'd borne the brunt of that piece of lunacy.
"Did you really believe that you were the reincarnation of Ivan the Terrible?"
"Of course not. I was just trying to upset people by being perverse. And attract attention, too, I guess."
"And did it work?"
Gibson nodded."Oh, sure. I was banned from over two hundred radio stations and MTV."
"So you wanted to be a victim?"
"Shit, I didn't know what I wanted. In fact, what I wanted hardly came into the picture."
"You felt you had no control over what you did?"
Gibson sighed. He was weary of even thinking about it. "Listen, what was really going on was that I had this job. The Holy Ghosts in general and me in particular had landed this job. Aside from the music, which at times became almost inciden
tal in the minds of some of the fans and most of the media, we were expected to go out to the edge and come back and tell the world what it was like. We were professional pushers of the envelope. We gave the world a window on the weird. In the beginning, the world was titillated and gave us loads of money and drugs and sex. They liked it while it was all fun and frolic and nobody was getting hurt, but when we started showing them what it was really all about they didn't like that. When we publicly got the horrors, they started looking a bit askance."
Kooning was looking a bit askance herself, and Gibson became a little alarmed. Dear God, had he overdone it? He couldn't imagine what might happen to him if she started believing what he was telling her.
Chapter Eleven
GIBSON FIRED FIRST. French staggered backward but didn't go down or even drop the rifle. They must have been made of sterner stuff in his dimension, maybe more selective breeding. There was no mistaking that the heavy-caliber slug was hurting him. His face was contorted, and his whole body cringed around the point of impact as though trying to contain and blanket the exvcruciating pain. It wasn't stopping him, however, even though purple blood was now seeping from the entry wound and Gibson could only guess at the mess that had been made of his back where the bullet exited. French was bringing up the rifle again. Gibson fired a second time. French dropped to his knees but still struggled to stand, and might even have made it if Gibson hadn't put a third bullet into him. This time he dropped the rifle. He was clawing inside his coveralls, pulling out a miniature version of the multibarreled streamheat weapon. Gibson hesitated. What was French doing? Why would he bother to zap him when he could have killed him the old-fashioned way with the rifle?
Before Gibson could react, French turned the weapon on himself. He placed the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger. There were twin flashes and French vanished as Gibson watched dumbstruck. The streamheat weapon clattered to the floor when the hand that was holding it ceased to exist in that dimension.
For the first time, Gibson was aware of the pandemonium in the square below, a cacophony of massed sirens and the sounds of people screaming, a lot of people screaming. He resisted the temptation to run to the window and look out. He had to clear his mind and think. If he didn't think it through and think it through right, he would be dead within minutes, shot by the police or torn apart by a raging crowd. His first thoughts were the simple ones: Go, run, hide, find a hole and crawl into it, then pull the hole down on top of him. Unfortunately any hole that might offer protection had, by definition, to be well away from Crown Electrical and Craven Plaza.