World Without Slack

Chapter 1

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send

peace, but a sword.

Matthew 10:34, The Endlessly Revised Holy Bible

GOOD LORD!... "CHOKE!"

The Vault of Horror, no. 26, E.C. Comics

The Fightin' Jesus looked out over the immense bridge of the the Xist battle saucer, Blood of Christ. He laughed. He was finally going to have His revenge on the natives of Dust-Mote 89-aB.

Aboard Jesus' flagship, dozens of killer theologians, the Shock Priests, were busy at their weapon terminals. On the power decks below, the proper orgone-cycle timings were being set by mass fornications between the ritual "crew" and the cancer beings of the Spree, Jesus' only true allies. An Invasion-ready state existed on this ship and the six hundred and sixty-five others floating over their doomed target, Earth.

Jesus was in a psychopathically elated state. His long, soft hair hung loose about his shoulders, flowing to meet the white, muslin robe that was the Prince of Peaces' uniform. Simple leather sandals adorned His feet, which sported their own matching wounds. Floating a fraction of an inch off the deck, He fussed with His neatly trimmed beard, His manic aura dancing about, crackling and hissing where it touched across the glowing Halo. At the moment, His face truly did resemble many of the perverse portraits the humanoids painted in the name of His Glory. Those Yeti-born monkeys prayed to these icons for the salvation of their souls. As if they had any souls to save. As if anybody would want to save them, which was unlikely in the extreme.

He had gotten reports that the Earthlings had actually organized a planetary religion, completely centering around His murder there, so long ago. More like a lynching, it was. He spent three torturous days and nights digging Himself out. Just in time to escape those sadistic cavemen, if the old Greek records were correct. If He had been discovered up and about after the Crucifiction, before He was ready, they might have really finished Him off. Those hicks had the unmitigated gall to nail Him up like some common criminal and then pray to these "paintings" that made Him look like He was enjoying it! That He was forgiving! That He LOVED them!

Oh, the anticipation! He was sick to His stomach with glee! Jesus would show these backwater, genetic accidents the true face of Pain, Sin and Redemption! He had hired His own Holy Ghost-writers to revise this "Bible" the Earthlings had, more to His own thoughts and He was going to make sure it was the only edition available. It had taken Him two thousand standard Earth-years to return. Now He would pay them back for the holes He still carried in His hands. Sweet Stigmata! Even the slightest thought of the old scars made them glow red, right through His fists, through the boxing gloves. The battle command of the spacecraft was staffed by veteran Angels of Light, on personal loan from JVHV-1, Jesus' father. They supervised the officer Daemon units that were the fleets' literal conjurors of destruction within the tangible energy spectrum. To focus these unworldly reactions and project them to the proper targets was the job of the four thousand odd Seraphim. For mopping up and commando raiding, the Dark Bodies and AESON had been hired. Thousands of these emotionless, combat-proven mercenaries waited in the troop holds of each destroyer. All at time-and-a-half. It was expensive to ravage a planet, even an insignificant one like Earth.

No matter. The Host of Judgement, That Which Comes, had finally arrived. And on Jesus' birthday, too.

"What do you think, Dad?" Jesus' second-in-command, Jim Jones stood by with the final attack codices for His approval. A man-sized holographic map of Earth rotated in scale next to Jones in mid-air. On its surface grids of the native's planetary defenses were lit up in green; communications nets in violet and manned stations in blue. A colorful network of intersecting lines covered the sphere. It was quite pretty, actually.

"Like a Christmas tree ornament," Jesus mused, "My Christmas tree ornament -- to smash. To return to dust!"

"Our children wait for us below, Master. We will walk among them and we will smile. At Your moment of choice, of course," Jones toadied.

Jesus studied Jones' tired, puffy face in the pink glow of the neuron banks that ran around the walls of the mighty dreadnauts' bridge and shuddered. He was no stranger to resurrection of the undead, but whoever had brought this Jones around again had slipped up. Something was missing from this creature, something else had been added. Something, but what? Jones had been forced on him as a Number Two by the DJIN bankers who financed His war party. Damn them! He never forgot the price they had demanded for this little expedition. Jones' constant reminders of their influence and expectations irritated Jesus no end. Not to mention the annoying habit Jones had copied from J.R. "Bob" Dobbs. The twisted thing insisted on smoking a pipe, even here near the sensitive memory cells and nerve relays of the ship. Jones might have been left dead a little too long. He moved with a constant jerk and never stopped poking at his throat. Jones always wore dark sunglasses and still took massive injections of meth-amphetamines, even though they no longer had any effect on his regenerated shell. Huge abscesses ran up and down the insides of his arms, yet he continued to wear short-sleeved, tropical shirts, as if to show off his puny efforts at self-mutilation, here with the Spree, to whom matter manipulation was an ancient art-form.

With a drop of blood, Jesus OK'd the pad Jones held out to Him and tried once more to draw out His second. "You know, Jimbo, the best part about all this is that the humans actually think there's an Afterlife, for them anyway. That's why they strung me up the first time I was here. Something to do with getting to Heaven, I believe. Who the Hell would want to go to Heaven. A slum like that? They think like bugs down there."

"I'm well aware of that, Commander," Jones answered stiffly. His Xist hard-wiring made him go formal, whenever Jesus became too familiar with him. There was a big secret buried in Jones' skull that the bankers wanted kept hidden.

It bothered Jones to be back on Earth so soon after his failure with the social programming research post he had been running there. What had happened hadn't really been his fault. The administration changes at Central had shifted all the friendly execs away from public sympathy for the project and Jones had lost his funding. He was forced to abort the experiment and terminate all the subject organisms, himself included. True, as head scientist he had an escape clause, but really, now, years of work were abandoned overnight when the grant was cut off! Politics, it was due to nothing but politics. If everything went right this time, he'd have the last word with Central, the very last word. With this asshole, Fightin' Jesus, too. What an insult now, to have this Jesus harping at him, calling him `Jimbo.' Jones had often called out for Jesus in his trances and he'd done it with respect. No respect for Jones here. The only thing Jesus and Jim had in common was their sexual preference for young children. Just a couple of cosmic chicken hawks.

Jones had a prime directive with full authorization from NEXUS Security to take out JHVH-1's bastard Son when the invasion was completed, or at the first sign that Jesus knew what the real objective of this mission was. He could wait. It would be soon enough.

"Have the Pope brought up to the bridge," Jesus softly ordered to a waiting spirit, bringing Jones out of his private thoughts. "I do hope he's capable of conversation. He didn't seem to respond too well to My Last Offer. Oh, and please keep any Warrior Spree away from him. Their resemblance to `cockroaches' seemed to frighten the little faker no end before. Get him some unsoiled clothing."

"As you wish." The runner blinked off to the interrogation chamber with its message.

Jones was impatient. "I hope the audience is a short one. The poor man could hardly stand up after Your previous `chat' with him. Let him rest. It's hard to maintain our surprise arrival advantage for long. Earth electronics are pre-historic, no problem there, but if ` Bob' should feel the gravitational disruption caused by our orbital formation, I remind you that the margin of profit for the NHGH would drop by almost a half-point, which would bring your balance into the red. You are already very close to having command of this trip turned over to our investment managers."

"`Bob'? `Bob' will be terminated by My Own Hand," Jesus snapped. "As for the Pope, that whining simp, why, he's going to give the order to begin The Rapture."

? Next Chapter

Chapter 2

SubGenius propaganda sticker, 1995

It was almost April, but a late-season, New Confederacy bombing run had come screaming in off the plains, its delivery of high grade munitions turning the afternoon sky dark, with the resulting fires sending the temperature up well over a hundred degrees in the undamaged parts of the city. Ah, Spring wasn't quite what is used to be.

After the destruction of Akron (and the rest of Northern Ohio) in the aliens' sneak attack on Christmas Eve, I'd seen the spray-paint on the wall and prepared. I had my Church to thank for that. Originally, the pancultural SubGenius religion had appealed to my alienated sense of humor, long dulled by the desensitized asylum that was life in the Rubber City. I joined up, first becoming a Convert Op, then a Dogma Sprout, finally worming my way up through the DobbsHeads to Overbaiter Prime. I went to Dokstock. I did it all, new family, new hairdo, new TV.

But... then it all started to come true. With every passing year, the Light of "Bob" became a little less funny and a lot more trouble. All the sick things I had envisioned as merely humorous black commentary on the stewing, devolved culture us (HA!) Earthoid primitives had trapped ourselves with was coming to pass! Every collective fear, learned long-ago in filthy caves from supposedly benevolent aliens, every Church Rant and OutreachBurst of irrational, auto-hysteric spouting, every prophetic utterance, every drop from the dried-up teat of the Great Dogma of us all was coming to life with dream-like precision. Now that Jesus was stomping about, who could argue?

As previously arranged, Doug Smith and I met up in Chicago, at Pope Flores' place. The Pope was long gone, off to Dobbstown at the first sign of trouble. Being populated mostly by atheists and drug addicts, Chicago had made it through the Rapture, barely, but the same couldn't be said for the economic federation it had belonged to. The United States of America had collapsed along with most western nations in The Shakeup, as it was popularly known. The continental U.S. was dissolving into a haphazard arrangement of warring city-states, oddball political territories, private kingdoms, military dictatorships and corporate control systems, all at each others' throats, fighting for the scraps of power and technology that hadn't yet been destroyed.

Smith had then first revealed to me my true role in the galactic sting taking place on what turned out to be a rented planet -- not even ours! We decided to travel together, making our goal the flying saucer Doug claimed he had buried under the main temple in Texas. The last two months had seen us zig-zag across the Midwest, evading various martial law roundups and relocation camps, heading for Dallas. HOME. But I was getting tired.

One last stop, Smith had promised. A Church board of directors meeting had been called to discuss cutting a deal with the aliens, we couldn't miss it.

And so, in a blast-proof Temple-Clinic in Free Fire Zone 554--St. Louis, Missouri, I was about to meet the infamous Ivan Stang face to face.

Nervously, I paced back and forth in Dr. Drummond's waiting room, raising the gun blinds to glance out the window slits at the burning buildings every few moments. I felt naked without my old riot-pump, there'd been a gun check at the clinic door and the receptionist was very insistent but I'd managed to hold onto the rocket pistol. It was some kind of security, anyway. I heard an occasional car blow up, off in the distance by the river. The fire storm was hurling cinders every now and then against the thermal plastic with a thin, brittle sound that sent shivers up and down my back.

Across the room, Doug Smith sat blankly leafing though a Church pamphlet he had dug out of a stack of Hi-Lights magazines on the coffee table. "How can you be so ass-scratching calm about all this?" I wanted to screech at him, to throttle his skinny neck in my hands, but I already knew by heart what his sing-song answer would be. It was amazing, considering what Dobbs had put him through.

"I'm sure it's just a false alarm, Paul," he had told me again that morning over a scavaged breakfast of canned cat-tuna and warm Gatorade in a drainage ditch just outside of town.

Well, that was what "Bob" had written in the Book, too, but somehow, it failed to reassure me.

"And what if it isn't?" I had demanded angrily, "Then what?"

Doug had frowned. "You must learn to trust "Bob", Paul. Have faith. If this is His will, then He will give us the slack to accept it. Or you can kill me."

What a temptation lay in that offer! I flopped back onto the tattered, orange vinyl couch, next to Smith. The air-conditioner kicked on with a sick grind as the wall began to heat up.

If only Doug knew! I had lost my faith on that long-ago, warm November afternoon, out on the grassy knoll that overlooks the Plaza. There were the tourists on the banked hill. The whole crowd had turned as one at the sound of the First Shot, solemn and respectful. The women red-eyed and the men in their dark suits, looking still and uncomfortable under the hot television lights. Doug himself had delivered the Presidents' eulogy. "Bob" had a plan, he told us in a firm voice. It was not for us to question the ritual slaughter of the actor-politician. Or we could kill him. But I had stared angrily into the Black Limousine that day. I cursed the ways of Doug's merciless and unintelligible God. One of these days someone would take up his dare.

Just then, Dr. Drummond's nurse appeared at the interior airlock, his throat vocorder announcing, "Reverend Smith and Mr. Mavrides? The Doctor is ready to see you now."

The dull echo of the Southern Navy xenon-bombs carried all the way down the corridor and the whole clinic shook in response to the thunder of their fighter jets coming in low. The nurse, a once swarthy Cuban weight-lifter, cursed them and led us to a tiny room toward the back of the shielded Quonset hut that Philo worked out of. The fellow wasn't a very positive testimonial to Dr. Drummond's healing powers or skill. I'm no medic, but he was obviously suffering from at least six of the major phage-weapon strains and would be dead in a matter of days. Still, he was cheerful. I made it a point not to get too close when I gave him his tip.

The door closed behind us with a click of the lock. Then, the clicking of several more locks. More than had been visible on the door frame when we had entered. A string of bare red light bulbs hung from the ceiling, which was only four and a half feet high. Both of us were forced to to bend over in a humiliating manner to avoid the lights. It hadn't seemed that small until the door shut behind us. I felt a lurch and heard the whine of a motor start up. Was this an elevator we were in? We seemed to be going down.

I suddenly felt sick to my stomach. In spite of everything I had done to get here, I wanted to leave -- to die, to just have it all be over and finished, forever. Dread blossomed and grew off the corners of everything. I felt dirty and cheap. The dim 25 watt bulbs cast an evil glow in the decending cube. The building shook again, and the lift stopped. The lights kept banging into my forehead, burning my hair if they touched against it, filling the space with the foul odor. They were far hotter than they should have been for that low a wattage. The fillings in my teeth began to hurt. My clothes smelled bad. My face was dirty. I needed a haircut. Something.

Smith looked affected by the change in mood, as well. He had wet his pants and lay curled up on the floor, banging his head against a plastic chair leg, the only piece of furniture in the incredibly claustrophobic "room." His convulsions made a nice pattern as he thumped away. Almost a cheap, Casio, chip-stick samba-beat. That Smith always did have musical talent.

Another lurch. Were we going down now or sideways? I was sinking to my knees. I heard my gun fall from my jacket to the floor and felt apathetic about retrieving it. Why bother? It was just my gun. So what? Why was I here? Now there was a mystery. Where was here, anyway? At least there was a nice drum beat.

I woke to the sound of thousands of angry bees swarming inside my head. Feeling nauseous and vaguely "high", I lay still for a second and kept my eyes closed, trying to listen to the voices I heard coming through the mental blizzard of white-noise. I could make out friend Smith having an argument with someone who punctuated Doug's always urgent tones with ugly laughter. My skin felt like it had been drenched in paint stripper. Hot, unpleasantly-scented air, mixed with the odor of burning Frop, was blowing softly across my face, making me gag.

"No use pretending you're out, Mavrides. Sit up and shake the third hand of the Only Hope You Have," demanded a rough, deep voice, "And when you're behind the lines, from now on at least try to look like a SubGenius. Take off that Pink slave-suit and act your nental-age before somebody grabs that disgusting tie and strangles you with it. Want a drink?."

Cracking my lids apart, I saw a rather imposing figure dressed in an expensive, grey three-piece before me, offering an oversized snifter of greenish liquid and puffing on a cigar-sized frop-stick. He looked like a heavy-set cross between James Bond and Mike Hammer, with dark, sunken eyes set off by a plastic nose that rode a thick, brown moustache. It could only be G. Gordon Gordon, the Church Head of Security, that was giving me this warm welcome. Smith had warned me about him back on the road, "meta-killer with a heart of gold" or some such crap. Gordon had been backstage at the Victoria Theater, the legend went. A dangerous fellow to cross, Smith said. Gordon worked both sides of the razor blade, his nervous system boosted by Conspiracy military med-tech, spine scraped out and replaced with meat-chips and the latest carbon-ceramic weapons systems in some secret underground Pentagon hospital. He always went heavily armed. I had heard from others that his instant fits of violent behavior were a horror to behold, but that he was equally capable of acts of irrational, saintly kindness.

I sat up painfully and took in my surroundings. I was seated deep in a black leather, executive chair in what appeared to be a left-over set from some cheap, Hollywood spy blow-out. A pale-grey concrete ceiling, covered in reinforced-metal beaming that looked like it could withstand a direct nuclear strike, rose in a dome over a luxurious, over-designed, pentagonal meeting room, tastefully lit by colored spots that threw green and red shadows over everything. The place looked like a bad comic book panel. My fully loaded Gyro-jet pistol, spare clips, money belt and packet of fake I.D.s were on a brushed copper, board-room table in front of me that ran in a crazy pattern around the hall. It could easily hold thirty or forty people at individual, computerized desk settings. Bowls of bright pills, a clear beaker of ice water and a single, black carnation were placed before each terminal.

Set flush with the floor against the nearest wall was an enormous pool filled with what could have been several tons of steaming Lime Jello. I could make out indistinct, dark shapes about the size of compact cars, slowly moving back and forth under the surface, their churning actions sending quivers throughout the emerald "gelatin". Another entire wall looked in on an equally large tank that was swirling with toxic-looking, dirty-yellow vapor. The inside of the tank window was splattered with bubbling, reddish-brown oil running down deep gouges and scratches in the plastic that had the look of powerful claw marks; the floor was covered with small, dark-grey pebbles and muddy, purple rock. The four remaining sides of our "executive corral" appeared to be seamless black plastic. There were no doors of any kind that I could observe.

"You going to drink this or are `Bowel Lifters' and `Screamers' more your style?" Gordon again pushed the glass into my face. I took it and then saw Dougs' grinning puss peering at me from over a padded shoulder. Twice. From over both of Gordons' shoulders. There were two Doug Smiths! This was really too much. I did need that drink. Grabbing the offered snifter from the ham-sized fist, I tossed half of it down without thinking and recognized the familiar, vile taste too late. I started to choke. The crystal slipped from my hands to the stainless-steel, tiled floor, shattering at my feet, splashing my legs with the thick, foul drink. The poisonous, bitter flavor brought bile up my throat and hunching forward, I started to spit up all over my boots.

"What is that shit? Love Canal water?" I gasped, trying to catch my breath. "God, it's like --"

"No need to be crude. If you don't want any, simply put it down, like any civilized, well-mannered jackass," teased the smirking Gordon, who sipped at a mason jar full of the stuff. "I guess ninety-proof Green Peyote Joy Jacker is a mans' drink. Sorry."

"Leave him alone, Gordon. He's not the enemy," cut in one of the Dougs, handing me a flask of water. "Can't you see how close it was for him? We're lucky there's no brain damage or I'd have another useless broom-pusher to take care of."

Patting my back as I gulped at the cool water, the Doug apologetically explained, "Never mind Security, here. We're all a little bit edgy. You both had a near thing coming down when our `special guest' took the drop shaft with you. All three of you just made it in under the shields. I'm afraid our little space buddies have found out about "Bob's" briefing today and now there's a bit of a hub-bub topside. We're safe enough for the moment. Oh, and don't worry about the `sunburn.' It won't happen again. The pain should go away in about a week. We had Dr. Drummond check you and Doug both out. If it gives you any trouble, just let us know. By the way, I'm Ivan."

It was incredible, Smith and Stang were identical twins. Almost. . . clones. Was it possible? How? Dopplegangers? Robots? Surgery? Magick? The visual similarities that the two SubGenii shared were unsettling.

"`Pears to be that I'm not the only one getting `burned' by Dobbs this time `round," Doug said, picking flakes of translucent skin from his cheeks and nose while staring icily at the impeccable Stang. "This is truly some goddamned Holy Shinola, I'd say, coming from my own `best friend', thank you so very much. Dr. Drummond doesn't know his foot-gland from his Oxfords. `Bob' almost toasted us like a couple of meat-filled pop-tarts back there. Look at poor Mavrides, his eyebrows are practically singed off," he added, gesturing in my direction.

Ivan Stang was dressed in a dapper, ice-white suit with matching ten-gallon hat and pointed, snakeskin cowboy boots, but his thick, plastic, horn-rim glasses exactly matched those of Doug Smith, standing there in a soiled, olive-drab jumpsuit next to him. Studying the twins more closely now, however, I began to see that the differences between them became more than just the matter of a shower and a good tailor.

Doug Smith showed the weight of a lifetime time spent in search of Dobbs' fabled SLACK, fighting for the SubGenius Right of the Wrong-Way. Doug had the gaze of the veteran grunts' thousand-yard stare, walked in a stooped over shuffle and had acquired a tobacco jones that left him wheezy and generally short of breath. He had lived a hard forty-five years, with most of the last decade spent in a Tampa maximum-security federal prison on trumped-up blasphemy violations.

Doug had been at "Bobs'" side from the late sixties, back in the early days, serving as go-between for Dobbs and his contacts in the New Left and later, the developing New Right. By 1978, dropping out of public view, he became the mysterious Stangs' ghost-writer, responsible for all the speeches, rants, ravings and most of The Book of the SubGenius, all presented as Stang's original thoughts and writings. Many people had assumed that Stang and Smith were one and the same. Smith had vanished and Stang had appeared, or rather, not appeared but seemingly created behind a scrim curtain of obscuring PR drek. The mysterious Stang never showed his face in public. There were no personal audiences with him. No photos existed. The Church videos were the only place one could ever see his image, their quality being so poor that an accurate image was impossible to discern, even with computer-enhancement imaging. The unbreakable copy-guard on these static filled tapes was such that film in a sheilded camera would fog trying to take a picture off a monitor.

The Church had used Doug, paying him barely enough to keep his family alive, keeping him tucked away in a hidden Dallas slum, letting Ivan take credit for the works that Smith slaved over, then turned him in as the fall-guy when the Hinkey Senate SubCommitte had come too close to nailing the top boys for the Dobbs shooting. Only Connie's "special appeal" in an all-night secret session with a certain friendly Supreme Court Justice finally paid off where years of open lobbying, world-wide demonstrations for mercy, political threats and outright bribery had failed, freeing the popular, martyred pamphleteer last Spring after serving a small fraction of his two-hundred-and-twelve year sentence.

Knowing that Connie could have done this from the day the first indictment was served; that he could have been spared all the pain and humiliation of the year-long trial; that he had been considered more valuable to the Church rotting away in that tiny cell as a symbol of Conspiracy oppression; that the upper Foundation had let him sit out ten years in cold storage until the approaching X-Day had revived his usefulness, hadn't made Doug bitter or hard. "Bob" had his plan. Smith still believed, was still fool enough to follow Dobbs' maniacal path, explaining to anyone who would listen, "It's just his way."

This bottomless well of faith didn't extend to Ivan Stang, to hear the way Smith talked about him. Stang was a sore point. Doug would become instantly angry and abusive anytime the Scribes' name was mentioned around him, almost as if Smith held Stang solely to blame for his misfortune, even when he knew that it had been Connie keeping the big-house door shut on him all along. Smith had indeed taken the all-too traditional path of organized, or, rather, disorganized religion, and paid heavily for it.

Ivan Stang, on the other hand, in mid-life, seemed like a twenty-five-year-old version of his over-aged double. His youthful, thin face was smooth, unlined with worry, except for the sun-baked, wrinkles around the good-natured, twinkling eyes, which gave him a warm expression of deceptive, cheerful friendliness. Smiths' mousey-brown hair, greying at the temples, ratty and uncut, hung over the worn-out, reddish face in sad contrast to the greased and pomped peaks of Ivan's styled power coif.

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Chapter 3

Surrounded by wreckage of the once-familiar objects strewn about her kitchen, Gudren Thompson clutched the ice-pick even tighter and walked quietly across the thin path left open to her. The random shapes on the floor had made sense to her once but now they seemed ridiculous and useless --disjointed and somehow menacing, their colors even alien, disquieting. Everything in the room seemed to have sharp edges, rough broken lines, jagged points. The details of her own life were fading from memory. She had no names for anything now, could not even understand what a kitchen was for, much less that it was her kitchen. She was moving by instinct. Tin-foil and eggbeaters, boxes of herbal tea and sharp knives, pencils and broken glasses that had only moments before flung themselves wildly through the air --smashing almost everything in the tiny, yellow kitchen to bits, now lay still and inanimate. The floor was evenly covered with debris from the whirlwind poltergeist, except for a pathway that led around the overturned dining table and behind the bathroom door that opened off the kitchen.

She had been practising her marimba in the front of her railroad flat. A nice fall afternoon. Play some marimba, then ride her bike down to the pool for a swim before dinner. A nice quiet day. She might write a little bit later on or attend the newly formed community-militia co-op's first meeting.

It was the smell that had startled her first. The musky, ammoniated smell of an Old One. Palmer had shown her how to see them. Now she couldn't stop seeing them. She saw them everywhere --buses, at her office, the food distribution center, bars, the roofs of neighboring houses. How easy it had all been. You only had to wear a certain color, stand a certain way, held your hands like so, and a monstrous thing would come into view, sort-of. What you saw was actually more like a badly polarized, 3-D movie that was out of focus and transparent. What fun to make this simple magic. The forces all had different shapes but all shared that peculiar odor and seemed to uniformly equal the mass of a half Volkswagon.

Palmer had said the Elders were all around us, constantly, only nobody could see them or smell them unless you were lucky. She pointed out that smelling something that bad should not be considered luck. Palmer laughed but went on: a few could even materialize themselves, without an invitation from our plane. These were the hungry ones, the oldest ones, the demi-gods who sucked humans' minds dry. He said they were called Will Elders and must never be viewed directly. Would you look upon the Gorgon? Palmer said they were here to help, if they didn't eat you first. They were certainly ugly, Gudrun thought.

She didn't see much point in all this mumbo-jumbo, her crush on Janor aside, and resented Palmer for making her life even more complicated than it had been. The sex was pretty O.K., but now with this galactic war business, her sense of humor was wearing thin. Gas and food rationing, the collapse of the national government, a thousand other inconvieniences added up to a good case of future-shock. She was lucky to still have a job with what was left of the local state management system. And the rest of the SubGeniuses, it was enough to make her regret ever picking up their damn bible. First Smith and then his twin, Half-Smith, had insisted on Gudrun arming herself, once they found out Palmer had unofficially initiated her into the middle levels of Church secrets.

But not with something that made sense like a .45 automatic. No, now she had to carry around bits of red and orange plastic and a vial covered with SubGenius runes that contained a turkey gizzard. Armed! Oh, yeah. She felt real safe now. Still, she toted them around with her everywhere she went.

Then Palmer had started with his pre-historical biology lessons. He would ramble on and on at night while they lay there, telling her of glorious ages gone by, ages filled with long-dead races and not-quite dead races and Space Bankers and Jesus --Big Jesus, Little Jesus, Were-Jesus, more Jesii than she could keep track of, not to be confused with the Fightin' Jesus, the current, world-class Assoul who was slaughtering Earths' billions like a slum-dweller stomping roaches.

Some boyfriend Palmer Vreedees had turned out to be! In the last few weeks she had been forced into waxing her eyebrows once a day to keep up with the accelerated growth of the hair follicles around her Third Nostril. The large black strands were supposedly due to her new vulnerability to the plasmatic influences. An extra mat of organic protection for her expaned pineal gland. "Once you saw them", Vreedees had cautioned, "they could see you and since they were everywhere, you were permanently and irrevocably involved with their matters."

Now she had one in her bathroom.

So there it was-- a blob had shown up. The signs were all in place: the unmistakable stench of a half-ton, unwashed, mystic being; the crackle of ozone; and the animation of small, inorganic objects. Palmer had also said something about amnesia, memory loss as a sudden side-effect, but that bit of knowledge was becoming hazy.

All that loud noise coming from the back, too loud to forget, too loud to ignore, too distracting from thoughts of . . . of . . . something. What? She turned from the sink and walked towards the open door.

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Chapter 4

Nelie Connally to John Kennedy, seconds before the assassination, November 22, 1963

Stang and Dobbs had set up temporary headquarters for their collection of followers in an old Burger Chef on the west edge of things. It was bad ground. Lots of Dallas industry had left behind lots of bad chemistry. Add the BZ gas and nerve weapon residue from the End Time and it made a sweet stew. Just what "Bob" liked to eat for breakfast.

It took almost a whole day and a case of metal-piercing ammunition to reach the "Temple." Rooters and civilian militia had tied us up in Dealy Plaza for the better part of the afternoon, until Wellman had managed to put the X-ray laser back together. His talent for breaking equipment had almost cost us our lives several times that day.

We had always joked in the past about the shining, glass offices of downtown, about how the monstrous, multi-colored rectangles reflected the hellishly hot rays of Texas noon sun back and forth between their tinted finishes, each new refraction angle making the beams a little bit more coherent, a little bit stronger, until, at some unoccupied focal point where all the invisible beams intersected, twenty feet or so above the middle of State Street, there was a single, square-inch of space that had the surface temperature of a small star, able to vaporize anything moving across it. God help the pigeons that flew around down there.

We should have known better. The pigeons had long ago all been caught and eaten by the starving citizens of Dallas. The Men In Black warned us of the psychic violence the area seemed to exude and of its effect on organics. They told us that the mirrored angles of the banks and hotels compounded this urge to destruction, that the geometry of the downtown area was an illness itself planned long ago by now-dead Rebel architects, that this rationality-sapping phenomenon was strongest right around City Center. This effect was so intense in Fort Worth that the Xists didn't even bother trying to save it, just melted the place down to slag first thing off. They lent us their best left-brain filters, but it was still depressing. Wellman and I squabbled away the whole time, like some demented survivalist rewrite of "The Bickersons."

As for the rest of Dallas, "the city that shoots Presidents and shoots the people that shoot at Presidents", nothing remained. Block after block of ruins, stretching away for miles. Dead cars filled the streets and freeways, killed in their tracks when the first electro-magnetic pulse had reached them, frying out their generators. The horizon lay flat, broken only by the randomly placed skeleton of a lonely office tower.

Some Rapture. At least most of the Christians had been killed in the first ten minutes. They had asked for it and had got exactly what they deserved. When JHVH-1 turned out to despise these God-fearing, sycophantic maggots, every one of them was sent to their reward. Quickly. With pain. It hadn't done "The City of Love" any good.

We finally pulled up to Aftermath Central. "Victor" Street, indeed. Hah! You could still see the giant cement hamburger. A junk food god. It figured as much. The newsletter had promised a force-field and a mansion. You can't believe every thing you read. It didn't look like he had any 50,000 Bobzoids to command either.

Wellman stopped the tank and gave me a funny look. "All out for Bulldada Time-Control Laboratories."

We checked our handguns and hopped out onto the back `Parking Lot of the Gods.' That's what the faded sign said it was, anyway. The SubGenius Foundation that was being presented to the Bobbies didn't look so grand these days. I kicked in the service entrance door, an easy feat. The acid rain had eaten the hinges away awhile back. We walked past the large uncomfortable cages in which Ivan made everybody sleep. They had been used to store potatoes in more normal times. Now they appeared empty as we approached. I wasn't so sure. Invisibility was one of the first things a SubGenius learns to manifest. To think that this had been a food preparation area! I looked into the wooden boxes that served as the mating areas in their disgusting rituals, and recoiled. Invisible they might well be, but their mucous was strictly First Plane. The stains alone made me sick.

A multi-colored furball the size of a watermellon floated out from behind a broken deep-fryer. As we watched, it unfolded in thin layers until nothing but a pipe (now familiar) hung motionless before us at eye level.

"Cut the crap, Dobbs!" We were getting irritated at his moronic level of mysticism. Ever since The Retreat, "Bob" had been showing more and more signs of strain. We suffered a constant barrage of of sleazy magic tricks that those autistic aliens had taught him while he was off-planet being transformated.

The pipe had now turned orange and the smell of cheeseburgers permeated the gutted kitchen. Cheeseburgers! There hadn't been a cow alive for fifteen years! A ghostly background noise of grill hoods and Muzak faded in.

"May I help you?" Dobbs was speaking in Moe Howard's voice.

"Yes, I'll have large fries and a coke, asshole! Jesus, "Bob", give me some Slack! Where is Philo? We were supposed to trade him in for a shipment of the PILS, remember? Yesterday? It only almost got us killed when he didn't show! The Posse Comitatus didn't appreciate the deal falling through like that."

"Never mention Jesus in my Burger Chef."

"Dobbs, I get the feeling you're not `hearing me' as we used to say in California." Wellman's exasperation with our situation was growing by the second.

The fast food church had filled with bright blue water and little goldfish that all looked like "Bob", their miniature pipes trailing smoke as they schooled around us. Another hallucination. I was still able to breath. They always missed some detail. That was the problem with this inane religion. At least the aliens were methodical.

"PILS? PILS? PILS? PILS? We are VERY ATTRACTIVE by most discriminating standards! I AM BI AND VERY SENSITIVE. GOOD CLEAN SEX IS ALL I'M AFTER! A LITTLE PAIN, A LITTLE KINK. PILS! PILS! PILS!"

""Bob"! Calm down. It's OK. We don't need to know where Philo is. Who cares? Slack. Right?"

"SLACK! SLACK! SLACK! SLACK!"

The water had changed into PILS! Mounds of them! We were waist deep in them! "Bob" had come through! Wellman was scooping them from the counters and shoving them into his mouth as fast as he could, washing them down with more PILS! The PAYOFF! Tens of thousands of the PILS! Even I was taken in by the sight! We could stop looking. We were set for Pre-Life!

The PILS disappeared, of course. In their place was Dobbs. What a clown.

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Chapter 6

Semour Dunn

Smith's ears were still ringing from the crash. Not more than ten feet away from his desk, centered in the smoking ruins of his bookcase, was the object that had dropped from the sky. He couldn't move. He couldn't speak. He could see, though, and what he saw he didn't want to believe. His prize sci-fi paperbacks, all the Blowfly party records, the Famous Monsters of Filmland collection, his autographed photos of Betty Page and Kitten Natividad, racks of software and floppy disks: burning and melting in the small fires that lit the darkened study. Worst of all, there, in the ashes of fifty years of priceless pop culture, lay the glowing, white-hot, miniature Head (and nothing more!) of The World Cup Golfer.

The Head made Doug want to throw up. Its unclean radioactive aura was already poisoning the atmosphere around it, mixing with the toxic, flaky, black smoke from the sizzling plastics. He was scared and knew he should be; any reasonable Dogma Sprout would be pissing his pipe in terror by now at the Bleeding Head's tormented countenance.

Smith heard the Overchildren start to cry from their nursery in the basement. They could feel the Head's presence. "Why doesn't Tev change their diapers?", Doug thought fuzzily. Then he remembered, Tevis was still chasing around GreenHelle trying to find an artificial H'Frop substitute in the jungle wasteland Gordon called his backyard.

A sound like rotten meat being torn in two snapped him back into the present. He forced himself to look at the Golfer thing glaring at him from its circle of fire. Opening its mouth, it was trying to speak with an effort that made little pieces of the lips drop away. Its eyelids were gone, leaving a ceaseless stare of blind pain that was focused on the Prince of Pamphlets. Doug cleaned his glasses and moved closer. The Head's voice was almost inaudible, a wheezy, sick cough, a hollow sound. Small wonder. It didn't have a body, much less lungs. How could it talk? But it was trying. That's why the Head was World-Class, Smith supposed.

He found his 'corder under his desk and checked it out. An old cassette from Puzzling Evidence in Oakland. "Too bad." Smith worked quick, tearing off the safety tabs, muttering, "Gotta tape the Head. Means erasing Wellman's contract. Tough shtr, P.E., but this is real show material. Those maniacs actually launched the damn thing and now it's landed right here in my lap."

A cold wind blew down from the hole in the ruined ceiling. Snow began to drift in, landing in the Golfer's flames, evaporating with loud pops and cracks. Snow? In Dobbstown? In May? It started to hail, blood-red chunks of ice the size of baseballs. Now there were shouts from outside as Dobbstown woke up to the Whore of the Greens' calling card. Large explosions sounded from the direction of the Blank Tanks, as their flat-lined occupants overloaded on the Heads' evil Pstench. The Malaysian night sky shined through the shattered windows, flaring with purple, green and yellow flashes, even though it was three in the morning.

"Unibrow," the King of the Golfers hissed, and spat out chips of corroded metal teeth. "Unibrow wants his share of the Church sold."

Poor Hughes lay in his big, pink restraining straps, twitching and shaking. It had been a close thing. There hadn't been much left of him when Palmer and Mobius Rex had fished him out of the sludge that lay off the Las Vegas shore line. The Church Auto-Surgeons had had a hell of a time keeping him alive: skin grafts, spinal transplants, gallons of anti-viral injections, and weeks of chemotherapy resulted in holding the High Priest of Sub-Surf to just this side of existence.

Palmer had warned Hughes about the "water". "The oceans are dead, Gary. Killed 'em myself, last year. Had to. Only way to stop stop Dobbs and his 'Lost Atlantis' Beach Boys. I'm sorry about the surfing and all, but in about two or three hundred years it ought to safe enough to go back in. Bad Science, Dude. That soup's toxic enough now to fry fish right in their beds. Stick with me and have a cigarette, they're healthier than going swimming, for sure."

Gary didn't want to believe it. He'd scorned the warnings of his friend, shook off the the nightmare thought that his beloved coastal waters were irrevocably dead. And deadly. He took his best board, the forty pound, twelve-foot teak-aluminum number, pulled on his pink wetsuit and headed for the beach. The extra layer of rubber was probably the only thing that saved Hughes from total dissolution in the brackish acid through which he had paddled out. That and the hard wood and metal stick. It had been reduced to a toothpick by the time the rescue craft had reached him. As for Hughes himself, about the only thing undamaged was his dreadlocks. It seemed that not even Palmer's lethal sea brew could touch those dense, matted coils of hair. Too bad he hadn't been covered with it, because the rest of him was something else again.

The poisonous wastes of the Pacific had melted and merged the plastic insulation with Gary's epidermis, sculpting skin and resin into webs of repulsive crust. In a few spots, the wetsuit had offered some protection, the single thing holding his internal organs in place, keeping them from oozing out. His face, if you could still call it that, was a horror show. Where the fetid sea-liquid had touched mucous membranes, black foam had bubbled out from dissolved nostrils, ears, eyesockets, mouth. Bloated green and purple skin cancers, large as puffballs, inflated in every direction, their growth accelerated by the wash of ultraviolet light from the once safe sun.

Good thing Hughes had held a Major-Medical. The oxygen and draining apparatus running in and out of his chest was as close as he was going to get to a "perfect tube" for a long, long time.

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Chapter 9

All the instrument readouts and panic bars were flashing on and off over the hull ofthe cramped flight cabin. A dozen red-alert programs were frantically signaling with reports of autodefensive activity, fighting off various probing scans that were sweeping the dark sky. Outside, the Earth hung "above" them as they crazily spun around it, their craft trailing spirals of jamming chaff. The bright crescent of the planet bounced back and forth across the top of the viewing port as the ship gyros mimicked the random pitch and yaw drift ofthe burnt Soviet Comsat that the ship had overtaken and replaced. Just past the dancing horizon lay the Moon, lit by occasional flashes from the huge firelight that raged on behind them. They had escaped in the fortuitous confusion, stealing a Spree craft and killing the insect pilot and crew. The surprise Dero assault had caught the Elohim off guard and a rout was in progress.

Spree numerals flickered on and off the navigation screens, their ultraviolet chicken scratchings producing a distracting, strobing accompaniment to the rhythm of the board keys underneath Palmer's tapping fingers. The bugs' inboard stealth gear was working so far. If it failed now, they'd both be fried so quickly they'd never have time to realize they were dead. He worked furiously, reprogramming the observation craft for surface landing. The Bohandas, being merely a vacuum launch, wasn't built for gravitational touchdowns but, with all its heavy military armor and wave shields, it should be able to hold out long enough for one suicidal reentry. Once down the well, it could never reach space again. As long as it brought them to the ground in one piece. Palmer finished his computations, shut off the flight recorders and turned to the Overman.

"I can't understand how Smith managed to let himself be captured," Vreedeez whined. He glanced over at his mutated companion, waiting for the completion beep signaling that the alien computer had finished translating his retum trip commands. He'd been making mistakes, had almost hit the command for a core dump, thinking it was an environmental stack.

The combat 'Phrane was wearing off Palmer could feel the payback for his week of Antisleep looping begin to settle in. His brainpan felt scoured, as if it had been filled with hot, dry sand. It was times like this that made Palmer almost reconsider his decision not to go for Gordon's offer of free glandscaping. It would have been handy to power-up to seven-speed and use a preprogrammed assassination chip back there at the Blood of Christ. Gordon paid through the nose for it, though. Literally. No doubt about that. G.G.'s trips to the Black Hospital left him with a little less Gordon each time and a little more "them." Gordon would never acknowledge the side elects either, but it was still an expensive set of tools, one way or another. Palmer would stick to his dmgs. At least you could come down.

"Our suicide spores should have activated automatically at the first official question, even if Smith couldn't set them oW himself. Say the Xists pulled out all his teeth, a few spores still collect in the arterial walls. Enough for 'death,' anyway. That asshole! I knew that homeboy couldn't do it! He'II sing for sure! I should have made him a Third Nostril when I had the chance. And I like him. Now we have to land on the friggin' White House lawn and go deal with Jones because Unibrow, of all people, says we still need Smith."

"We have use of him. The Dero came to create a diversion, so that we could confront Jones. And there is still the question of. . . Dobbs," Philo mused, his massive, clownlike head nodding in response. "How far gone is he? Will we have to terminate him?"

If things kept going in this direction, Palmer swore that he would wipe that idiotic smile from the Overman's swelled cranium. Ever since Philo's transformation, he had become worse than useless. Now all he ever did was smoke 'Frop and more 'Frop. He acted like he was superior to everyone else and knew things that better should be left unsaid. Throw in the white plastic complexion, a shit-eatin' grin that wouldn't stop, those space-spook eyes, and a skull the size of a medicine ball, and you had the first SubGenius Overman-Prime: Dr. Drummond. In spite of rumors Palmer had heard about size and shape changes in certain other external body organs, it was his opinion that, if this was the next step in evolution, you could keep it. There was even talk down in the Money Pits about Overwomen, though nobody could actually recall a sighting firsthand.

Philo had come a long way from the phone company.

"Yeah, sure. I'm not going to try to hit Dobbs. That's the craziest thing I've heard so far. Look what happened to Sterno. lvhat a fuckin' mess he was, couldn't even tell he had been human. Spread out over a whole city block. Yeech. Dobbs may be a traitor, but his biologic tantra can't be touched. If you want him dead, you pull the trigger. Count me out, you goddamned guinea pig."

"It's not Dobbs that is the danger. It is his Pipe," Philo answered, the foot-wide slash in his head shutting with a clack of huge teeth. They looked like they could bite through saddle leather.

"The pipe, huh? I've heard it all now." Palmer was too exhausted to show his aggravation forcefully. He left his pod, reached for an empty equipment sack and began stuffing it with parts of the dead Spree pilot that floated about them. It wouldn't do to reenter without everything tied down. "Make this' quick, balloonhead," he snapped, plucking an iridescent bottle-green compound eye from the cloud of drifting, chitinous flesh. "Thank the stars these things don't bleed. Two minutes to descent sequence. lvhen the lights go green, get in the netting and don't forget your crash helmet this time. Now, what's all this about the pipe?"

"Not the pipe. Rather, the Pipe," stated Philo, fixing the perplexed Vreedeez,with a demanding stare and a matter-of-fact sigh. "Actually, its real name is unpronounceable in any Earth language. The Pipe is our tme enemy. It is an alien parasite, attached to Dobbs' teeth. At the end of the smoke stem is a taproot which is slowly growing into the forebrain and instituting its will there. You may have noticed "Bob's" behavior has become rather erratic in the last few months. If we cannot remove it, "Bob" is doomed anyway. The root will continue to grow; within a half year at the most, it will split Dobbs' head in two and release its brood of young. Killing "Bob" will be an act of mercy."

Palmer was beside himself. He started to reach for a coffin stick and then remembered that the cabin was loaded with pure oxygen at Philo's request. The better for the OverBrain to think with, or so he said. Palmer suspected it had merely made the lobe-head space-drunk. Just great, really fuckin' great, he thought.

"That's the stupidest thing I've heard so far," snapped Vreedeez. "All of our trouble with "Bob" comes from this . . . this thing? He's had a pipe in his mouth ever since I can remember. Decades! And the whole time it was the 'Pipe' we were talking to, not "Bob" at all?"

"The Pipe's race is more ancient than time. The oldest civilized recordings available to the Pan-Lógos Co-op mention myths conceming their entropic powers of universal dissolution and abstraction. Pipes have played a role in the end of every major cycle in mathematical space. They live in Chaos, thrive on dimensional distortion, vacation in the Skor. Numbers are less than nothing to them-they use No-Theory. A Pipe will twist, fold and spindle the fabric of time and energy, encoding existence to suit its own dark purposes, restarting creation over and over, shredding the pathways of causational surreality until some edited pattem of subatomic law 'pleases' it. At any given instant, they can pull the Vortex right from beneath our foot glands. The Pipes' motivations are unguessable, their intelligence opaque to the most intense scrutiny. No one in the known history of the Universe has ever succeeded in establishing communication with one. All past attempts have resulted in failure, with the most horrifying consequences for any 'lucky' survivors. The Stark Fist of Removal is as a gentle, loving caress compared to the touch of a Pipe.

"When JHVH-1 learned that one had reached our world and mated with Dobbs, He had no choice but to attack and destroy them both before this whole sector could be contaminated. The tiresome revenge plotting of that paranoid half-breed, Jesus, provided a convenient front so that JHVH-1 could move against this being. Those at the NEXUS, when informed of "Bob's" misfortune, tried to subvert the extermination mission and capture the target, to harness it for their own ends. They would have failed. The Pipe is the most dangerous life-form known, if 'life-form' is truly the correct term. It is not 'alive' as we know life. The sacrifice of the dozen sentient Earth races is a small price to pay when measured against the possibility that a Pipe would find conditions for reproduction favorable here. It did.

"We have all been manipulated from the first. Jones, Jesus, Unibrow, yourself, everyone: only pawns in the Greater Power's struggle to destroy the Pipe. Now it shows its birthing pattern, and so deception is discarded. Ifwe cannot remove the Pipe, we must kill Dobbs. The Council of None concurs with me in this. The Pipe is a parasite and will die along with the host. This is its one weakness: While pregnant, it is mortal, sharing all our laws of space-time and matter. If we cannot kill the Pipe, then JHVH-1 vlill incinerate half the galaxy to do the job. He has done this before; the titanic X-ray quasars dotting known space mark past extermination sites. We are his microscopic surgeons. If the Doktors fail . . ."

The OverMan fell back into the acceleration webbing, panting with the effort of his speech, and watched as Vreedeez stowed the sack beneath the telecommunications board.

It was the most Palmer had heard Phi'o ever say in a coherent manner. He felt strangely serene. Peaceful for the first time in years. Happy, even. He smiled at his old friend. Why had he ever doubted the obviously superior Homo excelsior? The Overman's story almost made sense. It sounded so . . . so right. If it was true- Yes ! It had to be true! Palmer checked the Bohandas' weapons banks. They would need every particle beam and plasma cannon on board to stay alive in the next half hour.

The lights on the dashboard changed to green and down they went.

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Chapter 11

Smith crawled across the dark green carpet. It was hard and pointed, the way Astro-turf should be. He moved slowly, like a snake, slithering on his unclothed belly, trying to avoid the heat-seeking traps Jones had placed around the trashed-out rumpus room, trying to reach the SubSuccubus waiting for him by the smashed computer monitor. Stopping to pick up an eight-inch kitchen knife, he continued on, the scratchy rug leaving long, red welts that covered his smooth, young belly, winding and writhing like the glowing blue snake Fightin' Jesus had held in His right hand. It was easy for Fightin' Jesus; He had those Everlast boxing gloves to protect Himself. "Pretty Snake Smith, the Sucker," he thought dejectedly.

There she was, smoking a cigarette, pretending not to notice him as he slid through the rubble of what must have been a tremendous fight, a fight he couldn't remember. He flowed and changed, using the Yacatizma metamorph training that was second nature to him by now. He made himself small and wound his way around a coffee cup until he had a clear view of her feet.

He was stunned as he noticed the cheese! The fine, soft Spanish cheese that grasped her ankles tightly, that clasped her knees, that knew her knees, that melting cheese! Her search-and-destroy sex pheromones locked in on his body chemistry and molecularly bonded to his pleasure center, as the mating musk wafted up his nose. Excitement rose in him as he saw the hot cheese melt down over her firm, naked flesh, covering the quivering, red skin in thick white runners of viscous consistency. Multiple tongues flickered in and out over moist, full lips. Six breasts, peaked with spiked-copper nipples, throbbed and jiggled as she turned the pages of a fashion magazine, feigning boredom. Her five-inch waist spread out most fetchingly to primal, curved hips almost a yard wide. Hips and perfect round buttocks, completely covered with ice-blue runic tattoos of incredibly obscene picto-graphic concepts, these all seemed to be crude invitations to experimentation. A moving tangle of yellow pubic hair glowed like thousand-watt fiber-optic thread. Truly, she was the match for the Squirtin' Demon of The Rebel Gods, this unborn, teen-age grand-daughter of ERIS, Queen of SEXHURT, Herself. Smith knew that power sufficient to drain the heat from a runaway star and leave it cold lay behind her swirling, glittering eyes.

The cheese continued to flow from who knows where. He wasn't even sure if it was cheese. He wanted to taste it. Stuff his gut full of it. Choke on it. His breath raced.

He was so pretty now, pretty for her, his shiny blade held between his teeth. His skin turned pink, then red, then magenta, trying to attract her attention. Colors ran up and down the spectrum and his skin began to shed. As he tore away at himself, Smith had a bad feeling about all this. Had he been set up? He was losing control of himself, becoming the victim! Talk about unsafe sex!

The scent of the cheese was breaking his concentration, leaving him open to her attack. He tingled all over. His tormented nerves were on fire and she pushed him over the edge with a quiet sigh that had the weight of an eon of merging, fornicating life behind it. Blood pounded in his ears in answer to her call. He wanted to impale his skull, mouth first, on the points of her razor-sharp teats, one by one. He reached up and tore his ballooning eyes out, then, needing to look her over again one more time, grew new ones and spit out his teeth upon the old. Steam rose from his sweaty, overheated head and his feet stomped the carpet with wild, dog-like thumping while his "take" thundered on, spiraling his arms like corkscrews, snapping the femurs with loud cracks. His erection became horribly painful and raw, pushing away from him, as it seemingly tried to leave his body behind and reach the siren on its own. All his organs felt liquid; the perverse pressure building within him was unbearable. Thoughts of personal safety vanished under the wild, obsessive urge to mount and thrust, grind and bump... to mindlessly copulate with her like an insect, until, all spent, he'd fall off -- a drained, seedless husk, ready to finally serve as her food.

Groveling on the floor before her, he looked up her long, fine, shaggy goat legs, past her oval, navel-less belly, up to her indifferent face. Against his will, he heard himself, from between his flayed lips, stammer nervously, "S-say, do you come here o-often?"

She looked down at him with an expression of amused boredom and ground out her smoke under a polished, cloven hoof. "Oh, wow. That'd be great, Dude. How's about a double, sugar-brain? Please? Pretty please?" she asked in an incredibly flat, husky voice.

She shook her animal-like rump at him twice, splashing his agonized chest with scalding drops of cheese, and bent down, her conical breast tips clanging together metallically. And slowly, very slowly, he raised the kitchen knife to his own throat with his mangled hands and began to cut. His reeling, overwhelmed mind watching itself spin out, memories flooding by, all the Church secrets being picked over by the SubSuccubus. She was going very slow with him as she bent to sip at the fountain of blood spraying from his neck. It wasn't the only thing that was jetting. He knelt in a spreading pool of blood and semen in hypnotic satisfaction, without pain, his unholy orgasm continuing without pause. NUNU was determined to get the most pleasure out of this that she could. Smith could hear Jones chuckle as blackness closed in.

Smith couldn't wake up. That stupid S/M wet-dream had been bad enough, but he felt as if somebody had poured plastic resin all over his face. The slightest movement caused intense pain, with blinding flashes of light behind the eyeballs. What the hell had Palmer dosed him with? The coffee hadn't tasted like it had been "doctored". Some new, off-world sedative that the Xist bankers had given Palmer along with the instructions about Philo. Well, at least the whole ugly mess was out in the open... Now that they'd talked about the money, there was no turning back. It was all on tape, and that was just one more of the problems Smith would have to face presently.

"Ah, good. He's coming around. Wheel my instrument kit over here and we can begin to question our friend." A voice that sounded like broken glass started to filter through to Smith's fogged-out brain. He blinked and struggled to turn his head against the straps-- the Big Red Straps, he noted -- to get a better look at his captors.

The name "Zipperhead" wasn't so funny now. Beneath the Palmer mask, the Thing masquerading as Vreedees was all too visible. Standing next to it were the various members of the President's Council on Physical Fitness, most of them anyway. All of President Jones' vaunted "Bathroom Cabinet". Smith could make out Wellman, Stang, and, way down at the end of the room -- it looked like Janor. That was impossible, of course. Smith himself had killed Janor, in the messiest, most violent way possible. He'd carry the memory of Hypercleats' hysterical shrieking, "My legs are on fire! Whoop! Whoop! Help me, somebody!" to his grave. It had been necessary. He had made sure that there wasn't enough tissue left to make a decent clone. It had been Janor's last request. In fact, given the current situation, chances were good that most of the creatures in the room were duplicates. The Space Bankers had perfected their cell techniques hundreds of thousands of years ago. Smith had his suspicions that they were the original seeders of Earth, trying to set up a cosmic squatter's rights battle over possession of the planet. These things thought on the long term view. Not what you'd expect from speculators at any level. Pehaps geological time had different meaning for these galactic realtors.

Smith made a pathetic attempt at defiance. "Blankmen... you can't fool me... you're all a pack of dirty lies... where's the real Vreedees? Ain't he 'doug' enough to show his real face?"

"'Doug' enough for you, Smith." Broken Glass Mouth was running tendrils up and down the side of an evil looking instrument, a cross between a dentists' drill and a Space Force Combat Laser. "Why, I don't believe Palmer would want to miss this." It held up a small, clear specimen bottle, with what looked like a tiny doll in the bottom.

Smith blanched. This was going too far. "You fiends! What have you done to my son?"

"Hey, hey, Smith, who's laughing now, eh? I do think I'm going to enjoy this. I've been waiting since X-Day for a shot at you. You thought everything would be okay, once Jones was out of the way. . . only you didn't figure on Unibrow switching sides," chortled the Pain Technician from behind its ill-fitted mask.

Smith crumpled against his bonds. If Unibrow was here he didn't have a chance. It seemed those monstrous eyebrow tendrils could reach anywhere, even into one's very soul. The whole horrible picture was becoming clear. Palmer had been in the pay of the evil Fightin' Jesus all along and now he had all the "hex power" of the real Unibrow to back him up. That and the tiny homunuculus of the President of Texas there in that glass beaker. He'd been drugged at the Foundation Headquarters in Dobbstown and was now probably several hundred miles above the Earth. They had brought him to one of the few remaining War Saucers still orbiting, and now they wanted answers. . .

"Pull Smith's pants down and let's get started," said the Palmer thing.

Jones screamed, "Dobbs is exaggerating, or can't do arithmetic. That stack of thousand dollar bills, one trillion bucks, would not be sixty-seven miles high!"

"Right you are, Jones," Vreedees echoed, leveling the Colt displacer at the President's chest. He blinked his eyes and a wind began to rise behind the master SLAK hashshashin. "If a million dollars worth of thousands stacks up four inches high, then a stack to make a trillion dollars would be a million times as high, or four thousand inches."

Jim Jones groaned and stuck out his teeth as the lecture continued. "To convert this to miles, divide by twelve times five thousand, two hundred eighty. The result is a little over sixty-three miles. You lose the bet, Jones," Palmer ordered. "Release Smith now."

The President muttered to his Secret Service guards in an ancient language and they disintegrated into pink mist. He looked around the Oval Office for the last time, signed a paper and burned it. He threw the ashes in a circle around his desk and pissed on it. As the desk burst into flame he turned to Vreedees, hissing, "It is done. Smith is unharmed and free. Tell your "Bob" that his Pipe will soon go out, and then my will shall sweep the Earth!"

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Chapter 14

Kicking aside a skull, G. Gordon Gordon edged up to the large, black, iron door and rang the buzzer. Flies hovered around the bullet-pocked metal, attracted to the dried bits of blood and hair that had been splashed across its surface. Finding Palmer Vreedees' studio had taken up the better part of a week, a week Gordon didn't have to spare.

After ten seconds or so, Gordon decided the buzzer was "out of order", like most things in San Francisco these days. He began hammering against the thick plating with the butt of his silver-plated, Redhawk double-action .44.

"Vreedees, you green-shanked, pipe sucking thief, where the fuck is my painting? Open up or you'll get the Rothko treatment!" Gordons' impatient bellowing could be heard all the way down the narrow, filth-encrusted alley that Vreedees' door led off of. All the way to South Howard street. Gordon didn't care. It didn't matter if anyone heard him, they wouldn't bother to investigate. After what had happened last Christmas with Jesus' disastrous "second coming", it would have taken an equally mystic nightmare to catch the attention of the few surviving community police. They had become quite cautious. They wanted to live.

After hurling several more choice threats to no visible effect, Gordon decided to take a more direct approach in order to gain entry. The door was the only feature in the five story, concrete wall. The dark metal was set flush with the surface, with the portal only openable from the interior. There was no kind of knob, handle or lock to mar the tantric rune outlined by heavy reinforced riveting.

Reaching into his coat, Gordon took a small, white vial full of "dragon snot" from a vest pocket and began carefully pouring gooey runners of the home-made plastic explosive down both sides of the door frame. Spreading a thin strand along the top, he connected these borders with a wipe of his thumb, hooked a matchbook sized detonator to the plastique and backed twenty feet down the alley, flattening out against the same wall the door shared. Taking out a pen-shaped radio-control for the detonator, Gordon muttered, "This one's for Janor." Keeping his mouth wide open, he tapped a contact solenoid twice and his small action was answered by a sizable explosion. Hearing the door blow off and clang against the far wall, he paused, waiting for the cloud of dust, shrapnel and concrete chunks to settle.

Gordon decided against the .44 and reholstered it. "No," Gordon thought, "this calls for something more--more traditional. Dr. Vreedees would appreciate the right tool for the right job."

He pulled his Ingram M11 from the shoulder sling and checked the clip.

Taking off his Raybans, Gordon walked back to the ragged, smoking hole he had created and invited himself into Palmer's nest.

The foyer, a dingy, square, cinderblock chamber, was unlit. In the small amount of illumination from the alleyway, Gordon made out a rusty, iron, spiral staircase that rose into blackness.

Out of the gloom above, Vreedees' drug-ravaged voice hailed, "Gordon, sweetheart, what brings you to California? Hey, good to see you! How's the wife?"

"Never mind her, you aborted son of Onan! I paid you a goddamned advance on my painting and I WANT IT!" Gordon paused, chose his next words carefully. "Besides, I still owe you three hundred dollars on the job."

Palmer laughed, "Three hundred dollars? Dollars? Not worth the paper they're printed on, I'm afraid. Now, if you had three hundred SubGenius pamphlets we could do some serious talking. I hear the going price for a healthy child on the street is a mere two P, now think what that painting's going to go for out in the free marketplace."

Gordon raised his voice a notch, smoothed his tone and introduced a low amount of SALES into his sly inflection. "OK, OK. So, no Bulldadashit. I'll get some pamphlets, if that's what you want." Gordon didn't trust Vreedees. Ten years of Brazilian emerald dealing had taught him where trust inevitably led to. And of course, Gordon expected treachery sheerly as a matter of style where the duplicitous Vreedees was concerned. Too many past deals with the rogue ascetic had gone sour in the most surprisingly unpleasant ways.

Gordon was still paying off the lawyers for that job he'd handled for Vreedees back in '92, setting demo packs all through the Keith Haring opening at MOMA. True to form, once the building had been blown to atoms, Vreedees sucked up all the credit for "the brilliant statement on visual, commodity fetishism", as The Times had said in their glowing review, and vanished, leaving Gordon somehow responsible for the criminal charges.

"Painting? Art? Gordon, honeybear, no one does 'art' anymore! 'Art's' been replaced by religion. Or food. You should know that better than anybody. How about a nice can of Safeway peaches? With a label? That's worth about five hundred-thousand bucks these days on the black-mart. California Federation currency isn't even toilet paper, I burn it to keep warm," Palmer cackled. "Hey, step over near the stairs so's I can get a look at you. Still dressin' in those alpaca sweat-suits? Gosh, I'm glad you came. You know, I don't get much company these days."

"Bloody, goddamned, Conspiracy quacks! ", the Yetinsyny assassin cursed disgustedly to himself as he gave his body a quick internal scan. Most of the inner-eye, LCD's were still showing power-down status. About the only thing giving a trustworthy read-out was the time. "Three-fifteen," fumed Gordon. "I should be back at the St. Francis starting on my Goddamned, fourth bloody-mary by now instead of playing games with this saucer-riding, Yeti moron."

Ever since the St. Louis siege, the Con med-techs had been trying to regrow half his combat circuits without much success. The M-16 round that'd nicked his neck in Drummonds' office sent thousands of microscopic ceramic shards deep into his upper vertebra, damaging and fusing the hardware lines beyond simple repair. After a dozen painful operations, most of his bio-electronics were still dysfunctional. Gordon didn't dare use his shields at even quarter-power, without risking a massive stroke. It also meant that switching to infra-red, targeting optics was out. The sapper relied now on his own habitual caution to keep himself alive.

Gordon tossed a box of Sherman's cigarettellos at the first step. Before it even hit the floor, a thin red beam of light flicked down from overhead and speared it. The smokes burst into flame, filling the space with a pungent odor.

"Aw, Gordon, you know those are my preferred brand. They don't even make them anymore. You got any idea what tobacco costs this far up the coast?" Vreedees' voice trailed off in a fit of coughing and hacking. There were some wet, unhealthy sounding grunts and then the insane Mediocretin took up his taunting again.

"I started your painting, anyway, RoboDope. That's better than most of my 'clients' get. What more do you want? You never did tell me how to ship it down to Green Hell. What do you use down there for delivery service, donkeys? I trust no painting to donkeys, man. Jeez, it's beautiful, though. What a portrait. Your sceptum, in full color, as fresh as the day the Space Doctors sliced it out of you. You should see the damn thing. Haven't touched it in months. Waiting for the right light, you know. Can't just paint any old day."

"Look here, you bargain basement Warhol," Gordon snapped, "I received one lousy, color xerox in the mail five years ago. I'm here for some real art. If I can't have my canvas, I'll settle for that five-sided tattoo of Dobbs that you've got on your backside, the one Connie can't stop talking about, skin and all! I'll make a lampshade out of it and read your comic books by the light!" Gordon let off a half-dozen rounds into the dark, just for effect.

"G.G., baby, if I'd known you were so mad, I'd have flown down with the pic myself and delivered it to you in person. Come on up. No tricks, I promise."

"Don't forget, Vreedees, if you nail me, I have my operatives, and Palmer, Palmer, some of them aren't even human. I'm stepping out," Guy called. He pushed two gas filters into his plastic nose, made sure his catch on his throwing-knife sheath was undone, armed three thermite grenades and made his way upstairs.

With half-destroyed chip-gyroscopes fighting inner-ear canals for control of balance, Gordon tried to shake off the vertigo that climbing five flights of circling stairway was producing. The computerized, wet-wired stabilizers in his chest kept throwing his feet in the wrong direction, making the ascent dangerously slow. Only a few, short months ago, the Foundation executioner would have been able to tango up the thin hand-railing on one foot with eyes closed. Now every slow revolution in the coiling platform left him feeling faintly nauseous from the errant signals of his malfunctioning gyros' micro-oscillations. At the top, Palmer Vreedees waited in his eyries' doorway, cradling a bulky K-12 field laser mounted with an IF scope. The figure was silhouetted by bluish television light flickering from somewhere inside the guarded room.

Finally reaching the upper platform, Gordon paused to regard his former "friend." Even in the dim, phosphorescent glow, Vreedees looked like a hell-bound shell of his past self, standing shakily on two, cadaverous pipe-cleaner legs, bracing the weight of the tac-torch against a bundled stack of molding comic books. He was swimming in a shredded, black rayon, cop dress shirt that hung low enough to make up for his absence of pants. Attached to the badge clip was a silver star that said "ART POLICE." Vreedees face was something else again.

The eyes were sunken in, with no whites showing at all. Whatever drugs he was taking had permanently dilated his pupils all the way out, out to total black, the dull, vacuous jet of Xist space. No wonder he had never taken off those mirrored sunglasses. The gringo chin-strip Palmer'd always worn was about two feet long and his head was shaved into one-inch strips, front to back. His skin was a sallow pasty-white and hung about his pock-marked face in loose folds. Gordon didn't think anyone could be so thin and still live. The mercenary had seen a lot of starvation in the Omaha camps and he was still taken aback.

Palmer extended a wasted hand in greeting to his visitor. When his offer of false courteousness was ignored, Vreedees shrugged, turned and wearily shuffled into the warehouse loft. Gordon followed the piteous creature inside.

The "studio" was a shambles. Broken, torn canvases were scattered about the floor in greasy puddles of unidentifiable liquids. Pieces of broken computers and electronic gear lay everywhere. The huge, windowless, concrete room stank of sweat, smoke and turpentine. The air was stale. Broken ampules of dangerous narcotics were strewn around.

One whole corner was occupied almost to the ceiling by a tangle of snapped brushes, ammo clips, circuit boards, yellowing bones, rolled-up paint tubes, mummified dogs, used condoms, bits of photographs, printouts, and just plain garbage, composing an assemblage that Francis Bacon would have been proud of. This Augean squalor was lit by a flickering fluro-tube and two small TV monitors, both facing a wall. Gordon could faintly hear a tinny speaker playing "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down" from somewhere deep in the chaotic pile.

"Welcome, welcome to the salon, mon patron, . . . my sanctum sanctorum," said the emaciated Vreedees, casually tossing aside his weapon. He hopped around Gordon, making exaggerated low bows, bits of plastic and glass crunching underneath his bare feet. As he spun about, the back of his shirt revealed a dark circle of dried blood centered with an ugly shot-gun hole.

"But wait. You're tired. Here you've come all this way and I tease you. You must think me a terrible host. Care for some refreshment?" Vreedees offered with sarcastic politeness. "A drink? Food? -- Sex?"

"Good Christ, Palmer," Gordon exclaimed, "you should take better care of yourself. You know what happened to Hughes. What a mess he was. All those tubes and bags. And look at these candy bar wrappers. You've been living on speed and sugar."

"Oh-ho, better than speed, Gordon," said the crazed anti-artist with a sick, dreamy grin. His smile revealed a row of broken and rotting, yellow teeth. The gums appeared ulcerous, almost black. "Better than PILS. Better than anything. Those po' bucker aliens got shit that makes meth look like, well-- never mind that. It's worth it. Yeah, well worth it. Helps me think --better." Palmer exploded in a fit of corrosive coughing, brownish sputum flying from his white lips.

Gordon was disgusted. This manic, capering skeleton barely resembled the healthy, asocial Neo-Dadaist he remembered. "Yeah, sure, Slim. Look in a mirror real soon. I can remember when you didn't even touch decaffeinated coffee. Don't you ever get scared? In case you forgot, mammal, your new 'pals' --they're insects! You've been shooting up roach crap! What the pink-hell does that bug dust help your gaseous brain think better about ?"

"I can really SEE now. I mean it, Gordon. This' the same stuff they gave Satan, and you know how He acted. I see. See all kinds of things. See things you can't see with eyes, with even those synthetic ping-pong balls you use. Nice things. Interesting things. I see them all the time, now. Best of all, I understand what I'm seeing. I'm not high. I can't even really say I'm having a 'good time'. Or a 'bad time'. Temporally speaking, I guess you could say I'm not having a 'time' at all. It's just that --well, it's the line, you know, the line has dissolved. I'm not talkin' about the four-brained division that Dobbs seems to think is so important. That profane shithead's still hung up on flesh, spirit and soul --all the mud, the fuckin' meat. That fluff doesn't matter. 'Doorway to Doom.' Ha! 'Bob's' way off the mark! You can't open the lock without the right key. I'm into real alchemical breakdown. Convulsive. Infallible. Final."

"Oh, yes, yes. You could too, though. See them," Palmer said gleefully, dancing about Gordon. Bloody tears pooled at the corners of his dark, opaque orbs, ran down his pocked cheeks. The trails of poisonous-looking, reddish liquid stood out in grim contrast against ghostly, semi-transparent flesh. "We can see the things together. I've got enough to do both of us. It's not a drug, you know. Not technically, anyway. Want some?" Palmer produced a wrinkled baggie filled with a dirty-grey powder and a corroded hypodermic, giggling, "First one's free."

"I've just about 'seen' enough, Vreedees. You're fuckin' Death-on-a-stick."

"C'est moi."

"Just leave me the pic in the will, suicide-boy. Your lungs sound like a bad day on the cancer floor. The way you're career's going, I don't think you're going to last much lon---"

Then Gordon saw it.

The painting was nailed to the far wall. It was small, perhaps two feet square, held in place by four railroad spikes pounded through the corners, deep into the cement. In spite of the pornographic, multi-color, layered graffiti that was sprayed across the four walls and ceiling of the dark abode, the canvas--Gordon's canvas stood out as if a half-dozen mini-spots were lighting it. He felt like the art had been suddenly pinned to his eyeballs with a shaft of lightning. Magic! Its hyperphysical surface glowed with life!

Palmer had said it wasn't even finished. Gordon, spellbound, kicked the mess on the floor aside, brushed past the almost blind visionary. He had to get closer. It was magnificent!

"Why--why it's beautiful," Gordon whispered, "how did you do it?"

The colors in the translucent imagery seemed to be burning with fire, as if from some inner light, radiance blazing and flaring outward from the oil. It was drawing him in, relentlessly overpowering his rational thought processes. Arabesque interactions of the composition seduced his visual center, directing his pupils effortlessly with their prepensive tracings. He was bedazzled by the intricate, swirling detail, which seemed to contain teasing hints of unknowable truths. No matter how near he drew, the superfine resolution of the minutinous, brush strokes endlessly increased.

His arms began to feel heavy as he fell under the pictures' intoxicating sway. Gordon let go of the Ingram, heard it distantly clatter to the floor.

It was now impossible for G. Gordon Gordon to take his eyes away from the image. He couldn't move his feet. He felt the loft start to spin around him. Still, his vertiginous mind was locked to the hypnotic artwork, even while his eyelids began to close. As he passed out, he heard the insane, mocking laughter of Vreedees.

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Next Chapter

Chapter 15

Tevis Stang sipped at her last bit of Coke and wondered if she'd ever see Dallas again. The dusty, flat wind was starting to blow up from the hot nyika, the sun would soon be setting over the Samburu Plain, night would bring out the large predators and there was still no sign of Paul.

At least he could have left her with a flashlight or some matches. And now, who knew where Paul had gone to? It was starting to get dark. Some vacation!

Matches, flashlight, Dallas -- everything gone! No, not gone. Still in the future actually. The far future. She was now the proud possessor of The Only Coke Can In The World. The only bit of processed aluminum. The only drop of refined sugar. there wasn't going to be anything like that until millions of years later. She really couldn't blame Paul though. She could blame Dobbs. Dobbs and that whole damn bunch of lunatics that Paul and her father had been involved with for the last twenty years. She had thought it was a joke, when Paul had started babbling in Nairobi, back at the hotel, about "the real reason" why he had come on the trip with her. Talking about "time-webs" and "pipe traps." What garbage! She had begun to regret not taking off with Connie.

How was she to have known it was all too horribly true?

Now she was probably the only woman on Earth, as far as that went, unless she was going to count "Lucy."

Philo hadn't been kidding. There was no warning at all when the Xist Time Sphere had dropped into the center of their safari camp near Isiolo and, with a burst of pink light and a muscle-cramping jerk, had whisked them both off to the distant past--now her uncertain present. Back to paleolithic Africa and a galactic-invasion force that she and Paul were supposed to stop somehow.

Every time she started to think about it she got madder and madder. Stuck in a cheap science-fiction plot, indeed! She'd show "Bob!" She'd show that entire gang of over-grown adolescents what fooling with Tevis meant! Of course, she'd also have to wait until gunpowder was invented.

It must have been around noon when the Xist scientists deposited them on a small ridge on the edge of a immense lake, surrounded by miles of prehistoric grasslands. A voice in their heads had told them to "WAIT" and so they had, sharing half a Coke and some dates that had been in the day pack. There hadn't been much to say to each other. Paul had tried to make the best of it.

Traveling with Paul certainly was interesting. They spent the afternoon trying to identify the amazing types of animals that inhabited the green banks of the water. And waited. And waited. Waited for what? Once the voice spoke, they had been unable to do more than sit up and move their arms.

At last, a full six or seven hours later, the voice had spoken again. It said, "I think we'll start with you," and Paul had vanished, just like that. Nothing but the thin sound of air rushing in to the space he had occupied. Now she sat, "waiting" all by herself.

The sun was going down.

? Next Chapter

Chapter 16

Reverend Jim Jones, White Night Jonestown Gut Blowout, 1978

"If you don't kick it, how're ya gonna know if it's dead or not?" Sterno muttered. It pretty much summed up the way Keckhaver was feeling about the whole war by now. It also happened to be his philosophy on culture, life and sex. A statement like that tends to sit like a doughball, which is why the SubGenius Hellsaint used it as his mantra.

"Well, now, don't you know you can fuck it. You know it's dead, if you fuck it," sputtered Jones, barely suppressing an insane twitter. His mind was decaying faster than Kreegar had predicted, Sterno realized. Without the power of the Bleeding Head to keep the undead priest animated, the wretched little pa'bucker would eventually degenerate into full-blown zombiedom and be of little more use than the shuffling Dobbs Youth who tended the endless, parched "Gardens of Delight" in Texas. Everything's falling apart, Sterno thought disgustedly. If Gordon doesn't snuff Smith before he spills the beans to the Jesus Monsters, all of Malaysia will end up one stinking crater. Like Arkansas, he added, spitting ruefully into "Bob's" diamond cuspidor.

With a crash, Jones lurched around the Throne Office, his arms flailing in confusion, knocking half of Dobbs' collection of aborted False Overman fetuses off their shelves. Sterno considered giving him a phlebotomy with the new air knife, but decided to let the punk preacher dig his own grave, as it were. The tiny video security cameras turned with audible whines to follow Jones'progress.

Sterno glanced at the readouts over the door again. "Well, the goddamn mass-waves haven't penetrated this far. We're safe for the moment. Wotan hasn't peed our asses yet. It's still just you 'n' me, Bro' Jim. You 'n' me," he sighed, and began to rummage around for a pack of'Fropsticks. There was at least two miles of solid granite between them and the surface plus an additional five meters of captured Spree hull ceramic, not to mention the autonomatic field barriers. The time-control chamber lock wouldn't open for at least another forty hours, maybe fifty. He couldn't tell, Jones' last shot having shattered the dial. That was twenty hours longer than Jones would last. Sterno was having the satisfaction of watching his old friend dissolve cell by cell. He was sure Palmer had got his message through to Connie. He had to trust Palmer. Again.

After Sterno had cycled the air lock behind them, the bunker mainframe had powered down, cutting off his remote deck from the net. He never had a chance to tell if Palmer had acknowledged his waming. Jones had continued to come after Sterno, his artificial personality still somewhat intact at that point. Keckhaver was down, about to be gutted with a dull hog blade Jones had grabbed off the wall rack, when something loudly popped deep inside the priest's ears, his eyes rolled back into his head, and his spasming body toppled off Sterno. Since then, the NEXUS puppet's appearance had returned to "normal," but, all the same, Jim Jones had been switched off.

Sterno had the heavy shielding in Dobb's office to thank for that. He'd been counting on it when he allowed Jones to follow him in, just one step ahead of the Xist process servers. The two enemies were now completely isolated in "Bob's" private survival capsule. Jones wasn't much of a threat now. . . .

"A little PIL, Sterno, pretty PIL PIL, please? Want fuck PIL for Jimmy, ol' Dad, come.now, huh, huh. PIL, PIL, PIL. Jimmy will tell Kickover a storyaboutwellman and Connie for pretty PIL. . . ."Jones was sweating. His left leg was jerking with regular convulsions and his breath had started to smell like an open kill pit. Sterno considered kicking him but he already knew what the answer to his question would be.

"Sure, sure, Jones. Go ahead. I like stories," Sterno answered. He reached over and flipped a Doktors for "Bob" tape into the desk deck and switched on a four-channel mike so that Jones' dying ramblings could later be piped all over Dobbstown, mixed in with the demented Arkansas "music." He opened his medicine bag and tossed three PILS to the drooling, chittering Jones, who scrambled alter them. He paused, then took one himself, washing it down with a quarter flask of hundred-proof white rum. Sterno noticed that one of Jones' ears was starting to slide down his skull and that the joints in his elbows were swinging both ways, like a broken doll.

"It's going to start to smell like Dog Town bad in here damn soon," Sterno mused. Jones was gibbering and hooting away about the Head, the Voices, the heliopters inside his head, and every other mystic trauma that had been Jones' source material for his multilifelong religious mania, all self-disguised as backwoods simplemindedness.

"You getch'a buncha damn ratshot, that's what you do, and you go right in there after 'em. Them saucer boys think they kin ride them a damn heliopter all the way to Graduation, straight up Dobbs' ass! It's the Night of Slack, it's the Night of Slack, just like Dobbs said! We'll all go to meet that great wagon wheel in the sky, shit yeah! I'm wall climbin'! I'm wall climbin'! You think Dobbs would approve? You think Dobbs could get into it, man? The Pinks'll fall down upon their checkbooks and mate with them," bleated Jones.

"Hell, Jones, you loveburger, you're starting to sound like Janor," Sterno yawned. Father Jim was beginning to bore him. "You sure you wouldn't rather let me take you out qui-"

The whole Throne Office began to vibrate. The enclosing miles of rock started to shimmy with a low, sustained bass groan that seemed to come from deep within the earth below them. Sterno suddenly felt lighter. Much lighter. It wasn't just the PIL he had taken, either. The sepulchral Jones noticed it too, and he was way beyond the PIL high. The Xists were breaking through the defense shields with their magnetic focusers. "The holding company that controls magnetism controls the marketplace." Sterno hadjust enough time to remember "Bob's" dreary financial advice before he automatically went into protective meditation.

"Gravity wavesl Gravity wavesl" Jones screeched. He flew up against the ceiling and stuck there. The room became an instant hurricane of objects, whirling around, attracting and repelling each other's electrons at subatomic speeds. The enhanced-gravitational weapon was forcing all photonic activity down the scale, deeper, darker. Visible light shifted to red, maroon, purple.

Concentrating on the Ten Simple Patterns of Abuse, Sterno floated calmly in the center of the colliding molecular mayhem that formed and reformed about him. The lights went out as the power units collapsed and died, but the energy the Xists were beaming in more than compensated for the loss; the space shimmered with a violent blue glow, the radiance of dying matter.

Sterno glanced up at Jones. Jim Jones was gone to Glory, dead at last; had to be. Nothing more than a smear now, quickly spreading to cover every surface in the room. An impossibly flat surface, formed under the pressure of a thousand suns. The furnishings, the weapon rack, "Bob's" priceless comic book and pornography collections, the tools, Jones, everything except Sterno, smashed to an infinitely thin film. The walls, floor and roof of the chamber were being twisted and pulverized by the fantastic gravitational elects until, with a final twist and spin, the subterranean retreat became a hollow sphere, held in shape by magnetic bottle beams. All the formerly protective rock outside had liquidized, roaring and chuming as it boiled into gas. The Xist technicians were attempting to create a black hole right where Sterno hovered, in the center of the Throne Office.

Only one thing stood between Sterno and Eternal Slack, and that was the pristine mental state of absolute awareness/nonawareness, the perfect balance of the metamathematical and mortophysical. Sterno "knew" the Skor, okay. Neither dead nor alive, neither in existence nor negation, he rested in the pause of the Universe and began to hum "Dumptruck Full of Dead Cops," snapping one finger to the unheard beat.