"And what will happen when you are fully awake?"
The messenger winked. "That's something you will have to wait and see."
"Yancey Slide seemed to think…"
"The idimmu are tough and cunning but they suffer from a great narrowness of vision. They believe that our return will make things as they were fifteen thousand years ago. I can guarantee that this will not be the case."
"Can I ask one more question?"
"It hasn't stopped you so far."
"What's going to happen to me?"
"You will eventually be returned to your dimension of origin. It may be necessary for you to remain here for a while until an unobtrusive reentry cover can be devised, so you're not seen to simply appear out of nowhere. We assure you that, in the meantime, you will be quite comfortable."
"How long will I have to stay here?"
"It shouldn't be more than a couple of weeks, as you perceive time."
Gibson nodded. "I guess I can handle that."
The thought occurred to him that, if he was placed in the right illusion, it might even constitute a well-earned rest. The messenger winked. "Look on it as a rest, Joe."
"I wish you wouldn't read my mind."
"It's unavoidable."
"Then just don't read it back to me."
The messenger sighed. "If it makes you happier to pretend."
"I take it that I'm not going to get to be the Master of Men out of all this?"
"You want that?"
Gibson grinned and shoved his thumbs into the pockets of his white pants in a decidedly hoodlum gesture. "Maybe I could handle that."
The messenger shook his head. "I'm afraid that's idimmu romance. Things will be a good deal more complicated this time around."
"So I just drop back into my old life?"
The messenger laughed. "Your old life has gone. You've seen far too much to return to the way you were. Of course, the memories of what you've been through, particularly this current episode, will become blurred and indistinct."
Gibson was outraged. "I'm going to forget all this?"
"Temporarily."
"More drugs?"
"Your own mind will do it. You're not going to rest easily with the memory of talking to a superior being. You're going to suppress and mythologize all of this, and turn it into some symbolic peyote vision, something that you'll be able to handle more easily."
"You said I'd forget temporarily."
"When the time comes for Us to enter your world, We may need you to serve Us. When that time comes, your memories will return."
Gibson looked sideways at the messenger. "I'm going to be your servant?"
"We always reward Our servants, and if it's power you want, We can easily give you power."
"I've really never been that keen on power."
"You make that obvious in your behavior. It may be one of your redeeming features."
An abrupt flash of crimson stained the clouds across the valley. It seemed as though one of the volcanoes was burning red rather than gold. A second volcano belched red flame and purple smoke that spread like a stain across the clouds.
Gibson looked sharply at the messenger. "What is that? Is something wrong?"
The messenger didn't answer right away. He stood staring out across the valley at the angry red intrusion, as though listening to instructions inside his head. "We have been made aware that the Hole in the Void is under attack."
"What?"
"Streamheat forces are attacking the Hole in the Void. They have transported aircraft and heavy weapons across the dimensions and seem to be bent on wiping out the idimmu."
Gibson looked around as though he expected them to come bursting through the cloud cover. "Thank God I'm here and not there."
The messenger was shaking his head. "You cannot remain here. You have to return immediately to the Hole in the Void."
"What the hell would I want to do that for? The streamheat don't like me any more than they like the idimmu. I could be killed."
"You will die for sure if you remain here."
"But you told me…"
"This attack has changed everything. The Hole in the Void is your link. It is the route by which you are connected to your dimension of origin. If that link is broken or that route is severed, you will become a wraith and you will simply wither to nothing."
"I can't stay here?"
"Go, Joe."
The landscape vanished and the Messenger of Necrom along with it. For a fleeting instant, Gibson seemed to be in some gray, indistinct limbo, a place of fog and gloom and visual distortion. He sensed that there were other beings crowded around him, but beings who were not completely there, insubstantial and ghostly, a whisper on his senses rather than something fully real.
And then he was standing on an orange hillside above the valley of the Hole in the Void, right in the middle of a fullblown and very real firefight.
The White Room
BACK AT THE clinic, in the days that immediately followed his short-lived escape bid, they kept him submerged in a sea of pills and injections. It was almost as if they were trying to medicate the will for freedom out of him. He was so doped that he didn't even dream, merely drifted through a gray fog of nonfunctioning responses and dull frustration. Only a handful of what could be classed as clear memories came through that period. He could remember passing John West as they dragged him down a corridor bundled up in a straitjacket. West had been sitting in a wheelchair, and he had treated Gibson to a sad salute. "I told you you shouldn't have tried it."
He also remembered Kooning coming to look at him, staring down at his bed with a look of outraged betrayal.
The worst of the lasting memories was the nasty smile on the face of one of the male nurses who had recaptured him; he suspected it was the one who had used the blackjack on his kidneys while they were in the van. The man had leaned so close to him that Gibson had been able to smell the spearmint gum on his breath. "You were iucky they didn't dust off the ECT for you. Back in the old days they used to cook your brain if you broke out."
It was a constant reminder of the helplessness of anyone who got themselves labeled as a mental patient.
Chapter Fifteen
GIBSON, WHO HAD never in his life been in combat, instantly discovered that it wasn't in the least like the movies or even the TV news. Combat happened all at once, and so fast there wasn't enough time to take it in or even to be specifically frightened, just a dry-mouthed, unfocused terror and a gasping, sobbing need to scramble away, out of the line of fire. Beneath him, in the inhabited valley of the Hole in the Void, buildings and vehicles were burning. As far as he could tell, one of the structures on fire was the Rearing Eagle.
"Bastards."
The sky was a dull gunmetal-blue streaked with rushing parallel lines of gray interference that provided little light by which to see. Two large aircraft, black shapes above the glare of the fires, hovered over the valley, filling it with the high-pitched siren wail of their engines. They were like big helicopter gun-ships, but without rotors, and of a design unlike anything Gibson had ever seen in his own world. They were pouring fire into the village, both conventional tracer and the jagged beam of some advanced energy weapon. Small dark figures were moving around among the flarnes, and Gibson could make out the repeated pinpoint muzzle flashes of weapons. He wasn't, however, allowed the luxury of wondering what was going on in the valley. Other dark figures were coming over the crest of the hill above him. To his relief, he spotted Nephredana, still in her armor, among their number, and he realized that they had to be a group of defenders. The bad news was that they were in full retreat.
Gibson yelled and waved his arms, even though he realized the gesture was probably pointless in the gloom. "Hey, over here!"