Gibson had to admire the sheer gall of the streamheat. Minutes earlier, they'd been knocked out by a UFO and they were all but trying to blackmail the captain into keeping quiet about it. Donovan was silent for a very long time. When he spoke, it was with a cold distaste. "No, I don't think so. I'll leave it as a purely electronic phenomenon. All of the crew will almost certainly be up for drink and drug tests and psych examination as it is. I see no reason to make our lives even more difficult."
He paused and looked hard at Smith, Klein, and French. "Why do you people fill me with a deep and instinctive distrust?"
Smith put one hand on her hip and faced the captain. "That's a good question, Captain Donovan. Why do we?"
French backed her up.
"Maybe that's something else that might be a good idea to keep to yourself if you don't want the airline and FAA shrinks climbing all over you."
Donovan thought about that and answered with the expression of an honest man who finds himself compromised. "I take your point."
He turned to go back to the flight deck. In the doorway, he glanced back. "I'll be very happy when all of you are off my aircraft."
The White Room
THE TV FINALLY went off in the white room in the very exclusive clinic. The lights followed five minutes later. Joe Gibson lay in the darkness too drugged to move. He didn't miss the TV. How many back-to-back game shows and reruns of M*A*S*H could he watch? He didn't even miss the light. In the darkness, he could let his imagination wander and create pictures. In the light, he was clamped into a sterile reality with the TV as the only escape. Not that his imagination worked too well after Nurse Lopez had administered the shot. It was sluggish and had difficulty grasping on to entire concepts; fragmented images and disjointed words and phrases were mostly all it could manage. Right at that moment, two words, a name, kept going round and round in his head. The words were Gideon Windemere. He couldn't put a face or a personality to the name. It stood alone, unconnected to events or memories. Gideon Win-demere.
Deep in his mind, though, in the area that the drug tried so hard to suppress, and even to obliterate, a single tenuous link remained. The name came from somewhere in the lost memories, the ones that the doctors wanted to take away from him, the memories they claimed had never happened and were making him sick. He groped around, fighting the drug and going as deep inside his mind as he was able, Gideon Windemere. There had to be something else, something tangible to which he could anchor the name and force it to start making sense. Gideon Windemere?
Chapter Four
WINDEMERE PASSED THE ornate silver-and-ivory pipe to Gibson. "The problem with contemporary culture is that it suffers from the metallic KO, so to speak."
Windemere had a definite tendency to pontificate, but Gibson didn't mind. In the hour that the two of them had been together, it had become very obvious to Gibson that Gideon Windemere had a decidedly superior mind, and if he tended to become a little arrogant in the way that he delivered his ideas, the quality of the ideas certainly entitled him to a degree of self-congratulation.
Gibson sank into the deep leather armchair. He was exhausted, but the Methedrine that Smith had shot into him just before the plane landed wasn't going to let him sleep for a while, if at all. Apparently they thought that he still ran the risk of succumbing to psych attack if he closed his eyes. Sprawling was the next best thing. He applied the flame of a Bic lighter to the bowl of the pipe and sucked hard. The smoke went deep into his lungs and filled him with a sense of heavy-limbed well-being. It was a mixture of premier Lebanese hashish and opium, and it did a great deal to take the edge off the speed. He and Windemere were alone in the man's crowded study. He passed back the pipe. Windemere took it and relit it without missing a phrase.
"The industrialized society thinks in terms of metal. Cans and containers, generators and dynamos, magnetism and electricity, even chemistry is aggressively mundane. We take a trip to the moon in a steel-and-plastic container while the gossamer wing is relegated to the realm of song and fantasy. Everyone can drive an automobile but few can astral travel and almost no one can levitate. Not even the medical arts can be raised above the knife, the isotope, and the pill. The metal mind is so bloody unyielding. It doesn't flex. It entertains no alternative to its hammer and anvil. Even simple bioenergies are all but ignored, and advanced bioenergies are still looked on as witchcraft."
Smith, Klein, and French were in some other part of the house inspecting the security with Windemere's two live-in minders, Cadiz and O'Neal. The house was Number Thirteen Ladbroke Grove, a threejstory detached town house that from the outside looked perfectly normal, apart from the way the small front garden was heavily overgrown, but on the inside was anything but. Windemere's home was also museum, a chaotic jumble of art and objects. Warhols and Mondrians rubbed shoulders with models from the various productions of Star Trek. In the hallway, an Edward Hopper was mounted next to a framed original poster for the show that Hank Williams had been due to play the night after he died,"if the Good Lord's willing and the creek don't rise." Gibson could only stand in awe. Windemere's home was even more crammed with junk than his own apartment on Central Park West. It was quite understandable, though. Now in his mid-fifties, Windemere was not only fabulously rich and extensively traveled but he was also one of the great unsung outlaws of the sixties and seventies. He was unsung because he had always avoided being caught. Gideon Windemere was the one, above all, who had been too smart for them. He'd made his first fortune by being one of the great Owsley Stanley III's major subdistributors during the acid summer of 1967. The very few photographs that remained of him from those days were paparazzi shots of the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, or Morgan Luthor, in which he could be seen blurrily lurking in the background. During the seventies, he surfaced again as the inventor of the designer hypnotic Mandrake but almost immediately had to vanish, one step ahead of the DEA and the Hell's Angels. Rumor had it that he'd hidden out on the private tropical island of a legendary movie actor. Somewhere along the line, he'd also acquired an intimate knowledge of the back hills of Afghanistan that greatly exceeded that of the CIA, a fact that later insured his liberty during a brush with the Roy Cohn Justice Department in the mid-eighties. His studies of the occult and allied subjects, the reason that Casillas had entrusted Gibson into his care in the first place, went back to even before his acid days, and he had, according to Casillas, delved in quite as deep as Sebastian Rampton. He had certainly been on nodding terms with the Manson Family, but fortunately nothing had rubbed off. Unlike Rampton, he had never courted publicity, although it virtually went without saying that there had been times when he'd behaved with equal weirdness. As a consequence, nobody went around calling him the Great Beast or the Antichrist. Gideon Windemere simply lived in strange semiretirement in his large house at the smart end of one of London's traditional rock 'n' roll neighborhoods, just up the street from the local police station.
Gibson and the streamheat had driven in from Luton in another white Cadillac that was almost identical to the one that they had left at Kennedy Airport. After the UFO, Gibson had ceased to sweat the details or worry about how the streamheat could find identical cars in strange cities at a moment's notice. He was doing his best to learn relaxation, to float on the stream of events. The banana boat had left, and he was irreversibly on board with no chances of swimming back to shore.
It had been some years since he'd been in Ladbroke Grove, and at first he had scarcely recognized the neighborhood. There were still reminders of glory days when it had been the stronghold of hippies and punks, rudies and dreads, and a large assorted population of the down-at-heel and plain crazy, but all over there were the same signs of creeping gentrification common in so many once-bohemian enclaves in the big cities of the west. It was no longer the place were Gibson had once lounged around smoking ganja with a bunch of Rastafarians and a couple of guys from The Clash. Sometimes it seemed that the whole world was going to yuppie hell.