Windemere laughed. "That's something you really can never know."
"I'm glad you find it amusing."
"If you can't see the cosmic joke, you're liable to go crazy in the process."
"I can't help feeling that I'm still waiting for the cosmic punch line and I may be the one falling over on the cosmic banana peel."
"That's the chance that you take."
"Thanks."
"Lighten up, Joe. You're in safe hands right now."
Gibson sighed and sipped his cognac. "I'm sorry. It's been a hard day."
"Tell me about the saucer. What did it look like?"
Gibson wondered if Windemere was really interested or whether he was merely decoying him away from his latest attempt at self-pity.
"In fact, it wasn't a saucer, it was more like an egg."
Windemere grinned wryly. "Shades of Mark and Mindy."
Despite himself Gibson also had to grin. "I hadn't thought of it that way."
"So what did this egg do?"
Gibson shrugged. "Up until it put us out, nothing very much. The captain said it was zigzagging a lot when he first picked it up on the radar. Then it came alongside and mostly just kept on changing color."
"And what happened when it put you out?"
"There was a blinding light, like a massive burst of radiation, and that was all she wrote. Next thing, we're waking up ten minutes later. You have any inside track on UFOs?"
Windemere shook his head."Not much, aside from what I've read, and, as far as I can see, about ninety percent of that is pure bullshit."
"That's pretty much what the streamheat said."
Windemere looked at Gibson questioningly. "The streamheat claimed that they didn't know anything about UFOs?"
Gibson nodded. "That's what they said."
"I thought they knew everything."
"Apparently not."
Windemere leaned forward and lowered his voice. "Maybe I shouldn't say this while they're in the house, but I don't altogether trust your newfound chaperones."
It was Gibson's turn to look questioning, "Why not?"
Windemere frowned. "I don't know, it's just a feeling. They're a little too… metallic, if you know what I mean."
Gibson nodded. "I know what you mean."
Windemere held his brandy glass, warming it between his cupped hands and staring thoughtfully into the amber liquid.
"It could be that someone out there believes that you're some sort of catalyst or pivot, that somehow some minor action of yours is going to trigger major events."
"William Storm Eagle said something of the sort."
"He's a wise old bird, Storm Eagle."
Gibson winced at the terrible pun. Windemere spread his hands. "It just came out."
"What makes you think I'm a catalyst?"
Windemere inhaled the fumes from his glass. "It's one explanation of all the shit that seems to have come down on your head since you hooked up with Casillas. You certainly don't seem to have done anything to merit it, unless there's something that no one's telling me. I very much doubt that UFOs are chasing you because some alien doesn't like your old records."
"Are you telling me that all this is happening to me because of something I might do in the future?"
"You have to remember that telling the future is a big deal in what, for want of a better term, gets called the paranormal. Projection's a growth industry, and there are a lot of people, not only in this dimension, that are very hung up on plotting the future. You should talk to your streamheat friends. From what I've heard, their dimension has made a high-tech science out of trying to figure out what's going to happen. They've got data banks from here to Thursday chock-full of nonlinear projection models and societal convection rolls and ways of suppressing the sensitivity to initial conditions. It's all very grand, but I have a sneaking feeling that it's all just fortune-telling when you get down to it, and I've never really trusted fortune-tellers. Even Nostradamus tends to fuck up. It's hard enough to predict a crap game, let alone the whole of everything interacting. If Lorenz's butterfly proves anything, it's that there's only so much you can do to constrain chaos."
Gibson put his brandy glass down on the desk. He had lost Windemere about three sentences back, but he didn't really care.
"How does all this affect you and me?"
"You mean in terms of your remaining here when it seems like half the multidimensional universe is down on your ass?"
"I'd hate to find myself out on the street."
Windemere gestured dismissively, as though his continued hospitality went without saying. "There's no chance of that. I gave my word to Don Carlos that I'd take care of you, and I don't intend to go back on it. On the other hand, though, if it gets hairy we may have to come up with some sort of backup plan."
"Do you have one?"
"Not yet, but I'm thinking about it."
"Do you mind if I ask you something?"
Windemere laughed. "It doesn't seem to have stopped you so far."
"Why aren't you one of the Nine?"
Windemere hesitated before answering. "I guess basically because I didn't want to be. I didn't want to be involved in something that also involved Sebastian Rampton."
"That's been puzzling me ever since I was at that place on Greene Street. How did a sleaze like that get to be one of the great guardians of the Earth?"
"Rampton may be a very unpleasant individual, but there are areas about which he knows more than any living human. When the Nine were selected, nobody was talking morality or even likability. They were dealing in terms of knowledge and power and, God knows, he's got both."
"But can he be trusted?"
Windemere's expression was matter-of-fact. "I doubt it. It's always been my opinion that he was a power-crazed geek who fancied himself as ubermensch. I never thought that it was just coincidence that he wore exactly the same glasses as Heinrich Himmler."
"Isn't his being one of the Nine downright dangerous?"
Windemere nodded. "We'll just have to hope that his interests go on corresponding with those of the rest of them." Windemere swirled his brandy in the glass. "It's not just Rampton. I doubt that I would have joined the Nine even if he hadn't been one of the other invited candidates. I don't exactly share all of their principles. I guess when it comes down to it, I'm too much of a nihilist. The Nine are altogether too strong on preserving civilization as we know it. Me, on the other hand, I'm not even sure that I like civilization as we know it."
"I thought that if Necrom woke up, it'd be the end of everything, that he'd eat us alive."
Windemere shrugged. "That's more fortune-telling."
"So what will happen?"
"Damned if I know. It could be that Necrom will usher in a whole new golden age, although, having lived through the sixties, I'm not sure we'd recognize a golden age if it jumped up and bit us. The only real hope I can see is that we survived the last one and maybe we'll survive again this time round."
"Survived the last what?"
"The last influx of superbeings."
Gibson blinked. "When did that happen? Did I miss something?"
"This planet was occupied for about ten thousand years by Necrom and his kind."
Every time Gibson thought that he was starting to get a handle on the events that had been thrust at him from the moment that Casillas had come knocking on his door, someone or something came along and kicked all previous logic out from under him.
He took a deep, cleansing breath and then spoke slowly and carefully. "There were superbeings actually living on Earth?"
"Right."
"Right here on Earth."
"Right."
"For ten thousand years."
"That's correct."
"When was this?"
"From about 25,000 to 15,000 B.C."