Gibson glanced at Klein. "Is this it? Are we there?"
Klein nodded. "This is it."
They stepped out of the cab and Gibson looked up at the front of his new temporary home. It really wasn't all that different from his place on Central Park West, maybe a little down-market but basically the same kind of structure. A similar blue-and-white awning led up to the front door, and as he walked into the paneled lobby it was easy to picture Ramone, his New York doorman, standing there.
The streamheat apartment was on the fifteenth floor, and that was where the resemblance to his New York home ended. The place was small, dark, and dingy, with tiny cramped rooms and narrow slit windows, most of which looked out on a blank air-shaft. It was also crowded with heavy, fifties-style furniture. Most of the space in the living room was taken up by a massive three-piece suite, upholstered in green leather that showed the marks of wear and even the scars of cigarette burns. Klein turned on a light, but it did nothing to improve the place's appearance. The walls were a dirty parchment yellow and the carpet an all-purpose excremental brown. Neither seemed to have been properly cleaned in the last decade.
"It's hardly the Plaza."
"It'll do for the moment."
Gibson sniffed. "You don't have to live here." Then he realized that he was only assuming this. "You won't be living here with me, will you?"
Klein shook his head. "No, I won't be living here. You'll be here on your own until other arrangements can be made."
Gibson raised an eyebrow. "Aren't you afraid that I might take a powder?"
The idea of Gibson walking out didn't seem to bother Klein at all. "Where would you go?"
Gibson nodded. "You have a point there."
They moved into the single bedroom. The double bed and a wardrobe like an upright coffin built for two hardly left enough floor space for the two men to stand in comfort.
"This is the kind of apartment where junkies come to die."
"It'll have to serve."
"Maybe if we got rid of some of the furniture?"
"I wouldn't bother thinking about redecorating. I doubt you'll be here long enough."
Gibson looked around. The place still seemed to be inhabited. There was certainly someone else's stuff strewn all around. "Who used to stay here?"
"Another agent. He was just transferred out."
There was a quality to Klein's voice that made Gibson suspect he was hiding something, but he decided that it was probably pointless to call him on it, and they returned to the living room. If Gibson had learned one thing during his acquaintance with the streamheat, it was that they were masters of keeping their mouths shut. He noticed a large TV set in the corner in a solid mahogany cabinet. Now what the hell was TV like in Luxor?
"So what happens now?"
"I have to return to the base and make my report."
"What about me?"
"This is your apartment for the moment. Relax, make yourself at home. I think you'll find there's everything you'll need."
This was all going a little swiftly for Gibson. "Wait a minute. You're just going to leave me here?"
"I don't have any orders to stay here and baby-sit you, if that's what you mean."
"What do I do about food and stuff?"
Klein shrugged. "The place is well stocked. I guess more will be sent in when you need it."
"Don't I get some kind of emergency number? Some way I can contact you people if there's a problem?"
"If there's a problem, we'll know about it."
Gibson remembered the bank of postcard-size monitor screens in the streamheat base. "You'll be watching me?"
Klein's face was blank. "I don't know what exact arrangements have been made for your security."
"So I just wait here and amuse myself?"
"You'll be contacted." Klein was at the door and on his way out. "I wouldn't recommend roaming the streets or anything, but otherwise you're free to do what you like. I believe alcohol has been provided."
Gibson's lip curled. "Then I'll be all right, won't I? I mean, that's all the poor old drunk needs, right?"
Klein ignored him. "Drop the deadbolt on the door after I've gone."
The door closed behind Klein, and Gibson was suddenly all alone. After about twenty seconds, the realization of this crashed in on him like a physical blow and he had to say it out loud to himself to make sure it was real.
"You're on your own in another dimension."
The idea was almost impossible to accept.
"You're on your own in another fucking dimension."
Suddenly something inside him crumpled. He no longer had Smith, Klein, and French hurrying him from one place to the next, or Windemere providing him with at least the illusion of protection. He now had nothing but his own resources, and that was frightening.
"Jesus Christ, boy, what have you gotten yourself into?"
He went into the kitchen of the apartment and found that, as Klein had said, the place had been fully stocked. The cupboards and refrigerator were full of brand-name goods that must have been brought through from his own dimension. Whoever planned his menu, though, had some strange ideas about what he ate. They seemed to assume he lived on a steady diet of Wonder Bread, peanut butter, Cap'n Crunch cereal, Dinty Moore beef stew, and Chef Boyardee ravioli. Although he wondered about the motivation and even the method that had brought him this bonanza of junk food from home, he was pleased to see it. He was in no shape to be struggling with unreadable cans of whatever they ate here in Luxor. He imagined he would come to that soon enough if the streamheat decided he was to stay in this dimension for a while, but in the meantime he'd do his best to chow down on what was there and not complain too much. He did wonder where the food might have come from. Did the streamheat maintain supplies of cheap supermarket provisions from a variety of dimensions for eventualities like this or had the stuff been transed in specially for him? That scarcely seemed possible considering the speed with which he'd been brought there, unless, of course, they'd been planning to bring him long before he'd known about it.
He was relieved to find that the promised alcohol had also been provided. In the cupboard over the sink, he discovered three fifths of Johnnie Walker Red Label, and there were also two six-packs of Bud Light in the big, old-fashioned refrigerator. He opened a beer and poured himself a very large shot of Scotch. He raised his glass to the empty air in a silent toast to whomever might be watching and then set off on a detailed exploration of the apartment and its contents. The previous tenant appeared to have left in a great hurry: his clothes were still there, along with a number of books in the local language, discarded magazines, and newspapers. Gibson even discovered a clutch of local soft porn in which blue couples cavorted across pages of implausibly cheap color printing. It wasn't long, however, before a certain uneasiness started to set in. The deeper Gibson delved, the more he came to believe that the "other agent" had not just moved out in a hurry-the signs seemed to indicate that he had simply vanished. His razor, toilet articles, and a selection of medications were still in the bathroom, and there was even a signet ring on the edge of the sink, as though a man had taken it off and placed it there while he was washing his hands and then never put it back on again. Gibson inspected the medicines with an experienced eye and found that one jar contained some thirty or so yellow pills that looked uncommonly like Valium. He was almost tempted to take a couple but decided that it might be wiser to stick to Scotch for the moment.
On a table beside the bed he found a pile of what appeared to be political leaflets, the kind of handbills that were printed up and passed out on the street by radical and fringe groups trying to make their point. They carried a less than flattering drawing of President Lancer and a slogan in a loud, violent typeface. Gibson sat down on the bed and studied the flyer. What had this guy been, some kind of agent provocateur worming his way into the confidence of local dissidents? Looking at the man's stuff, Gibson couldn't believe that he'd been regular streamheat like Klein or French. The man was too much of a slob. His shoes lay on the floor were he had dropped them, and there was a half-eaten plate of food in the refrigerator that he seemed to have been saving. His very smell was still in the place, a mixture of dirty socks and cheap cologne that simply wasn't streamheat in any shape or form. Perhaps he'd been some hired-on local operative or maybe another unwilling import from another dimension.