NECROM

"Jesus Christ!"

The bartender, who was still counting out his change, looked up sharply. "What's the trouble?"

"Nothing." He gestured to his now empty shot glass. "Why don't you do me again while you're still here?"

"You can put it away."

"It's been a rough day."

Gibson was wondering what, if indeed the double was his parallel in this dimension, would happen if the two of them met? Would they merely exchange pleasantries or would there be some hideous interface in which one or both of them were destroyed like matter and antimatter? Of course, the double wasn't an albino; maybe that would make a difference. A kind of sidebar idea jumped into his mind. If the streamheat's plan was really to swing some kind of substitution, the fact that he had come out of the transition as an albino may have seriously screwed things up. He sipped his second shot, hardly tasting it, and set the glass down on the bar. He took the whole parcel of thoughts that had been triggered by the picture in the wallet and, handling them with the mental equivalent of long tongs, consigned them to one of the deepest recesses of his mind. He should be concentrating on practical survival and concealing himself as far as he could in this red-light subworld of Luxor.

He took a deep breath to calm himself and clear his mind and then looked around the bar. He would probably be spending a lot of time in places like this over the next few days. The Radium Room appeared to be something of a pickup parlor. Gibson didn't know enough about the mores of Luxor to be able to tell if it was a swinging singles joint or a hooker bar, but he suspected the latter. He noticed that a woman a little way down the bar was looking in his direction. Taking the dim smoky light of the barroom into account, she actually didn't look too bad. Her close-cropped helmet of yellow-blond hair contrasted prettily with the blue of her skin, and her mouth, a slash of purple lipstick, pouted seductively. Gibson no longer had any doubts about how he'd handle getting close to a blue woman. To paraphrase Stephen Stills, love the color you're with.

The woman was coming through the crowd toward him. In her pencil skirt and low-cut blouse, she looked like a B-girl from some fifties gangster movies, and when she slid into the space at the bar beside him, he discovered that she had the matching, husky Lizbeth Scott voice.

"You wanna buy me a drink?"

Gibson smiled and signaled to the bartender. "Sure, anytime."

The woman's pout increased in provocation. "Are you alone?"

Gibson laughed. "You wouldn't believe how alone I am."

"My name's Zazsu."

Zazsu appeared to be a regular at the Radium Room. The bartender didn't bother to ask her what she was drinking, she simply set a green concoction in a conical glass in front of her and picked up some of Gibson's money. Zazsu sipped the green stuff through a clear plastic straw in a manner that seemed to be an open invitation to all manner of shadowy delights.

"Are you gonna tell me yours?"

"It's Joe."

Zazsu frowned. "Joe? That's a weird name. Are you from out of town?"

Gibson nodded. "Oh, yeah, I'm from out of town."

Zazsu came straight to the point.

"So I guess you don't know any girls in Luxor."

"Not a one."

"You looking for a good time?"

"I might be."

"I've got a place right near here. I could show you a real good time for a fifty."

"Is that a fact?"

Zazsu raised an eyebrow that seemed to indicate that time was money and he should make up his mind. "So, you wanna?"

Gibson hesitated. The offer was tempting, and even a little commercial creature comfort was preferable to the absolute isolation that he'd been feeling ever since Klein had left him alone in the apartment. As far as revealing his alien status, he was fairly confident he was on safe ground; the natives of Luxor seemed to believe that out-of-towners were capable of any gaucheness or stupidity. He was about to agree to Zazsu's offer when he happened to glance up. The smile froze on his face and the words stuck in his throat. Nephredana had just walked into the Radium Room and was heading directly for where he was standing. It was a somewhat different Nephredana from the first time he had seen her, with Yancey Slide outside Windemere's house in Ladbroke Grove, but there was no mistaking it was her. If nothing else, on high spike heels she was a head taller than most of the drinkers in the place. Back in London, she had been pure metal, the wet dream of any Megadeth fan; now she looked like a gun moll from some lost Robert Mitchum movie. As before, she was all in black, a sequined jacket like the skin of a vampire reptile over a sheath dress so tight that it gave no quarter, a wide-brimmed hat with a veil tilted at a piratical angle, and a pocket book over her shoulder big enough to hold a small arsenal of weapons. A hush fell and heads turned as she made her way determinedly through the crowd, and one dwarf actually dropped his drink.

She made short work of Zazsu. With a jerk of her thumb, and a rasp of that deep graveyard voice, she ordered the woman away. "Beat it, honey. This one's mine."

"Wait a minute…"

"I said beat it, bitch."

"I…"

"Now."

Nephredana raised the veil of her hat, and a pair of demon eyes exactly like Slide's were revealed. Zazsu immediately capitulated and moved quickly away, and Nephredana turned her attention to Gibson. Fortunately for him, she had dropped the veil again and the inhuman eyes were hidden.

"I would have thought you could have done better than that, Joe Gibson."

Gibson shrugged, trying his hardest to put on a careless, swashbuckling front even though on the inside he was on the verge of panic. "What can I say. I'm still getting orientated."

"Getting an orientation lesson from a twenty-kudo hooker?"

"She wanted fifty."

"Probably thought you were a rube."

Nephredana was the only person in the place who wasn't blue, but Gibson didn't think it was quite the moment to ask for an explanation. He glanced down the bar to where Zazsu appeared to be telling her troubles to a man wearing a silk suit with very wide shoulders whose long, straight hair was slicked back and tied in a ponytail. "The girl seems to be complaining to her pimp."

Nephredana also glanced down the bar. "I don't think we're going to have any trouble with him." She leaned across and said something to the bartender that Gibson didn't hear. Gibson, not quite convinced that there'd be no trouble, continued to keep one eye on the pimp while he tried to find out what Nephredana was doing there.

"I'm assuming that this isn't a chance meeting."

The bartender set two drinks in front of Nephredana. One looked like ouzo and the other creme de menthe. She poured one into the other, and the resulting cocktail came out resembling a glass of toxic waste. She drank half of it and then smiled atGibson. "Of course it's not a chance meeting. Yancey figured it was time that you got out of the clutches of the streamheat."

"I may have already done that for myself."

"I wouldn't speak too soon."

"You think they're looking for me."

Nephredana swallowed the other half of the foul-looking drink and signaled to the bartender for the same again. "More likely they're waiting for you to come back dragging your tail behind you."

"And when I don't?"

"Then they'll come looking for you, if they still think you're useful to them."

"I hope I can manage to disappear before they get around to that. Unless of course Yancey Slide has other plans for me."

Nephredana mixed a second of the toxic concoctions. "Yancey doesn't have any plans for you. If you knew him better you'd be aware that Yancey doesn't exactly make plans, he just rides the flow. The only reason I'm here is because he wants you to come to a party."