French was sighting the rifle again, resting it flat along the stacked-up packing cases. Gibson couldn't see the point of this. It seemed like such a needless risk. "I wish to hell you wouldn't do that."
French looked at him as though he clearly thought that Gibson was an old woman. "Relax, will you? Don't you know people never look up?"
"Cops look up on a gig like this."
"Let it go."
Gibson couldn't let it go. "Anyone would think you were going to do the thing for real."
There was the sound of cheering, out of sight, away down on one of the side streets.
"He's coming!"
French tensed, hunching into the rifle.
Gibson knew that something wasn't right.
The motorcade came round the corner. Four motorcycle policemen led the way on bikes as big as the biggest Harley Davidsons back on Earth, They were followed by two LPD cruisers, and a closed black car not unlike a Cadillac Coupe de Ville of the early sixties. After that came the president, riding in the back of a long, black, open-topped limo with Secret Service men or the equivalent riding the running boards. More motorcycles roared alongside the cars in low gear, belching black, unburned fuel. President Lancer was waving, acknowledging the cheers of the crowd. He was slim with an easy debonair stance and a shock of light-brown hair. His wife was beside him; she was wearing a pink dress. The motorcade was taking the curved road that ran diagonally across the plaza and on down to the underpass at the far end.
The pink dress did it. Gibson knew what wasn't right.
French was aiming the rifle.
The plaza was so familiar because he'd seen it all back on Earth. He'd seen it in newspapers, in newsreels, and on TV. The Zapruder film. It hadn't been in Luxor, it had been in Texas. It wasn't indentica] but it was damned close. The motorcade had made it complete. The underpass, the grassy knoll to the right. Dealey Plaza.
"Stop!"
Gibson made a grab for French's pistol.
"Stop!"
French fired. "There are certain events contained in the time stream that cannot be avoided. The bottleneck theory."
Parallel worlds and parallel events,
"Stop!"
Inevitable.
French worked the bolt and fired again.
The president jerked forward.
Unshakable destiny.
Simultaneously there were more gunshots that seemed to come from the grassy knoll.
A pink halo briefly surrounded the president's head.
How many shooters were there on this thing?
The president jerked back.
French fired a third time.
Gibson had the pistol. He knew and was consumed by rage. The streamheat were still lying to him. He was set up. He was the dumb bastard who could be conned twice. He was the fall guy and they were going to turn him into Lee Oswald!
"I'm going to kill you, you motherfucker!"
French turned. The rifle was pointed at Gibson.
The White Room
WHEN GIBSON HAD first been brought to the clinic, the medical staff had seemed determined to bury his so-called rock-star fantasy beneath an impenetrable layer of mind-numbing drugs and mental dislocation. Now, as the weeks turned into months, Dr. Kooning appeared determined to dig it all up again. She was particularly fascinated by the incidents that had destroyed his career. One day, hardly able to disguise her glee, she had let slip that she believed he was experiencing auto-destructive delusions of grandeur. From her excitement, he gathered that she believed that this was some big deal.
The pattern for the sessions was normally set by the first question. First, Kooning would read her notes, then remove her glasses and look at him. Gibson didn't like it that she wore the same round Himmler glasses as Rampton.
"You talk about a chain reaction of events that put an end to your career…"
Gibson was not in a particularly good mood. He was beginning to believe that his wholesale avoidance of the prescribed pills was setting up a serious psychochemical imbalance in his metabolism. The problem was that the shots continued, which meant he was actually only getting one half of the intended medication, and God only knew what that was doing to him over the long term. He'd found that he was waking up feeling increasingly ratty. He was also heartily sick of the sessions with Kooning. There had to be some finite limits on how much you could talk about yourself, especially when you had long since ceased to be your favorite topic of conversation. Escape was more and more on his mind.
"I thought we'd agreed that the whole thing was just a neurotic fantasy."
"I'd still like to hear about it,"
"The downfall?"
"It seems to be the thing that you're least willing to talk about."
"Is that really surprising?"
"It might prove to be a lot easier than you think."
"There isn't really that much to it. I fucked up. I fucked up by abusing the audience and walking off the stage at the Garden, I fucked up on the Letterman show by being drunk out of my mind. I went on the Woody Allen Show after doing coke and mescaline and took it into my head to mouth off about how I was the reincarnation of Ivan the Terrible and what the country needed was a good, old-fashioned autocratic tyranny, which was obviously the gig for me because there was absolutely nothing that I couldn't excel at if I put my mind to it, and how I'd end up ruling the world and the inner planets. I've seen the tape; my last words to Woody before they dragged me off were I'm Joe fucking Gibson, Master of the Universe, and don't you forget it."
Kooning's eyebrows had shot up like a pair of twin tilt signals on a pinball machine. "Woody? The Woody Allen Show?"
"In my reality, he was a talk-show host."
In fact this wasn't true but he was so tired of talking to Kooning that he had started slipping in selected pieces of fiction. As far as he knew, Woody Allen was the same in the reality he was in as in the one he'd come from. In fact, it had been Oprah Winfrey who'd borne the brunt of that piece of lunacy.
"Did you really believe that you were the reincarnation of Ivan the Terrible?"
"Of course not. I was just trying to upset people by being perverse. And attract attention, too, I guess."
"And did it work?"
Gibson nodded."Oh, sure. I was banned from over two hundred radio stations and MTV."
"So you wanted to be a victim?"
"Shit, I didn't know what I wanted. In fact, what I wanted hardly came into the picture."
"You felt you had no control over what you did?"
Gibson sighed. He was weary of even thinking about it. "Listen, what was really going on was that I had this job. The Holy Ghosts in general and me in particular had landed this job. Aside from the music, which at times became almost incidental in the minds of some of the fans and most of the media, we were expected to go out to the edge and come back and tell the world what it was like. We were professional pushers of the envelope. We gave the world a window on the weird. In the beginning, the world was titillated and gave us loads of money and drugs and sex. They liked it while it was all fun and frolic and nobody was getting hurt, but when we started showing them what it was really all about they didn't like that. When we publicly got the horrors, they started looking a bit askance."
Kooning was looking a bit askance herself, and Gibson became a little alarmed. Dear God, had he overdone it? He couldn't imagine what might happen to him if she started believing what he was telling her.
Chapter Eleven
GIBSON FIRED FIRST. French staggered backward but didn't go down or even drop the rifle. They must have been made of sterner stuff in his dimension, maybe more selective breeding. There was no mistaking that the heavy-caliber slug was hurting him. His face was contorted, and his whole body cringed around the point of impact as though trying to contain and blanket the exvcruciating pain. It wasn't stopping him, however, even though purple blood was now seeping from the entry wound and Gibson could only guess at the mess that had been made of his back where the bullet exited. French was bringing up the rifle again. Gibson fired a second time. French dropped to his knees but still struggled to stand, and might even have made it if Gibson hadn't put a third bullet into him. This time he dropped the rifle. He was clawing inside his coveralls, pulling out a miniature version of the multibarreled streamheat weapon. Gibson hesitated. What was French doing? Why would he bother to zap him when he could have killed him the old-fashioned way with the rifle?