You already know the full story.'

  'I only know that the flying saucers came down and that the cyborgs came out of them. I only know that it happened all over the world and that now they're in charge. But I don't know where they came from or why they're here and I think you might have a clue. So what's the story, Cowboy?'

  'Why should he know?' Bonnie asked with her customary belligerence. 'He's just an old guy who likes to wear cowboy clothes and get drunk on his porch. Hey, Cowboy, what were you in the Old Age? A Hell's Angel or somethin'?'

  Grinning, the Cowboy leaned sideways again, picked another bottle of Bud off the floor, snapped the cap off with his teeth, spat it out, then had a good slug. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand and his smile was still there.

  'Nope,' he said. 'I wasn't into motorcycles. I was a USAF orbital analyst working in the US Space Command's top-secret Space Surveillance Centre, hidden deep inside Cheyenne Mountain near Colorado Springs, Colorado. The locals called it Crystal City 'cause they didn't know exactly what went on inside that mountain and they imagined it was like those old movies you see on TV — Star Trek or Star Wars — with lots of space-age gadgetry.'

  'Were they right?' Bonnie asked.

  'They sure were. We had the most advanced space surveillance systems ever devised and they were pretty damned impressive to look at.'

  'What did you do?' Bonnie asked.

  'Knob turner,' the Cowboy said ambiguously, with a teasing

  grin. Then he went on to clarify the picture. 'I worked on the third-level area, known as Box Nine, a good half-mile below ground level. It was a windowless, narrow chamber manned by half a dozen orbital analysts, including me. Known as knob turners, we spent all day or night, depending on the shift, seated in an eerie green glow in front of computer consoles that showed the curving ground tracks of the many objects floating in outer space, high above the Earth's atmosphere, just outside the US

  electronic defence perimeter, known as "the fence". The so-called fence was, in fact, the US Naval Space Defence System: a man-made energy field that stretched three thousand miles across the southern United States, extended a thousand miles off each coast, and reached out nearly fifteen thousand miles into space. It's still there, still checking what's out there, but now the cyborgs control it

  — that and the whole of Crystal City. Those bastards got everything.'

  'So how did it work?' Gumshoe asked, always interested in technical matters.

  'When an object passed through the energy field, the so-called fence was tripped and the invasion of our air space recorded on our radar screens. When that happened, receiver stations all over the country locked onto it. Within seconds, the computers would calculate the object's speed and size. That info was relayed immediately to the system's HQ in Dahlgren, Virginia, where the signals were processed by a high-speed IBM 1800 computer that determined the precise position and anticipated ground track of the object. That info was in turn relayed to us lowly knob turners in Box Nine where, based on the info we received, we'd be able to feed into our computers a mathematical description of the orbital elements of the object, including estimates of the time it would take it to reach Earth, its inclination to the equator, and the highest point, or apogee, of its orbit. From those computations, we d be able to tell what was out there.'

  'Shit, man,' Bonnie said, staring wide-eyed at the Cowboy, you're a pretty smart guy.'

  'Thank you, Ma'am, for those kind words.'

  'You ever catch anything up there?' Gumshoe asked, annoyed that Bonnie, who normally had no respect for anyone, was practically drooling with admiration for the Cowboy, now fifty-five years old.

  'Yeah, lots of things, but nothing special. You gotta remember that even that long ago there were approximately seven thousand pieces of man-made debris floating out in space, including several thousand satellites and plenty of small items such as lost thermal gloves, screwdrivers, other tools, and even screws that had worked themselves loose and just drifted away. So they were all still up there, floating around, keeping our radar screens busy. Invariably, if we picked up an anomalous or unidentified object, commonly referred to as a hogey, it would turn out to be one of four types of item: a satellite whose orbital characteristics had changed, perhaps on command from the ground; a decaying object re-entering the atmosphere, in which case it was passed on to the TIP — tracking and impact prediction — teams; a newly launched object that had yet to be given an identification number; or simply one of the thousands of previously recorded objects floating around in space.'

  'You never saw the flying saucers entering and leaving the atmosphere, tripping your fence?'

  'We probably did,' the Cowboy said, 'and probably recorded them as unidentified flying objects —

  UFOs. But every time we vectored in aircraft to intercept them, they just blinked out on the screens and

  were never eyeballed by the pilots. Those sons of bitches were quick to disappear. So, though we recorded a lot of UFOs, that's just what they remained listed as: unidentifieds.' 'So what happened when the cyborgs invaded?' Gumshoe

  asked.

  'We were caught with our pants down,' the Cowboy replied, 'and all that fancy Star Wars hardware didn't mean a damned thing. We didn't see their saucers coming until it was too late because they didn't come through the fence, from outer space.

  They came from right here on Earth, from hidden bases in remote locations such as deserts and mountain ranges and, of course, from lakes and the seabed. So the flying saucers weren't seen as unidentified blips on the radar screens reading the man-made energy field; they didn't trip the fence. In fact, they weren't seen until they started ascending all over the globe, when they were recorded as unidentified blips on airport radars tracking known flight paths. So there we were in Crystal City, scanning outer space for signs of anything anomalous, while the whole show was taking place around us and we just couldn't see it. Not, that is, until a huge flying saucer, a mother ship, descended right over Cheyenne Mountain . . . and by then it was too late.'

  'The Cheyenne Mountain complex,' Gumshoe said, 'was supposed to be the most secret base in the whole of the United States — and the most impregnable. I mean, it's buried deep in the mountain, it's protected by bombproof doors, and it had, at that time, every kind of electrical defence system known to man . . . So, given all that, how did the cyborgs get in?'

  'They just walked in,' the Cowboy said. 'We couldn't do a damned thing to stop them. When that great mother ship came down, descending over Cheyenne Mountain and then hovering right above it as it released the smaller flying saucers, the ones containing the cyborgs and armed robotic machines —

  dreadful fucking things that looked like giant metallic insects — all our fancy hardware went haywire, blinking on and off, some smoking and even exploding, warning lights all over the place, sirens wailing and so on. Then the bombproof doors just opened and couldn't be closed again, the place was plunged into darkness — and just imagine that enormous place in pitch darkness with everyone in a panic —

  and then the cyborgs and the robotic machines just came in, swarming down through the whole complex, and no one could do a damned thing to stop 'em. Our weapons were useless against them.

  They had those laser weapons that could paralyse or kill. They simply zapped anyone who tried to resist, then they rounded the others up, marched

  them out of there, took them back to the mother ship in the smaller flying saucers, then took over the complex and soon had it operating again. A few days later, the technicians who'd been taken away were returned to their old jobs — but from what I hear, though they all looked the same as they'd looked before, they weren't quite the same. They were obedient and did exactly what they were told. They'd all had their minds tampered with.'

  'I hear the cyborgs do that all the time,' Gumshoe said. 'Most of the humans who work for them, it's been said, have had their minds tampered with. There's a lotta talk of electronic implantation. Hairline fibres, so thin they're practically invisible, that are implanted in certain areas of the brain and can then control it. You think that's possible?'

  'I know it is,' the Cowboy replied. 'They were doing it in our hospitals for years in the Old Age and the cyborgs were always well ahead of us, so no doubt they can do it. A lot of the cyborgs are remote-controlled that way — and so are the humans who work for them.'

  'What about you?' Bonnie asked, pointing at the Cowboy with her unfinished bottle. 'You're sitting here right in front of us and you seem pretty normal. How come, big boy?'

  'I got away,' the Cowboy said. 'A few of us managed to. We were able to make our escape in the darkness and we fled on foot from the mountain, still under cover of darkness. It was midnight, remember.'

  'So how come you're here,' Bonnie asked, 'in Washington DC? Or, to be more accurate, in a shanty town in Anacostia?'

  The Cowboy wasn't offended by Bonnie's directness. But he certainly looked less happy, his eyes narrowing as they gazed into the past. 'Well, now,' he said, as if not sure how to say it, 1 guess I'm here because I had to have some friends after I lost everything in Colorado, including my wife and kids.' He broke the shocked, uneasy silence by slugging some beer and clearing his throat by coughing into his clenched fist. 'That's one of the reasons I hate the cyborgs,' he said. 'They killed my wife and two kids . . . Not

  no

  deliberately, mind you . . . But that don't matter a damn. I hate those bastards anyway.'

  'What happened?' Bonnie asked with admirable bluntness.

  'We tend to forget,' the Cowboy explained, 'that a lot of damage was done when the flying saucers descended. Those were big motherfuckers — the mother ships, I mean — and they gave off a kind of vibration, an infrasound, that sucked things up and knocked things down and cracked tarmac roads and short-circuited electricity systems and made engines malfunction. In other words, they caused havoc, with things — and folks — being smashed and crushed, falling into deep holes caused by splitting earth, dying in fires, by electric shock, and in automobile crashes or in planes that malfunctioned in mid-air and went down. There was that and then there was the general havoc caused by panic, when drivers and pedestrians saw those huge things descending.' The Cowboy sighed with genuine sadness, then continued, speaking more softly. 'So, when I escaped from the Cheyenne Mountain Complex, I made my way to Colorado Springs on foot. My house was fine, but it was empty, with all the lights still on. From where the house was, I could see that huge mother ship, hovering over Cheyenne Mountain with its lights flashing on and off repeatedly — a huge, lit-up cathedral, beautiful and terrifying at the same time. Wondering why the house was empty, I was just about to call the cops when a patrol car stopped out in front. A local cop and good buddy, Jim Baxter, got out to tell me that my wife and two kids, a boy and a girl, one twelve and one ten, had been killed in a car crash. His assumption, based on other crashes that he'd also attended over the past hour, was that my wife had seen that huge mother ship coming down over the mountain. In a panic because she knew I was there but she couldn't contact me, she'd put the kids in her car with the intention of driving them to her folks' place just a few miles away. In her panic — or possibly because the other driver had panicked — she crashed into another speeding car. The lone driver in the other car survived; my wife and kids were killed outright.'

  'Aw, shit!' Bonnie exclaimed softly, with genuine sympathy.

  The Cowboy merely nodded. 'Anyways,' he said, 'I was going to stay on in the house after the funeral, but one of the other knob turners who escaped from the complex with me came to tell me that the cyborgs were spreading out from Cheyenne Mountain into the surrounding area and that they were rounding up all the scientists and technicians who'd escaped from the complex, as well as others who hadn't been there at the time but who normally worked there. Those who were rounded up were, of course, returned a few days later when their minds had been tampered with. As for me, with my wife and kids gone and most of my friends in the hands of the cyborgs, I did the only thing I could do, which was to light out of there. I made my way to the only place I still had friends — your folks, Gumshoe, then living where you're living right now — and they let me hide out in your place until I arranged a new life, and a new name, for myself. I solved the problem by coming here, where only the deadbeats

  live, where the cyborgs never come, and I turned myself into the eccentric character you now see before you.'

  'Jesus,' Bonnie said, 'that's all really sad. So how do you make a living these days?'

  'I paint and decorate for the poor of this very area.'

  'That's a hell of a comedown for a guy who used to do what you did.'

  The Cowboy shrugged. 'Since the coming of the cyborgs a lotta folks have had to climb down a bit. A man's lucky to be makin' a livin' at all and I do okay.'

  'You got no problem with the criminal elements around here?'

  'Around here,' the Cowboy said, 'they think I'm weird, an alcoholic and a crazy, which means that they leave me alone and would never think that the cyborgs might want to find me. Of course, a good twenty years have passed since then, so the cyborgs really might have forgotten me by now.'

  'Maybe' Gumshoe said. 'Maybe not. I think they might have long memories . . . and they still abduct people.'

  'They sure do/ Bonnie said. 'So what happened to the President of the United States? Him and his Vice-President and the other political fat cats who were taken away that first day and never seen again?'

  'I don't know,' the Cowboy said. 'No one does. All we know for sure is that the politicians left behind, the ones now running the country, are either too scared to take action against the cyborgs or have been brainwashed by them, electronically or otherwise. As for those picked up by the Paddy wagons, who knows what happens to them? They disappear. That's all we know. They disappear and they don't come back.'

  'Yeah,' Gumshoe said, suddenly feeling a rush of pain and embarrassment. 'Like my parents disappeared and never came back — a few months after you fled to this place. I wonder about them all the time and not knowing what happened to them is more painful than actually losing them. It's kind of a torment.'

  The Cowboy reached over to take hold of Gumshoe's shoulder and give it a gentle, compassionate squeeze. 'Yeah,' he said, 'I know what you mean. That must hurt a lot. No use telling you to not think about it, 'cause they were the kind of folks you remember.'

  'They used to visit him in Colorado,' Gumshoe explained to Bonnie, 'when they went there as physicists on NASA business. That's how they became friends.'

  'That's right,' the Cowboy said.

  'I can't remember what they were like,' Gumshoe said, turning back to the fifty-five-year-old who was charming the eighteen-year-old Bonnie Packard. 'I only remember that my Mom loved Elvis Presley and I think he's great too.'

  The Cowboy nodded. 'He sure is. That's why he's still so popular. Elvis was so unique, so off the wall, there was really no one to compare to him. You know why I think he's still so popular?'

  'No, tell me.'

  I can't wait,' Bonnie added, rolling her eyes.

  'He was everything rolled into one, you know? I mean, he did every kinda song you could do — the blues, country, gospel, rock 'n' roll, ballads, jazz, opera, kids' songs and novelty songs for the movies, an' he did 'em all like no one ever did. Then, of course, he was kinda androgynous: a real macho man on the one hand, kinda feminine on the other. You ever notice his face? One side of it, he looks like a

  hoodlum; the other side he looks like an angel — a real split personality. Then, to top it all, he wore those Captain Marvel capes and they made him seem almost godlike — or, at least, like someone from another planet. I think that's what did it. It's what your Mom used to say. She said that since the coming of the cyborgs and the growth of cybersex, with the differences between male and female being broken down on the World Wide Web, in all those e-mail transactions and virtual-reality sex parlours, Elvis had come to stand in for both sexes, offering something for everybody and making the unreality of the New Age seem perfectly normal. That Elvis, man, he's really fucking eternal and you'd better believe it.'

  'They say he's been seen coming out of the White House with cyborgs and their human aides. Any truth in that, Cowboy?'

  The Cowboy grinned at that one. 'Well, Elvis is alive and well and has been seen everywhere in the world, so I guess we'd better believe it. He also wanted to be a Messiah, you know, to change the whole fucking world, so maybe he's working on it with the cyborgs. For sure, they're doing something in the White House, so let's wait and see.'

  'Maybe Elvis is really Wilson,' Gumshoe said.

  'What? Who's Wilson?'

  'You never heard of Wilson?'

  'I've known a few in my time,' the Cowboy said. 'Which one do you mean?'

  'I keep getting a message on my e-mail saying that Wilson is back. I don't know what it means and I can't find out who's sending it, 'cause the poster's details are always false. But I keep getting that message.'

  'Cyberspace,' the Cowboy said. 'You're in a haunted world there. They're obsessed with all kinds of mystic shit and conspiracy theories. Maybe it's something like that.'

  'You ever hear of a Wilson in that context?'

  'Yeah, as a matter of fact, I did. Way back when I was working in Crystal City. Lots of whispers going around about a Wilson connected to flying saucer mythology — the old extraterrestrial mythology, before the coming of the cyborgs, way back in the 1950s and 1960s — in the days of rock 'n' roll and Elvis, naturally. I can't remember much about what was said, though I do recall that that Wilson was kind of a cult figure in UFO mythology. It could be a practical joke based on that. Check him out on the Web.'

  'I'll do that,' Gumshoe said. He glanced up at the night sky and saw the same spherical lights gliding to and fro high above Washington DC. Remembering what had happened to Snake Eyes, and recalling the SARGEs and Prowlers around the White House, he assumed that the cyborgs would be patrolling that whole area with even more than their customary thoroughness. They would be looking for anyone on a motorcycle and he was one of that breed. 'I think we'd better be going,' he said to the Cowboy, then indicated Bonnie with a nod of his head. 'I've gotta take this Long Hair home and that could give me problems.'