of spacecraft, doubtless of a kind even more advanced than those they already had, Michael cast his thoughts farther afield and saw that the moon's surface was now crawling not only with robot moon-miners but with fuel-cell, hydrogen-burning tractors, mass drivers and soil blowers. Its once barren valleys and plains were now peppered with cyborg-constructed nuclear power plants, ninety-foot antennas with aluminium reflectors for the transmission of electric power obtained from microwave beams in space, 1000-foot-diameter radio telescopes that constantly scanned the cosmos, and immensely powerful radio beacons that were sending signals into space non-stop. Letting his thoughts travel on, he saw that various cyborg satellites and space stations, the latter shaped like great wheels and spinning constantly to produce artificial gravity, were in orbit around the moon. Carried up there, sometimes in their separate constituent pieces, by flying saucers, they were assembled and maintained by a combination of cyborgs and robot workers. Human beings, as Michael knew, had no place up there because every space project of the Old Age had been brought to a halt.

  With his telepathic powers now at full strength, and so feeling more confident, Michael returned his thoughts to Earth and concentrated intently on the White House. After his success in reconnoitring the moon, he was initially frustrated when, as had happened so often in the past with this target, he now came up against a wall of impenetrable darkness.

  He fought to break through this wall, but it constantly pushed him back, and he realized that the cyborgs, highly advanced in parapsychological skills, had created a mental barrier to prevent telepathic intrusions into their space. This time, however, Michael refused to give in: instead, he focused even more intensely on what he was doing, first imagining the White House, then willing it into being as a visible entity in his head. It materialized eerily, reluctantly, out of that unreal wall of darkness until it was clearly there before him. First he saw the eighteen acres of flower gardens, lawns and trees around the whitewashed sandstone building, then the balustraded roof-line, and then, finally, the Ionic pilasters and windows with alternating rounded and triangular pediments.

  At this point, he felt a fierce resistance, a great mental force pushing against him, and the image of the

  White House wavered and grew dim as the barrier created by the combined mental telepathy of the cyborgs tried to keep him outside. He refused to retreat, instead concentrating still more intently, feeling that his brain was bursting, aware of his racing heart, the agitated alpha rhythms — and was relieved when he saw the image of the White House becoming three-dimensional, seemingly solid, growing larger each second.

  From high above the building, where his astral projection had placed him, Michael saw the Prowlers and SARGEs parked in front of the North Entrance, with cyborgs patrolling back and forth. He glided across the building, as if his thoughts were borne on wings, eventually descending over the lawns of the Ellipse. Once there, he willed himself to the southern side of the White House, melted into it, was surrounded by it, and emerged into what he assumed by its appearance was the Diplomatic Reception Room. He could see this room clearly, as if in broad daylight. It was empty, but when he tried to go through it, to explore the rest of the building, wanting to check all three floors, the light abruptly dimmed, the walls appeared to vaporize, and he found himself drifting through a darkness filled with flickering, silvery-white fireflies, which reminded him, righdy or wrongly, of the electrochemical signals, the neurons, that pass information from one point in the brain to another.

  Where am I? Michael wondered. In the White House or not? Is this the White House or the interior of someone's hrain? Someone or something? What's happening here?

  He was being blocked again but he willed himself onward, letting his memory guide him, recalling the diagrams he had studied to familiarize himself with the building, and glided upwards, over stairs he could scarcely see, to what he assumed

  was the East Room on the first floor. Now, though he saw little, the darkness being even deeper, he heard a bass humming sound, almost felt it, an infrasound. As the sound grew louder, as the pressure increased, the silvery-white fireflies multiplied dramatically, flickered on and off more rapidly, then started streaking this way and that, at incredible speeds, now here and then there, living and dying on the instant, creating countless lines of light that criss-crossed repeatedly until they formed an immense, glowing, constantly changing web, the strands of which were joined by a distant, rhythmically pulsating, mesmerizing dark core.

  Suddenly terrified, imagining that he was approaching a monstrous, steadily breathing, all-devouring spider in the centre of its immense web — a virtual cosmos of darkness and streaming light and infrasounds that could be felt — Michael almost lost control and felt his concentration weakening. But he managed to hold on long enough to convince himself that what he feared could only be an illusion.

  Gliding forward again, surrounded by the darting fireflies, the criss-crossing silvery-white lines, an abyss of darkness on all sides, up and down, beyond time and space, he approached that pulsating dark core at the heart of the great web and felt the bass humming sound, the infrasound, as a palpable presence, moving in on him, crushing him.

  At that moment, for no reason that he could comprehend, even as he felt that he was suffocating, Michael thought of Wilson.

  He sensed that Wilson was here, right in front of him, all around him, somehow part of that pulsating dark core at the heart of the immense glowing web that now filled his whole view.

  Fear rushed back to hammer down his defences and smash his concentration.

  Everything dissolved around him, the great silvery-white web turning back to light-flecked darkness, the fireflies then disappearing to leave only the darkness, and the darkness receding to let the walls of the White House reappear, albeit vaguely, and finally the White House itself dissolving as he returned (or, more

  precisely, as his thoughts returned) to his room in the glittering geodesic dome outside Freedom Bay.

  His heart was racing and he was trembling, sweating profusely, as if about to collapse.

  He did not collapse. Instead, he stretched out on his spine, placed his hands behind his head, spread his legs and practised deep breathing until his racing heart had slowed down and he was breathing normally again. Back in control of himself, but still shaken by what he had experienced, feeling older than his true age yet somehow more prepared for the future, he hurried out of his room. He left the geodesic dome and crossed to Freedom Bay, passing the parked flying saucers and other vertical ascending craft, all created by the legendary John Wilson, then took the lift up to Dr Brandenberg's office near the mountain's summit. No appointment had been made, so Brandenberg looked up, surprised, when Michael walked in and stopped in front of his desk.

  'Wilson's back,' Michael said without preamble but with absolute confidence. 'And he's in the White House.'

  Chapter Eleven

  Gumshoe's personal space had been well and truly invaded by Bonnie Packard and he was having trouble coming to terms with it. If Bonnie had been a saint sent down from heaven to look after him, Gumshoe would have still had problems because he had lived by himself for so long and didn't know how to compromise with the habits and foibles of the other human being now sharing, supposedly temporarily, his small, cluttered apartment in Georgetown. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that Bonnie was not a saint sent down from heaven to look after him, but was, instead, a noisily opinionated Long Hair with the domestic skills of an orang-utan. Given her state of impoverishment (also temporary, she had informed him), Gumshoe had bought her a lot of clothes to compensate for the ones she had lost to her unpaid landlord and already they were strewn all over the apartment to add to Gumshoe's normal state of disorder. As for the bathroom, he could hardly find his own toothbrush in the clutter of hair gels, hairclips, combs, brushes, lipstick, phosphorescent make-up, unwashed knickers and discarded bras left there by his disorganized female guest.

  Not that she wasn't trying. It was quite touching, really, the way she would mutter, 'Oh, for Christ's sake!' when Gumshoe feebly complained about the mess and then melodramatically tidied up, picking her things off the floor and chairs and out of

  the sink only to dump them in some other equally messed-up area. Then, as she discarded what she was wearing or made herself up — the purple lipstick and painted face and gelled hair — she would drop things all over the place again, obviously not used to drawers or cupboards. In truth, she drove Gumshoe mad.

  'So what's happening to this other place you're trying to find?' he asked her when she'd been in his place a fortnight, instead of the one night he had planned.

  'Why? You want rid of me?'

  'I didn't say that. I merely—'

  Tm a nuisance now, am I?'

  'I didn't say that, either. I merely—'

  'I made your breakfast the other morning,' she bitterly reminded him.

  'Cornflakes.'

  'What's wrong with that?'

  'Nothing. They were great. But—'

  'You didn't even say thanks.'

  'I made breakfast all the other days,' he reminded her. 'Toast and boiled eggs.'

  'I hate boiled eggs.'

  'You never mentioned that fact before. Now about this apartment you're trying to find . . .'

  'I'm looking! I'm looking! It just isn't easy. I mean, I don't have a dime to my name and they aren't into charity.'

  'I lent you the money for a deposit,' Gumshoe reminded her.

  'You really do want rid of me, don't you?'

  'What happened to the deposit?'

  I mean, it's not that I'm any kind of trouble. All I do is watch TV.'

  'That's true enough,' Gumshoe said.

  And it was true enough. From the moment she slipped out of his bed to the moment she slipped back into it, leaving him to sleep on his lonesome on the settee, she did little other than watch the TV, with the external speaker turned off and earphones on her head, her jaws mangling chewing gum, purple lips blowing bubbles. He desperately tried pretending that she wasn't in the room, right there behind him, her legs long and practically naked except for the hotpants, moving restlessly this way and that, making suggestive rustling sounds, exciting his seemingly constant erection, while he worked in growing despair at the twenty-eight-inch computer screen of his Tower of Babble, either hacking into someone's system on behalf of a rich client or trying to track down some references to the mysterious 'Wilson'.

  So far he hadn't managed to find anything on Wilson, though he had, given the constant distraction of Bonnie's presence in the same room, fucked up more than one professional hacking job in a way that he had not done before. This frustrated him gready. Even more frustrating, however, was the fact that he found her undeniably attractive, despite the ghoulish make-up, and that even as her presence here was preventing him from engaging in cybersex (she would be right there behind him, watching his every move), it was also increasing his sexual desire and making him think helplessly of her as a potential source of real-time relief. Given his former love of cybersex, he was shocked to find himself feeling this way and as a result was even more keen to get rid of her. When it came to the subject of her imminent departure, however, he could not pin her down.

  'Any luck today?' he asked when she had returned from yet another jaunt around the seedier, therefore cheaper, residential areas of Washington DC, supposedly looking for somewhere cheap to rent.

  'No.'

  'Nothing available?' he said, knowing damned well that there was plenty of accommodation available in the only areas she could possibly afford, if she could afford anything at all, which he was beginning to doubt, though she insisted she would be all right once she had been able to put down the deposit he had given her. The situation, she had explained, blinking her big star-painted eyes, was that her friends would help her out on a weekly basis once she had her own place, though they couldn't cough up the three-month deposit demanded in advance. Making good money from his hacking work, Gumshoe had given her that deposit but was convinced that she had, in fact, already spent it on clothes or, just as likely, on drugs. He suspected the latter because of her ability to

  watch the TV all day long as if in a trance, only moving enough to cross and recross her long legs to encourage his distracting erections. His distraction was, of course, even more acute because of the lack of cybersex due to her constant presence on the settee right behind his work desk and his ever-engaged Tower of Babble.

  'I saw a few places,' she confessed, sighing and stretching out on the settee to watch the TV with spaced-out eyes, 'but I wouldn't expect a pig to live in 'em.'

  'Maybe you haven't spread your net wide enough.'

  'Are you suggestin' I'm not takin' this seriously?'

  'I merely—'

  'You think I want to stay here, is that it?'

  'I only meant—'

  'You think I'd rather stay with someone like you, a cyberspace ghoul, when I could be living my own life with friends who know how to live?'

  'I'm not a cyberspace ghoul.'

  'You're not much better, that's for sure. You spend all your waking hours on that goddamned computer and you hack into other folks' systems for dubious reasons. Go out! Get a life!'

  I'm happy with the life I've got,' Gumshoe said, 'and I do go out on occasion. I met you when I was outside, after all.'

  Big occasion! Big deal! The ghoul goes out once or twice a year and thinks he's living a life. Now do you mind? I'm tryin' to watch TV.'

  You watch TV a lot,' Gumshoe reminded her.

  So as not to distract you,' she retorted quickly. 'That's the only reason. I mean, a girl can't make a sound in this dump

  because the maestro's at work, so I watch TV instead — when I'm not out looking for a decent place to stay, which is exhausting, believe me.'

  'Regarding a place to stay . . .'

  'Stop nagging me,' Bonnie said, picking up her headset to cover her ears and concentrate on the TV

  while stretched out, very attractively, on the settee, her long legs sensational as always in the hot pants, agitating Gumshoe's neglected loins. 'I'm doin' the best I can. Now why don't you just go back to work and leave me alone? Lose yourself out in cyberspace.'

  Gumshoe did so, not knowing what else to do, distracting himself from his unusual yearnings for realtime sex with Bonnie by hacking into the computer systems of major companies on behalf of other companies, either to steal something from them or to insert a destructive virus: both kinds of job paid well. Or he pursued his present main obsession — apart from Bonnie — to track down info on the mysterious Wilson.

  For a while it looked like nothing was going to come up, that the Wilson he wanted was a cyberspace ghoul's invention. But eventually, after a whole week of searching, he found him under an obscure posting entitled UFOs — MAN-MADE, put out by a now-defunct flying saucer organization way back in the early 1980s. Scrolling down through the text, Gumshoe, initially bored, found himself gradually straightening up in his chair with growing excitement.

  This was his man all right.

  The term 'UFOs', as used in this particular article, referred to unidentified flying objects in general rather than flying saucers in particular. After yawning his way through an interminable, often subliterate essay on biblical UFOs and other historical sightings — clearly misidentified sightings of comets, meteors, solar flares, noctilucent clouds, plasmoids, corona discharges, ball lightning, temperature inversions, and the planet Venus — he reached the Great Airship Scare of 1896—1897 and became really excited.

  According to the article, that particular scare, the first of the modern UFO flaps, had been caused by a number of 'mystery' airships that were seen flying over the United States between November 1896 and May the following year. Those sightings took place five years before the first aeronautical experiments of Orville and Wilbur Wright; and though there were, by that time, various airship designs on the drawing boards or in the Patent Office, none were known to have been constructed. Nevertheless, hundreds of perfecdy sane United States citizens saw airships flying overhead and reported that they were mostly cigar-shaped, that they frequendy landed, and that the pilots often talked to the witnesses, usually asking for water for their machines.

  The only pilot who ever gave his name was a man who called himself 'Wilson*. He never gave his first name.

  Now really excited, Gumshoe read on . . .

  The first 'Wilson' incident occurred in Beaumont, Texas, on April 19, 1897, when one J.B. Ligon, the local agent for the Magnolia Brewery, and his son Charles noticed lights in a pasture a few hundred yards away and went to investigate. They came upon four men standing beside a large, dark object which neither of the witnesses could see clearly. One of those men asked Ligon for a bucket of water, Ligon let him have it, and then the man introduced himself as Mr Wilson. He told Ligon that he and his friends were travelling in a flying machine, that they had taken a trip out to the Gulf — presumably the Gulf of Galveston, though no name was given — and that they were returning to the quiet Iowa town where the airship and four others like it had been constructed. When asked, Wilson explained that electricity powered the propellers and wings of his airship. Then he and his crew got back into the airship and Ligon watched it ascending.

  The next day, 20 April, Sheriff H.W. Baylor of Uvalde, also in Texas, went to investigate a strange light and voices in back of his house. He encountered an airship and three men —

  and one of the men introduced himself as Wilson, from Goshen, New York. Wilson then enquired about one C.C. Akers, former sheriff of Zavalia County, saying he had met him in Fort Worth in 1877 and now wanted to see him again. Sheriff Baylor, surprised, replied that Captain Akers was now at Eagle Pass, and Wilson, apparently disappointed, asked to be remembered to him the next time Sheriff Baylor visited him. Baylor reported that the men from the airship wanted water and that Wilson requested that their visit be kept secret from the townspeople. Then he and the other men climbed back into the airship and 'Its great wings and fans were set in motion and it sped away northward in the direction of San Angelo'. The county clerk also saw the airship as it left the area.