Two days later, in Josserand, Texas, a whirring sound awoke farmer Frank Nichols, who looked out from his window and saw brilliant lights streaming from what he described as 'a ponderous vessel of strange proportions' floating over his cornfield. Nichols went outside to investigate, but before he reached the large vessel, two men walked up to him and asked if they could have water from his well.

  Nichols agreed to this request — as farmers in those days mostly did — and the men then invited him to visit their airship, where he noticed that there were six or seven crew members. One of those men told him that the ship's motive power was highly condensed electricity and that it was one of five that

  had been constructed in a small town in Iowa with the backing of a large stock company in New York.

  The next day, on April 23, witnesses described by the Houston Post as 'two responsible men' reported that an airship had descended where they lived in Kountze, Texas, and that two of the occupants had given their names as Jackson and Wilson. Four days after that incident, on 27 April, the Galveston Daily News printed a letter from the aforementioned C.C. Akers, in which Akers claimed that he had indeed known

  a man in Forth Worth, Texas, named Wilson; that Wilson was from New York; that he was in his middle twenties; and that he was of 'a mechanical turn of mind' and was then working on 'aerial navigation and something that would astonish the world'.

  Finally, early in the evening of 30 April, in Deadwood, Texas, a farmer named H.C. Lagrone heard his horses bucking as if in stampede. Going outside, he saw a bright white light circling around the fields nearby and illuminating the entire area before descending and landing in one of the fields. Walking to the landing spot, Lagrone found a crew of five men, three of whom engaged him in conversation while the others collected water in rubber bags. The men informed Lagrone that their airship was one of five that had been flying around the country recently; that theirs was in fact the same one that had landed in Beaumont a few days before; that some of the airships had been constructed in a backcountry town in Illinois and that they were reluctant to say anything else because they hadn't yet taken out any patents.

  By May that same year, the wave of sightings ended . . . And the mysterious Mr Wilson wasn't heard from again.

  Completing his reading of the unsigned article, Gumshoe was so excited that he temporarily forgot the presence of Bonnie, still stretched out on the settee behind him. Now with the other lead he had needed

  — the UFO phenomenon of the so-called Postwar Years, meaning the years after World War Two — he started surfing the Net to find anything else relating to man-made flying saucers. As he did so, he found Wilson's name popping up repeatedly, letting him gradually piece together a life that seemed, even with hindsight, to have been truly incredible.

  The 'Wilson' who featured so strongly in the Great Airship Scare of 1896-1897 had repeatedly stated that he had constructed his airships — either five or six — in Iowa and Illinois. 1 aking those locations as leads, Gumshoe ran a search for a

  Wilson who had either come from or worked in one of those two areas. It did not take him long to find a John Wilson, born 6 July 1870 in Montezuma, Iowa.

  Montezuma, Gumshoe noted, was located near the border with Illinois, which the 'Wilson' of the Great Airship Scare had also given as a location for at least one of his airship-construction plants.

  A further trawl through the Net produced extracts from an obscure out-of-print non-fiction book, Project UFO: The Case for Man-Made Flying Saucers (1995), written by a British author, W.A.

  Harbinson, covering the whole history of man-made flying saucer projects, and giving Wilson's history in more detail. Most of that history was included in the Net posting and when Gumshoe read it, the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. He read it all three times, trying to take it in: Wilson's career at MIT, his responsibility for the Great Airship Scare of 1896—1897, his work on liquid-fuelled rockets with Robert H. Goddard, his subsequent covert career with the Nazis, his designing and building of the first flying saucers and, finally, his flight to, and death in, Neuschwa-benland, Antarctica. It was fucking mindblowing.

  'The son of a bitch!' Gumshoe muttered without thinking as he studied his glowing screen.

  'What's that?' Bonnie Packard called out from her supine position on the settee behind him. 'Did you say something, shithead?'

  Startled to be reminded of the presence of the short-haired Long Hair behind him, reminded in turn by this fact that he no longer had any privacy, he called over his shoulder, 'No!' and then went back to his reading, only to find that he had reached the end of the book extracts about the mysterious Wilson.

  'Shit!' he exclaimed.

  'What's that?' Bonnie Packard called out, her vacant gaze still fixed on the silent TV screen, getting the sound through her headset. 'Did you speak again, dumbo?'

  'Not a word,' Gumshoe lied.

  He spent the next half an hour surfing the Net for anything else he could find on Wilson, but came up with nothing until, on an impulse, he keyed in FICTION/WILSON, and found himself trawling through every character named Wilson in English-language literature.

  Voila! He hit the jackpot.

  Way back in 1980 a British author named W.A. Harbinson — the very same hack who had penned the factual tome on man-made flying saucers — had published a 600-odd page novel, Genesis, that was, he insisted in a lengthy Author's Note, fact disguised as fiction. The novel's theme was that the flying saucers sighted since the end of the Second World War were actually man-made craft and that the mastermind behind them was the same mysterious 'Wilson' who had first come to light during the Great Airship Scare of 1896-1897.

  Published as an original paperback, Genesis became a cult success on both sides of the Atlantic and remained in print for almost two decades. In 1995, however, the author published another fact-based novel, Inception, which was a 'prequel' to Genesis, covering Wilson's life in greater detail, including his work for the Nazis, and suggesting that at the end of the war he had fled with other Nazi scientists to a secret base in Neusch-wabenland (Queen Maud Land), Antarctica. There he had completed the construction of his first successful flying saucers and had used them as weapons in his battle to gradually, scientifically, take over the world.

  Inception was followed by another so-called 'prequel', Phoenix, that brought Wilson's story up to the beginning of the original Genesis. The latter then became Book Three in the novel-sequence known as the 'Projekt Saucer' series. A fourth novel, Millennium, was published in 1996, completing an epic work, totalling about 2,300 fact-filled pages, based on Wilson's extraordinary life and including ... his death.

  For indeed, according to Harbinson, Wilson had died in his Antarctica base just before it was captured by US military forces and turned into a legitimate research centre called Freedom Bay. There, according to Harbinson, Wilson's tale had ended.

  Yet, according to what Gumshoe was now finding on the Net, Harbinson himself was something of a mystery ... as was the fate of his epic series based on Wilson's life.

  Though the series was essentially an epic American story, only two of the books had been published in that country — inexplicably, the first and the third. The fact that the second and fourth books had not been published in the US, though they had been published in Great Britain, had led to suppositions on the Net that those particular volumes had been suppressed. As for the author, though he had written 2,300-odd pages of fiction based on the known facts of Wilson and his flying saucers, as well as a voluminously researched non-fiction book on the subject, he had not been known personally to anyone in the UFO-research community and had never been seen at any UFO convention, any science fiction convention or, indeed, any kind of authors' convention. His final novels — not about Wilson or man-made flying saucers, though on marginally related subjects — had been released in 1999. Then he had

  dropped out of sight almost as completely as Wilson had done many years before.

  Nevertheless, given the odd fate of his epic series, particularly in America, where two of the volumes had possibly been suppressed, and given that no one in the UFO community of the time had ever met the author of that voluminous flying saucer research, by the time his epic series about Wilson had gone out of print completely, in #4 of the New Age, when the arrival of the cyborgs had perforce increased computer interaction and devastated conventional book publishing, there was widespread speculation on the Net that Harbinson might have been a member of the National Security Council (NSC), which was then communicating with the 'aliens'; that he might have been abducted and brainwashed by the

  'aliens' into writing his books to spread disinformation about man-made flying saucers to detract from the real, alien saucers; and, finally, that he might have actually been Wilson and that the latter had been using the novels for a different kind of disinformation. So the Net of the late 1980s had speculated.

  Gumshoe wondered if there was any truth to it. Certainly the author, clever bastard, whether Harbinson or Wilson, had constantly, blatantly, stolen from himself, moving text, mainly factual, from one book to the other, obviously to ensure that even if one volume in the series went out of print, the next would still carry the factual, as distinct from the fictional, material. He had therefore written the series with clear, ruthless intent before dropping out of sight.

  Gumshoe was fascinated. Having lost the trail of Wilson, he now tried to find Harbinson in the hope of discovering just how much of what he had written about Wilson (assuming author and character were not one and the same) was true and how much was false. Alas, after many more hours of surfing the Net, he learned only that Harbinson had travelled a lot and otherwise had led a carefully anonymous life. Net press cuttings and reproductions of the blurbs of various dustjackets showed that while born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Harbinson had lived at various times in Australia, the United States, Spain, London, Cornwall, the Republic of Ireland and Paris, France. Millennium, the final book in his epic

  'fictional' series, had been completed in Paris, but some time after that he had moved back to West Cork, Ireland. Finally, in the year 2001, or #1, the year the cyborgs took over, he had disappeared for good.

  Had the cyborgs taken him? Gumshoe wondered, leaning back in his chair and staring in a daze at his computer. Or had he disappeared for his own good reasons when the cyborgs took over?

  What the fuck . . . ?' Gumshoe muttered.

  What's that?' Bonnie Packard said from behind him, where she was still stretched out on the settee, mesmerized by some mindless quiz show on the TV. 'Did you say something to me?'

  'No,' Gumshoe said.

  'You said something,' Bonnie insisted.

  'Just talking to myself,' Gumshoe said.

  'That's a real bad sign, buddy.'

  Gumshoe distracted himself from her increasingly troublesome presence (troublesome in the sense that he was starting to have sexual fantasies about her and was troubled by this fact) by punching some more keys, interacting with his mouse, and commencing another search across the Net, this one designed to find out if there was any recorded date for Harbinson's death. He had, after all, been born on 09 09 41 and would therefore be nearly eighty years old this year.

  Even after a search that took him two hours, Gumshoe came up with zilch.

  So clearly, if Harbinson wasn't Wilson, he was possibly still alive somewhere.

  Where?

  Determined to track down the British self-plagiarizing hack — if he was still alive — Gumshoe used his considerable skills and a lot of expensive on-line time to hack into the computer system of the royalties department of his last recorded publisher, located in London, England. Though worldwide book publishing had been devastated by the cyborgs' takeover and a subsequent leap in home entertainment that included downloaded fiction and interactive comic books on CD-ROMS, which in turn had dramatically reduced sales of printed volumes, a few of the original publishers had managed to survive in a rocky fashion and clearly Harbinson's publisher was one of them. Luckily for Gumshoe, given the publishing company's pitiful output these days and its consequent dire financial straits, it had an antiquated computer system that he was able to penetrate with relative ease. It had obviously been a long time since the publisher had been able to afford expensive security-program updates. Or had needed them.

  Bringing the list of authors up onto his screen, he scrolled

  down to 'Harbinson, W.A.' and was pleased to note that the old goat was still being mailed royalty statements — though most of them, he also noted, were for minus payments, which confirmed that his books were out of print. He was, however, still receiving the statements and the last one, only four months old, had been mailed to him at an address in . . . Holy shit!. . . Right here in Washington DC.

  Now so excited that his heart was racing slightly, Gumshoe scribbled down the address, then swivelled around in his chair to look at Bonnie Packard, where she was still lying supine on the settee, staring with stoned eyes at the same mindless TV quiz show, listening through the headphones. Her long legs were raised, one crossed over the other, and in hot pants they looked pretty sexy. Taking a deep breath to control his rising excitement, which now included a rising cock, Gumshoe slipped out of his chair, walked up to the settee, raised the earpiece off Bonnie's right ear and said, 'Hey! You wanna go out?'

  The stoned dullness instantly left her painted eyes as she rolled them up to take him in.

  'You mean . . . outsi&t?

  Yeah, I mean outside.'

  'Hot dog, man, let's go!'

  Galvanized back into life, she jumped to her feet and followed Gumshoe out of the apartment.

  Gumshoe led her down to the basement, removed his motorcycle from its cage and wheeled it out into the street. Then, when Bonnie was sitting behind him, he burned recklessly out of Georgetown, heading for Mount Vernon.

  The sunlight was dazzling.

  Chapter Twelve

  You know who I am, but you cannot accept that it is me, because I died a good forty years ago when you took over my world of snow and ice. But time marches on, science opens new doorways, and the work I began in the Old Age has led to my rebirth. This was the reward for my foresight and a devotion to science, the purpose of which was to forge a new future for mankind. Your kind think of me as evil when in fact I am a redeemer, returned to correct the ills of mankind, painful though the process may be. As a child in my first incarnation I already knew that I was destined to do this.

  I succeeded.

  I am.

  Naturally I was always a man out of my time, far ahead of my own time. And now, in my second incarnation, nothing has changed. Indeed, the world I inhabit, the world begun by the other me, is so far more advanced than your own and has a

  clearly defined purpose. It is a world devoted to science, to the pursuit of knowledge above all else, and everyone in it has their place, chosen for them at birth. From their first breath to their last, from the light of birth to death's darkness, they are taught to think only of their work and are shaped by that work. They are brought up in a closed system, cut off from the outer world, on the seabed, in underground complexes, in spaces so confined that you would not think it possible, though it certainly is, and there they live a life that has meaning and leaves no room for doubt.

  With regard to our state of advancement, our young receive their education through interactive media systems and computer technology with heightened

  sensory stimulation, including 3-D sound and wraparound vision. Though our body of knowledge keeps expanding, we have no problems with the storage of printed books as our libraries store everything in computers with memory crystals that can compress whole encyclopedias into the space of a grain of sand. Instead of sprawling campuses, we have small student meeting rooms fitted with videoconferencing terminals, e-mail systems and database access. Chemical, biological and physics experiments are simulated electronically, doing away with the need for space-consuming laboratories. Erotic needs also are met electronically, with teledildonics simulating sex with sights, sounds and tactile input of the real thing: thus potentially messy human interaction is kept to a minimum. Our advances in medicine and surgery, gained through my so-called 'obscene' experiments on human beings in the Old Age, have enabled our surgeons to operate on patients without actually touching them, without the need for making large, bloody abdominal incisions, since the body's interior can now be viewed holographically and telepresence allows operations to be performed by remote control only after the exact cause of the trouble has been located.

  All of this, and more, takes place in our large flying saucers, in our domes on the seabed, and in our hidden bases in isolated areas all over the world.

  The Earth is our oyster. With our saucers, we can go anywhere, from the bottom of the oceans to the peak of the highest mountain, from dense forest to desert plain, and pick up anything we require for our own maintenance. From ordinary soil and sea water we extract aluminium, magnesium, titanium and cobalt; from seabed nodules we process pure gold; from acid-rain-producing high-sulphur coal we produce pure carbon cubes. With biofabrication techniques, in which the fundamental DNA codes in living tissue are altered, we can produce any kind of material we require from standard protein building blocks. Once these materials were used for the building of more saucers, but our most recent saucers are made of etherium which is as light as a feather yet extraordinarily strong and capable of withstanding up to 4000 degrees Fahrenheit — a temperature that melts all other known materials. Thus, we are virtually invincible and we now rule your world.