Another bass humming sound coming from under the floor of

  the control room indicated to Michael that the four hydraulic legs were emerging from the base of the saucer. When the saucer touched down, it bounced lightly a few times, then became perfectly still as the wing-plates ceased their rotation. Then the wind created by the craft's electromagnetic gravity-damping system faded away, letting the swirling soil and wildly fluttering uprooted plants fall back to the ground. A brief silence reigned.

  'Home and dry,' Jessup said at last, breaking the silence. 'You can unstrap yourself now.'

  Michael undipped his strap as the others did the same. Then all three of them stood up. Clinton removed Michael's rucksack from the cupboard it had been placed in and handed it to him, saying,

  'Have a good hike down to Woodstock, kid, and watch out for the walking dead.'

  'You bet,' Michael replied, putting his arms through the straps and hoisting the rucksack onto his back.

  Hearing another bass humming sound, by now a familiar noise, he knew that the panel at the end of the corridor was falling down to form a ramp to the ground outside.

  Captain Jessup placed his hand on Michael's shoulder and said, smiling, 'Let's go. We can't hang around here.'

  He led Michael out of the control room and back along the curving corridor until they reached the open door formed by the falling-away of the panel that now sloped down to the ground as a short ramp.

  Feeling very strange, like someone setting foot on an alien planet for the first time — feeling this way because he had never been in the World before — Michael looked out.

  He saw what he had never once seen on the snow-covered plains of Antarctica: rolling hills covered in trees, verdant pastures and, in the distance, a glittering, winding river and, beyond it, the red-tiled rooftops of a small town. The sky seemed much lower than he was used to and the clouds were more grey than white; nevertheless, it looked beautiful.

  Michael turned back to Jessup and held his hand out.

  'Thanks, Cap'n,' he said.

  'My pleasure,' Jessup said. 'Now you be extremely careful out there. Good luck and God bless.'

  'Thanks,' Michael said

  He stepped down the ramp into the warmer air of the World. He had never been here before and the air smelt different. At the bottom of the ramp, he looked back up at the saucer, waved to Jessup, then walked a good distance away, surprised at how hard the ground felt under his feet with no snow to soften the impact. Once he had gone what he felt was a safe distance, on the edge of a densely forested area, he turned back to watch the flying saucer ascending.

  The panel that had acted as a ramp had already been withdrawn, all the shutters had been closed, the metallic covering remained over the transparent dome, and the saucer looked, all in all, like a seamless, whitish-grey eggshell, though of imposing dimensions. It emitted a bass humming sound, an infrasound that Michael could feel even where he stood, and then the multicoloured lights around its rim began to flash on and off, one after the other, to form an increasingly blurred kaleidoscope. The circular wing-plates began rotating, first slowly, then much faster, again creating violent currents of air that made the grass and plants flutter wildly, noisily sucking up loose soil and gravel and causing it to spin in the air.

  Seconds later it was lifting slowly off the ground to hover mere inches above it. It hovered there for a brief moment, bobbing like a cork in mildly turbulent water. Then, abruptly, faster than the eye could see, it shot up vertically and appeared to blink out, like a light bulb being switched off.

  When the swirling gravel and foliage had setded down again, Michael turned away from the clearing and headed into the forest.

  Chapter Sixteen

  'Life is dreadful, dreadful, dreadful,' the formerly well-known British hack W.A. Harbinson declaimed melodramatically in the nursing home in Woodlawn Plantation as the methamphetamine sang in his varicose and other coarsened veins while Gumshoe and Bonnie Packard listened intently. 'Life is so dreadful that only old age, or, perhaps, your average publisher, can reveal its true awfulness. "The horror, the horror", as Kurtz cried out in that excellent work by someone other than my good self . . .

  Mmmm, nice . . . What was in that excellent little capsule?'

  'Never mind,' Gumshoe said. 'Just lie back and enjoy it. So what made your life so damned dreadful?'

  'Publishers,' the old goat said. 'Those who make us and break us. They have us on the rack night and day and few of us survive. Of course, /survived, not being precious like some, but the price — well, what can one say? — here I lie in my penury. The writer's life is precarious.'

  «■

  'You don't seem to be doing too bad,' Bonnie said, never quick with the sympathy. 'I mean, bein' in this fancy joint an' all. All those broads who looked after you. I'd say that's a pretty sweet way to sneak into your cranky old age. No offence meant, pal.'

  'And none taken, my dear.' Revitalized, at least temporarily, before the sweats started in, as surely they would, the licentious

  old dog let his rheumy, lustful gaze roam over Bonnie again, taking in every curve and hollow. Then he smiled, showing that he still had good teeth. 'Point taken, my angel. Every nightmare has its bright side.

  It could have been worse, of course — the British National Health Service and so forth — but here I am, lying in this comfy bed, with my hand on a youthful thigh.'

  'Take it off,' Bonnie said. She didn't wait for him to do so, but removed the hand herself, then crossed her long, shapely, stocking-clad legs to give the old lecher something to latch onto and keep his tongue

  wagging. 'So what else gave you heartache?'

  'Disappointment,' he lied. 'You don't get here without being there. You two are too young to know it —

  nothing wrong with that, I'm sure! — but life is a process of disillusionment and you can't get away from it. I so wanted to write, you see, to be better than I was. Yet when I succeeded, when I had Andy Warhol's fifteen minutes of fame, I realized, as the good Dorothy Parker said, that there's no there when you get there. So I went for the money. What else is there when you're nowhere? And so I wrote all those books about flying saucers and reaped the whirlwind.'

  You mean money?' Gumshoe asked.

  'That and heartache,' the old guy said. 'All the treacheries of success. Vindictiveness from the critics, petty jealousy from fellow scribes, envy from former friends, begging letters from total strangers, nasty claims from the Inland Revenue, then, to cap it all, being cheated out of most of my income by publishers and agents and movie producers and every woman who ever warmed my bed. The price of fame, please believe me, is extortionate, so don't even try for it.'

  I won't,' Bonnie promised.

  You wrote those books just for money?' Gumshoe asked, not believing a word of it.

  Oh, yes, I did. I sold my soul for what I thought would be a fortune and it turned out to be no more than a pittance. I will never forgive myself

  'He's a moralist,' Bonnie said.

  Secretly wishing that Bonnie would shut up for at least a few seconds, but not about to risk her wrath, Gumshoe threw her a pained grin, then returned his attention to the bright-eyed old faker on the bed.

  Mr Harbinson, it seemed to Gumshoe, was playing a role, that old Eccentric Writer number, in order to avoid answering questions that he did not wish to answer. He had slipped up, however, by mentioning visits from the Men in Black. Although he had then wriggled out of that subject, Gumshoe fully intended to return to it, slowly but surely. Mr Harbinson had written hundreds of thousands of words about man-made flying saucers, about the mysterious John Wilson, and just about everything he had written had turned out to be true. More remarkably, he had somehow managed to write all those words and gather in all those facts without any assistance from anyone in, or related to, the UFO organizations of his time. So where had his information come from? So far, the old rogue wouldn't say, but Gumshoe was now ready to push him as hard as necessary.

  'Okay,' he said, 'so you wrote the books for money—'

  'May God forgive me!' the old man interjected, as hammily as any actor projecting to the balcony.

  '—but how did the ideas actually come to you? I mean, what made you think of that particular subject, which was way, way out of your normal field?'

  'Nothing mysterious there, dear boy. About 1980, one of my readers and regular correspondents, a German engineer living in Frankfurt, had attended a scientific exhibition at the Hanover Messe Hall and picked up what at first sight appeared to be an orthodox newsletter devoted to the futuristic sciences. That newsletter contained two seemingly unrelated articles: one on the scientific future of Antarctica, the other about Germany's Second World War flying saucer construction programme. The latter article was concerned mainly with a Luftwaffe officer, Flugkapitdn Rudolph Schriever, stating that this officer had

  designed, in the spring of 1941, the prototype for a so-called "flying top" and that the device had been tested in June 1942. The article went on to say that this same Flugkapitdn Schriever had gone on to construct, in August 1942, a large version of his original flying disc — yes, it was now called a disc —

  but that in the summer of 1944, in the East Hall of the BMW plant near Prague, he had updated the original model, replacing its original gas turbine engines with some form of jet propulsion. As I recall, that flying saucer was described as a large ring-plate with a wing-disc that rotated around a fixed, cupola-shaped cockpit. The wing disc had adjustable jets inserted all around it and could itself be adjusted to various angles to give it its manoeuvring capabilities. It had a diameter of about forty-two metres and a height from base to canopy of thirty-two metres. When tested, it reached a flight speed of two thousand miles per hour.'

  'That's a hell of a good memory you've got there,' Bonnie said tardy, 'for such an old guy.'

  'Thank you, my pet. In fact, I've always had a very good memory for facts and figures. The writer's gift, don't you know. Anyway, the article went on to suggest that Schriever's flying saucer, or a more advanced version of it, ended up in a secret Nazi base in Antarctica, having been shipped there in pieces, probably in submarines, throughout the war years. Indeed, the article also stated that Operation Highjump, the massive US Antarctic expedition led by Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd in January 1947, had actually been a military operation disguised as a scientific expedition and designed to root the Nazis out of their hidden lair in Neuschwabenland. That operation failed, according to the article, because Byrd's assault force was repulsed by the superior capabilities of the German flying saucers.

  The United States then withdrew from Antarctica for almost a decade.'

  And the other article?' Gumshoe reminded him. "This was clearly a newsletter with National Socialist leanings and the second article was, therefore, a rather crude propaganda statement masquerading as a scientific review of Antarctic potential. Dusting off the already well-known topographical facts, what one was left with was an insistence that the Democratic Republic of Germany should claim back their rights to that part of the Antarctic that the Nazis stole from the Norwegians and arrogantly renamed Neuschwabenland. The two articles combined, then, were suggesting that a Nazi scientific community was still hiding out in an underground base in Neuschwabenland, Antarctica, that it was responsible for the flying saucers then being seen all over the world, and that it should be allowed to remain there in what should be German territory.'

  'So this friend in Germany, this engineer,' Gumshoe said, 'sent you those articles.'

  'The complete newsletter containing them/ Harbinson said. 'Clearly, or so I thought then, he felt that he'd found the answer to the UFO problem and he wanted me to write a factual book about it. I checked the material out and thought that it would make good commercial fiction. Voild! My career turned in a completely different direction and brought me, if not lasting success, my fifteen minutes of fame.'

  'Who was this correspondent?' Gumshoe asked.

  The old man shrugged and licked his drying lips. 'I forget his name,' he said. 'Just one of my many readers who liked to correspond with me. I never met him personally.'

  'Did he keep in touch?'

  'No. Surprisingly, he didn't. More surprisingly, he stopped communicating shortly after I published the first book in the series. I haven't heard a word from him from that day to this.

  Gumshoe was growing excited, though he tried not to show it. He had just remembered that more than one of his trawls through the Net had produced unsubstantiated reports of a secret flying-saucer base in Antarctica, though one run by a bunch of American scientists. According to word on the grapevine (the historical facts being scanty and now erased from

  computer records by the cyborgs), that base had once belonged to another, unnamed nation, but had been captured by the US shortly after the close of the Second World War, then isolated from the

  international community when the cyborgs took over the whole world. The location most often given on the Net for that real, or imagined, flying-saucer base was Queen Maud Land. Now this deceptively eccentric old goat, W.A. Harbinson, was talking about a supposed Nazi base in Neuschwabenland, which was, in reality, Queen Maud Land. More interestingly, Harbinson had received his original information from someone who had then disappeared from the scene as soon as that information was published in book form. Which suggested that the man who had encouraged him to write the books had had his own reasons . . . This was something to think about . . .

  'So when you researched the subject—'

  'From books!' the old hack interjected abruptly, his eyes widening with what seemed to be panic. 'All from previously published books!'

  'Right,' Gumshoe said to the shameless literary thief, 'from other books ... So when you completed your ten years or so of research, what was your conclusion?'

  'About what?'

  'The reality, or the non-reality, of man-made flying saucers and the German connection.'

  My conclusion was that the Germans had indeed been involved with fairly primitive flying-saucer construction projects, that the Americans had later continued that research in the United States, that the American flying saucers did not fly very well, and that the secret test flights of those saucers - notably the Flying Flapjack, the Avro Car and, perhaps, some early discshaped moon-landing prototypes — had led to the outburst of so-called UFO sightings of the 1950s and 1960s.'

  Yet you went on to write hundreds of thousands of words suggesting the very opposite: that the Nazis did have a secret flying-saucer base in Antarctica, that it was run by a brilliant, renegade American scientist called John Wilson, and that when Wilson died, in the early 1980s, the US

  took over his base and continued to work on even more advanced flying saucers. Why did you do that?'

  The old man sighed, shrugged again, licked his dry lips, then wiped some beads of sweat from his forehead, coming down from his high. 'I told you/ he said. 'Money. It just seemed like a good idea at the time and it certainly worked for me.' ' 'That's all?'

  'That's all . . . God, I don't feel good any more. I have a blinding headache and the effects of that excellent capsule are wearing off already. Would you happen to have another one?'

  'They're bad for your heart,' Bonnie said.

  'I don't have a heart, honey.' Harbinson gave Bonnie a brief, lascivious smile, but stopped smiling when he turned back to Gumshoe. 'Please, dear boy, just one more . . .'

  'Well, now,' Gumshoe responded slowly, deliberately, 'I'm not so sure about that. . .' He leaned back in his chair as if deep in thought, as if deciding whether or not he should give the old fart a second capsule. Of course, he fully intended doing just that — he wanted Harbinson to talk — but first he wanted him to sweat a little and yearn even more for that little capsule. Considering this, Gumshoe felt like a sadist, but he really had no choice in the matter. He was a guy who liked answers. 'Well, okay,' he said, leaning forward again and producing another capsule of methamphetamine from his pocket. 'I guess I can let you have one more, though you've got to promise to keep talking to me.'

  'I will!' the old man exclaimed, his rheumy eyes brightening greedily at the sight of the capsule held up before his nose like a dangling carrot. 'I'll talk your head off, dear boy.'

  'Good,' Gumshoe said. As he gave Harbinson the capsule, he knew that this one, on top of the other, would loosen his tongue more than he realized and possibly get him to reveal what he had so far

  concealed. So he gave the old guy his capsule and then watched him swallow it. When he had done so and seemed more relaxed, Gumshoe leaned forward again.

  'How do you feel?' he asked.

  'Much better,' Harbinson said. 'An awful lot better, in fact. I feel as bright as the sun.'

  'Thinking more clearly, are you?'

  'Oh, yes! Age normally dims the mind, destroying memory, but now my mind is an ocean.'

  'Got your memory back, right?'

  'Most assuredly so, young man. Old friends and enemies are parading through my brain as if they were in this very room. Those capsules are wonderful'

  'What was the name of the German who first sent you that information about Nazi flying saucers?'

  'Kruger,' the old man said without hesitation. 'Hans Kruger — a regular correspondent . . . until I published those books, of course.'

  'Ah, yes,' Gumshoe said, 'the books! Let's talk about the books. Where did you get all your background information? Do you remember that now?'

  'Yes/ Harbinson said.

  So where did the information come from?'

  'From my dreams,' the old man said.

  'What?'

  'It all came from my dreams,' Harbinson repeated, dreamily indeed, closing his eyes and smiling a little. 'I would go to sleep and dream about a flying saucer descending to pick me up and • . . and . . .'