He stopped smiling and tossed on the bed, then moaned softly and held his head in his blue-veined hands. 'They were dreams,' he said. 'Only dreams ... I always thought they were only dreams . . . Until later, when . . .'

  'What were the dreams about?' Gumshoe prodded him when he moaned again and stopped talking.

  The Men in Black/ the old man said, regaining control f himself. 'Flying saucers and Men in Black. The flying saucers

  would descend and pick me up and take me away . . . Sometimes over my car when I was driving at night . . . Sometimes over the house when I was sleeping in bed . . . The flying saucers would descend, over my car, over the house, and these creatures would emerge . . . alien creatures . . . some as small as children, though with very large heads; sometimes cyborg creatures with no noses or lips . . . and they'd either pick me up and take me away in their saucer or simply surround my bed and communicate with me there.'

  'Communicate?' Gumshoe prodded him. 'You mean talk?'

  'They talked to me, yes . . . No, they didn't really talk. I thought I could hear them speaking, but they didn't have lips, yet they somehow put those voices into my head and I couldn't get rid of them. In my house, around my bed, they talked to me for hours . . . communicated for hours, filling my head with all those facts . . . but when they abducted me, taking me up in their saucer, it was all very different . . .

  They did things to me . . . Sometimes painful things . . . They injected me, put things into my skull,

  sometimes made me wear earphones and fed me the information that way . . . They did all of this in my dreams — and I had dreams for ten years.'

  'The dreams stopped eventually?'

  'Yes, they stopped.'

  'When?'

  'When the publishers stopped commissioning my books; when my career went downhill . . . When everything seemed to go wrong.'

  'What way? How did things go wrong?'

  'My books were selling so well, but then things just went haywire. I received visits from Men in Black

  — government officials, they said — and they told me that I was putting things in my books that were not permitted. They told me to stop writing them . . . If I didn't, I'd be in trouble. I didn't — I wrote the third and the fourth, but then more things happened . . .'

  'Such as?' Gumshoe prompted him.

  'The whole four-books series was published in England, but only two volumes were published in America. The Americans had contracted for all four books, so they were obliged to start publishing, but inexplicably they dropped volumes two and four, which made one and three incomprehensible to the reader, thus vastly reducing their sales . . . Naturally, I demanded an explanation from the publisher, but no one there was willing to talk. They refused to communicate on any level, either to me or to my agent, then they quietly dropped the whole series and pulped what was left of books one and four . . .

  Those books have never been published since.'

  'In America,' Gumshoe corrected him. 'They were published in England.'

  'Yes,' the old man said. 'All four books were published in England but, I repeat, only the first and the third were published in America before being pulped.'

  'What was in volumes two and four?'

  'American-related material,' Harbinson said. 'It was practically all American. The complete story of Kruger's work for the Nazis; his hidden base in Queen Maud Land, Antarctica; Rear Admiral Byrd's failed attempts to get him out of there; his postwar dealings with the Americans, covertly trading with them throughout the years of the Cold War; his contribution to NASA and other US military projects; his death in Antarctica and the secret takeover of his base by the US in the early 1980s. Volume four completed the story and I think that explains it. They didn't want that distinctly American material published in the United States and so those volumes were dropped, then the rest of the series was killed off. That's when my troubles began.'

  'Wait a minute,' Gumshoe said, now so excited he could hardly breathe, since clearly the original encouragement of Harbinson to write those books had been intended to leak at least a certain amount of the truth about the source of the man-made flying saucers. 'Who the hell was Kruger?'

  Kruger was Wilson. That was the name he used in Germany:

  the name on the German passport that he obtained from the Nazis.'

  'So Wilson really existed?'

  'Yes, God help us, he did.'

  Gumshoe glanced at Bonnie who, though giving a laconic shrug, was clearly intrigued. Gumshoe turned back to Harbinson.

  'So what happened when the books stopped being published? Did the dreams stop as well?'

  'Not dreams ... I thought they were dreams . . . But, no, they weren't dreams ... I kept thinking they were dreams for years after, but then I found out they weren't'

  'How?'

  'Hypnosis . . . When my flying saucer books were dropped, I turned to other subjects, but every time I tried to sell one of those books, they were rejected for ambiguous reasons. Soon, editors and other former publishing friends were refusing to answer my calls. Incoming calls did not get through. I bought one fax machine after another, but none of them worked ... I was convinced that my phone was tapped . . . My house was burgled and my papers stolen . . . All those years of work, all those facts and figures about Wilson and his flying saucers, disappeared overnight . . . Eventually, it all collapsed . . .

  my career and my marriage ... I kept having the dreams . . . the flying saucers and Men in Black . . .

  Then the dreams stopped at last, but instead I started having blinding headaches and thought I was going mad . . .'

  'But you didn't go mad.'

  'No. I went for a physical, but they found nothing wrong with me ... I then went to a psychiatrist and he put me on to a hypnotist. . . That's when I learnt that the "dreams" were real'

  Gumshoe glanced at Bonnie and noted that she was leaning closer to the bed, studying Harbinson intently. She didn't look laconic any more and her big eyes were bright. The old man had slipped down under the blankets and his eyes remained closed. He did not seem too happy.

  'Go on,' Gumshoe said.

  'Under hypnosis,' the old man said, 'I was taken back to those early days, to the time of my first dreams, and relived them exacdy as I had dreamed them — or as I thought I had dreamed them. I also relived for the hypnotist the visits I'd had from the Men in Black. According to the hypnotist, these were genuine experiences that could not have been falsified in the trance state . . .'

  'And?' Gumshoe prompted him when he tapered off into a soft groaning followed by silence.

  'He later played back the tapes of what I'd said in the trace state and they revealed that the Men in Black, who always came to my house at night and entered my bedroom to surround me in my bed, were normal human beings in normal black suits who insisted that they were government secret agents.

  The tapes also revealed that during their final visit to me — after which, of course, what I had thought were only dreams had ended — they warned me that if I ever talked about my experiences with them, they would come for me and take me away for good. I knew for sure that they meant it.'

  'Anything else?'

  'Yes. They said that they might one day want me to write another, final book for them, but that when and if they did, they would pick me up and take me away to work on it in complete seclusion and secrecy. Until then, they said, they'd leave me alone — as long as I kept my mouth shut . . . But dear God, now I'm talking.'

  'They'll never know,' Gumshoe said.

  The old man's eyes opened to look thoughtfully, perhaps cynically at Gumshoe, though also with fear in them. 'They know everything,' he said with conviction. 'I don't know how, but they do. Maybe because they put something in my head that enables them to read my every thought or, at least, know where I am. Either way, when they used to pay their visits to me, they seemed to know everything.'

  Gumshoe glanced at Bonnie and saw the nervousness in her eyes. Like him, she was thinking of the

  unusual powers of the cyborgs and relating them to the Men in Black. All things were now possible.

  Turning back to the old man, who seemed to have told the truth for once, he said, 'They won't know a thing about this visit. You can take that as read.'

  'I hope so,' Harbinson said, no longer casting a lascivious eye upon Bonnie, no longer smiling, simply looking exhausted as the effects of the methamphetamine wore off. He also now looked truly old. 'I live in dread of their coming.'

  'They won't come,' Gumshoe said. He pushed his chair back and stood up, indicating that Bonnie should do the same, which she did. 'Thanks,' he said to the old man. 'You've sure given us a lot of useful information and we're both grateful for it.'

  'My mistake. I'll regret it.'

  'No, you won't,' Gumshoe said.

  He shook Harbinson's hand and then led Bonnie out of the room and back down the stairs. Locating Mrs Weatherby's office just off the central hallway, he told her that he was going and thanked her for letting him see Mr Harbinson, who had turned out to be a great character. Receiving only a glacial smile and a curt nod, he grinned brightly and led Bonnie out of the building. The sun was sinking behind the green hills of Virginia and the afternoon light was quietly darkening.

  'Hop aboard,' Gumshoe said, swinging his leg over his motorcycle and kicking its steel support up.

  When Bonnie was on the back, he revved the bike into motion and headed along the curving west front driveway, between the smooth green lawns and whispering trees. He was just turning out of the estate when he saw the flying saucer.

  'Holy shit!' he exclaimed.

  Shocked both by the speed of the flying saucer's approach and by the unexpectedness of seeing it out here, where the cyborgs rarely patrolled, he swerved off the road and braked to a halt in the shadows beneath the tall trees. The saucer had appeared out of nowhere, in the blinking of an eye, coming from the direction of Washington DC, and now, before Gumshoe could blink twice, it flashed over the top of the trees as a ball of light — no more than that — and suddenly reappeared over the front lawn of the house as a solid, silvery-grey, domed craft, about fifty feet in diameter and hovering magically.

  Remaining on the bike with Bonnie still behind him, her thighs pressing tensely against his hips, Gumshoe looked on in mounting despair as the flying saucer, a transport, descended languidly to the lawn to settle mere centimetres above it, still hovering magically. This saucer had no old-fashioned hydraulic legs, but merely hovered just above the ground, swaying gently from side to side, while one of its side panels fell outward and down to form a ramp sloping to the ground.

  Two cyborgs emerged from the saucer, both as small as children but with exceptionally large heads and only a smooth metal mask where their nose and lips should have been. Both were carrying stun guns in perfectly normal hands. They were followed out by three normal human beings, all wearing ink-black suits with plain white shirts and narrow black ties: the notorious Men in Black. All five entered the Woodlawn Nursing Home and emerged a few minutes later, surrounding Mr Harbinson, frail in his striped pyjamas and obviously distraught, and the housekeeper, Mrs Weatherby, who walked between them like a woman in a trance. Harbinson and Weatherby were led up into the flying saucer by the cyborgs, followed by the Men in Black. Then the ramp moved back into its original place, forming part of the seamless, circular main body, and the flying saucer took off again.

  Spinning rapidly and silently, but sucking up gravel and loose leaves to make them swirl violently,

  noisily, in the air, the saucer ascended leisurely, vertically, to an altitude of about a hundred metres, well clear of the treetops. Then it hovered briefly again before abruptly shooting off at a right angle, back in the direction of Washington DC.

  It disappeared as quickly as it had appeared, in the blinking of an eye, as if it had never been.

  'Those poor bastards,' Gumshoe said, blaming himself for what had happened and feeling thoroughly ashamed . . . even as fear for himself and Bonnie crept coldly over him. 'Let's get the hell out of here.'

  With Bonnie clinging tightly to him, he shot off down the road, back along Route 235, heading for the George Washington Memorial Parkway and the deepening darkness.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I was twenty years old when we took over the world, but, educated and matured well beyond my years, I was already our leader. Like an Egyptian prince, I had been bom and raised for this task, but with a singular difference: the instructions for my resurrection had been written out by myself. Bfore I died, in the Old Age, in that colony in Neusckwabenland, Antarctica, I knew that we were on the verge of creating new life, creating and growing a DNA chain, and I arranged for a clone of myself to be the first one created. By that time, no one in the colony had a mind of their own: they had all been electronically implanted and programmed for absolute obedience, total loyalty. And so, before my death, I arranged for them to clone me when the breakthrough in cloning which we were rapidly approaching finally came. In fact, it came the next year.

  I am a product of parthenogenesis, self-cell-division, the real form of virgin birth.

  Like the rest of the world, we had started off with other, less successful forms of life creation, such as artificial wombs and in vitro fertilization to produce embryos that could be implanted in the wombs of women. Naturally, our first artificial wombs were primitive, with the foetus being removed from its mother's womb a few weeks before natural birth was due and suspended in an artificial chamber filled with a solution of sugars and salts. The premature child was fed and supplied oxygen via its umbilical cord, which was attached by plastic tubes to a heart-lung machine, but such children invariably died from their own waste products. We did, however, move on to pressurized steel chambers containing an oxygen-rich saline solution that could push oxygen through the body of the foetus,

  TCS?

  It disappeared as quickly as it had appeared, in the blinking of an eye, as if it had never been.

  'Those poor bastards,' Gumshoe said, blaming himself for what had happened and feeling thoroughly ashamed . . . even as fear for himself and Bonnie crept coldly over him. 'Let's get the hell out of here.'

  With Bonnie clinging tightly to him, he shot off down the road, back along Route 235, heading for the George Washington Memorial Parkway and the deepening darkness.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I was twenty years old when we took over the world, but, educated and matured well beyond my years, I was already our leader. Like an Egyptian prince, I had been bom and raised for this task, but with a singular difference: the instructions for my resurrection had been written out by myself. Before I died, in the Old Age, in that colony in Neuschwabenland, Antarctica, I knew that we were on the verge of creating new life, creating and growing a DNA chain, and I arranged for a clone of myself to be the first one created. By that time, no one in the colony had a mind of their own: they had all been electronically implanted and programmed for absolute obedience, total loyalty. And so, before my death, I arranged for them to clone me when the breakthrough in cloning, which we were rapidly approaching, finally came. In fact, it came the next year.

  I am a product of parthenogenesis, self-cell-division, the real form of virgin birth.

  Like the rest of the world, we had started off with other, less successful forms of life creation, such as artificial wombs and

  in vitro fertilization to produce embryos that could be implanted in the wombs of women. Naturally, our first artificial wombs were primitive, with the foetus being removed from its mother's womb a few weeks before natural birth was due and suspended in an artificial chamber filled with a solution of sugars and salts. The premature child was fed and supplied oxygen via its umbilical cord, which was attached by plastic tubes to a heart-lung machine, but such children invariably died from their own waste products. We did, however, move on to pressurized steel chambers containing an oxygen-rich saline solution that could push oxygen through the body of the foetus, but these foetuses, like the others, also died from their own waste products. Nevertheless, the day came when we produced living, perfectly normal human beings in artificial wombs, through in vitro fertilization and, finally, embryos created through parthenogenesis and placed in a natural womb for full development.

  Once it was clear that we could do this successfully, we experimented with the creation of slightly abnormal, though more intelligent, human beings. Having discovered that the sole limitation on the size of the human brain is the diameter of the female pelvic girdle, we experimented surgically on a wide variety of abducted females until we were able to enlarge the pelvic girdle without killing the subjects or damaging them in a way that rendered them useless to us. When the operation was completed, we then made them pregnant with in vitro fertilization techniques and artificial wombs to produce babies with unusually large brains contained in large heads. Brought up in isolation, these children were indoctrinated or electronically brain-implanted to behave exactly as we wanted them to. They were then allowed either to grow into normal adulthood, albeit with unusually large heads and enhanced intelligence, or were surgically mutated into cyborgs.

  The misinformed, when observing such creatures emerging from our flying saucers, invariably assumed that their abnormally large heads were proof that they had to be extraterrestrials. This aided our programme of disinformation for a great number of years.

  To early parthenogenesis experiments we added a variety of recombinant-DNA techniques, or gene surgery. I personally had become aware of the striking resemblance between the way computers operate and the way the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) double helix controls all known forms of life. By this I mean that the DNA double helix, like the computer, stores information in a coded form and the on-off structure of the DNA chain of molecules, shaped like a ladder twisted about its own axis to form the double-helix shape, is remarkably similar to the on-off switchings in computer memories. The complexity of DNA foils your world's still relatively primitive computers, but aware of the similarity between the operation of computers and that of the DNA double helix, I was able to develop a twenty-trillion-byte computer. Given that one neuron of the human brain roughly equals one byte of a computer, our computers, based on my original prototype, now rival the human