According to Friedman, and with relevance to the enormous power of fusion being packed into the relatively small confines of a UFO, a quasar represents the energy of a galaxy 'compressed' into something the size of a single star and, when we move from the atomic to the nuclear world, we may go down in size but we go way up in energy per particle. Thus, when we go down from the nuclear universe to the sub-nuclear universe, we go down in size again and up in energy again. Which means?

  Fusion presents us with a form of enormous power that can be confined in small containers. So maybe, if we're now flying above the atmosphere, we're using fusion propulsion. Which meant, of course, that . . . Where are we going? Where the fuck are they taking us? And . . . Jesus . . . Oh, my God, don't think about it. . . What will they do to us?

  Gumshoe had to open his eyes — though he didn't want to do so, not wishing to see his fear reflected in the stares of the other equally terrified abductees. Nevertheless, he had to open his eyes because his imagination insisted upon running riot when they were closed, making him visualize a whole range of dreadful possibilities concerning the fate that awaited him. So he opened his eyes and found that he could not escape the other eyes, particularly the wide, fearful gazes of the women and children. That sight, despite his fear of his imagination, made him close his own eyes again.

  Not fusion, he thought, desperately trying to focus his thoughts. The paddy wagons didn't fly in outer space, so they wouldn't need fusion, though they certainly would need an anti-gravity shield and some other extraordinarily powerful means of propulsion to obtain their speed and flight characteristics . . .

  That plasma-like glowing around the spinning outer edge . . . The traces of electromagnetism often found on saucer landing sites

  9 re

  . . . What was that guy's name? Famous physicist, long dead, but still alive on the Net to explain that a propulsion system based on the ionization of the air could solve all the problems of highspeed flight.

  With ionized air, as opposed to 'neutral' air, it would be possible to interact with the electric and magnetic fields, thereby reducing heating and drag, increasing lift, and eliminating sonic booms. And according to . . . Fuck, what's his name? Freeman . . . No, Friedman . . . The flying saucers' frequent changes in colour, extraordinary flight characteristics, and absence of noise indicated the presence of ionized air and high magnetic fields. So that, Gumshoe thought, would explain it. This paddy wagon, which can't he flying in outer space, is using a . . . propulsion . . . Fuck, what was it? Oh, Jesus, that hass humming sound has changed. Why the hell has it changed? God have mercy, we're landing!

  He opened his eyes and saw the other abductees, those equally distressed unfortunates whose only visible movement was the flickering of their fear-filled eyes. He glanced about him, without moving his head, to ascertain if the saucer was actually landing or not. There was still no sense of movement, but the humming sound had definitely changed, becoming even softer, more distant. Then, just as Gumshoe thought that he had been mistaken, the sound cut out altogether.

  Now he heard another sound, a hollow drumming sound. Then, for the first time, he sensed movement and his heart skipped a beat.

  Fuck, he thought, this is it!

  He didn't quite know what he meant by that. But he braced himself for any eventuality when he sensed that the paddy wagon was no longer in flight but was, instead, bobbing gently from side to side to the accompaniment of that hollow drumming sound, as if — and this thought almost stunned him — it was submerged underwater, just like ... a submarine?

  Oh, Christ, he thought, trying to choke back his panic and disbelief. It can't be. It . . .

  But it fucking well could be, he realized, recalling that when the cyborgs had first arrived to take over the Earth, their saucers, big and small, had not only ascended from previously concealed bases on dry land, mainly in mountainous areas and deserts, but also from oceans and lakes, including the Bermuda Triangle, the Devil's Sea, the Plata del Mar, the Great Lakes of Canada and even Loch Ness in Scotland. It had then transpired that those saucers, viewed sceptically in the Old Age as USOs, or Unidentified Submarine Objects, had been resting on the seabed or at the bottom of lakes as sea domes, manned by cyborgs or brain-implanted humans. There, while waiting to surface and take over the Earth, they had continued with a wide variety of scientific experiments, aided by remote-controlled Cybernetic Amorphous Machine Systems (CAMS). Now, Gumshoe was convinced, this paddy wagon was sinking down through water, either at sea or in a great lake, to join with a mother ship being used as a gigantic sea dome. If so, he was truly doomed.

  His worst fears were almost instantly realized.

  Three silvery-white lines appeared in the curved wall directly facing Gumshoe, just behind some of the other still-paralysed and terrified abductees. The three lines, two vertical, one horizontal and joining the top of the others, formed a door shape. At first sight it looked as if a searing light, a laser beam, was slicing down through the metal wall, illuminating the gloomy room. But then the lines widened, rapidly becoming spaces letting light in from outside, and Gumshoe realized that this was another panel moving away from the wall, like the panel he had entered by, to form a ramp leading, in this instance, out of what was clearly the bottom layer of the paddy wagon. When the panel had disappeared, angled down out of sight, Gumshoe found himself looking at an awesome sight.

  Some of the abductees gasped.

  Startled by that sound, Gumshoe realized that feeling was returning to his body and that the same must be happening to the other abductees. Even as his eyes were widening in disbelief at what he was seeing, he coughed to clear his tightened throat,

  ?.e-7

  managed to do so successfully, then flexed the fingers of both hands and shuffled his feet. To his immense relief, he discovered that he could move again, so he automatically moved to the doorway formed by the lowered panel. There he stopped in amazement. Certainly it was no surprise, given what he was faced with, that he made no other attempt to move.

  There was nowhere to go.

  Through the open doorway formed by the fallen panel, Gumshoe saw what appeared to be an immense curving white-steel wall broken up with reinforced viewing windows under a high dome-shaped transparent ceiling covered in a great umbrella of seamless steel coloured the same as the wall. That dome-shaped ceiling, he realized instantly, was actually the central dome of a flying saucer far larger than the paddy wagon — indeed, a craft that was truly immense: large enough to contain the paddy wagon and many more like it — and the windows, just like those in the paddy wagon, went around the central body to give a 360-degree view. Scanning as much of the area as he could see, he guessed that he was in one of the so-called 'mother ships', approximately 350 feet in diameter, 150 feet high at the central point between dome and base, built in three layers, all immense, and carrying a crew of over a hundred cyborgs and brain-implanted humans. He could see those from where he stood, all wearing the same black coveralls and boots, working side by side at computers and consoles covered in flashing lights, ascending or descending in open elevators to various levels, or crossing from one side of the central dome to the other by means of high catwalks.

  Even more frightening, however, was what he could see through those large viewing windows of reinforced glass: the artificially illuminated wonders of the sea bed, including a wide variety of

  plankton, luminous crustaceans, octopus, squid, giant jellyfish, other coelenterates and ctenophores that cast their own eerie illumination, bizarre fish and other creatures either exceptionally beautiful or, by human standards, downright hideous.

  One of the female abductees screamed in terror.

  Instantly, a cyborg appeared in the doorway, holding a stun gun in his right hand, to shoot a laser beam at the screaming woman. Struck by a bolt of sparks like tiny lightning bolts — a light that was, Gumshoe knew, flickering somewhere in the alpha-rhythm range, between eight and twelve cycles per second — the woman was rendered semi-comatose and instantly fell silent while remaining motionless on her feet. The other abductees, now getting their senses back along with tactile feeling, made no sound, except for the frightened sniffling of the children and a choked sob from one of the other women.

  At that moment, a human male appeared in the doorway to stand beside the cyborg. Thin as a rake in black coveralls and boots, his face gaunt and pale, his green eyes cold, his hair blond, he cast his gaze over the abductees, mentally counting them while looking at none in particular. Then he said, 'Please do as you are told. Please attempt nothing foolish. You are in a flying saucer, a mother ship, on the seabed of the West Atlantic Ocean, in the area known as the Bermuda Triangle. There is no way out.' Though clearly a human being, his voice was lacking in timbre and seemed oddly inhuman. 'I repeat: there is no way out. You have nowhere to go. So please do exactly as you're told and make things easier for all of us. Now follow me, please.'

  As the man stepped aside to clear the doorway, the cyborg with the stun gun entered the room to move around to the rear of the abductees and prod them forward if necessary. Being close to the doorway already and aware that what the man in black had said was true, that he had nowhere else to go, Gumshoe was the first to step out of the room.

  He found himself in what appeared to be an immense work area with a curving wall — actually he was standing on a wide circular floor surrounded by the outer walls of the mother ship -filled with ladders, elevators and catwalks, modules of steel and glass, shining mazes of pipes coiling around what might have been generators, and, in every direction, more cyborgs and

  humans in black coveralls and boots, working at computer terminals or control consoles in which lights of many colours flashed on and off constantly. As the other abductees emerged from the doorway of the paddy wagon to gather around him, some being prodded by the cyborg, Gumshoe glanced back over his shoulder and noted that this particular area, in the very centre of the great dome-shaped work place, was used as a parking bay for the smaller transport saucers — the widely feared paddy wagons.

  Gumshoe saw three of them.

  'This way, please.' Still speaking in a flat, chilling monotone that actually made the word 'please'

  redundant, the man in black led the group of cowed abductees across the wide floor towards an open door in the curved wall, located just beneath one of the many windows offering a view of the exotic seabed. The cyborg bringing up the rear of the group was now joined by another and both of them encouraged the group to move forward merely by being there with their stun guns raised in the firing position.

  Now walking directly behind the man in black, Gumshoe glanced up at the windows to see the ocean bed outside artificially illuminated by the lights beaming out of the mother ship but vast and impenetrable beyond the range of those lights. He felt his heart constricting with despair even as his fear increased dramatically. Clearly, there was no way to escape and he was now at the mercy of the cyborgs.

  What would they do to him?

  His imagination was already running riot when the man in black led him and the others through the doorway, into a white-painted corridor that followed the curving outer edge of the mother ship. Though featureless, with no windows, the corridor soon led into another large chamber that looked like a laboratory, being filled with workbenches, computer terminals, humans in white smocks or coveralls, and glass cabinets that were slightly frosted over on the inside. The cabinets contained a wide variety of frozen specimens, ranging from exotic creatures of the deep to land-based animals such as dogs, wolves, mountain bears and

  pumas. None of the human workers, Gumshoe noted, looked up from their benches as the group of abductees passed through them.

  'Please do not be alarmed by anything you see here,' the man in black said, speaking flatly, mechanically, like a tourist guide repeating his daily spiel. 'This submerged mother ship is used as a sea dome and conducts a wide variety of experiments. Disturbing as some of these might seem to you at first, you will soon get used to them and, indeed, you will even take part in some of them. For now, however, please let me inform you about the mother ship and about what we do down here.'

  Gumshoe thought he was hallucinating. The contradiction between where he actually was, what had actually happened to him, and the sheer normality, even blandness, of the voice of the man in black made his mind reel. Nevertheless, as they left the laboratory and headed around another length of curving white corridor, with the steel-masked cyborgs prodding the reluctant abductees along, if necessary by giving them small electric jolts from their stun guns, the man in black continued talking in his mechanical, oddly chilling monotone, like the tape recording in one of those hand sets tourists used to get on museum tours.

  'Our mother ship is powered by a combination of a highly advanced electromagnetic propulsion system that ionizes the surrounding air or, at this moment, the surrounding sea, and an electromagnetic damping system that aids our lift and hovering capabilities when in flight while also equalizing the pressure when we're submerged. The bodywork of this particular mother ship is composed of an electrically charged magnesium ortho-silicate so minutely porous that it manages to be waterproof while ensuring, when airborne, an absolute minimum of friction, heat and drag. This explains the extraordinary power and remarkable manoeuvrability of this and other saucers.'

  The group was now approaching another door while passing a row of glass cabinets attached to the wall and displaying a collection of jewellery, silver cups, the pottery of various periods, 261

  much of it badly chipped or worn, stones, crystals, old anchors, chains, and stuffed fish of a remarkably exotic variety. The man in black pointed at the cases as he passed and kept reciting his lecture like a zombie given the power of speech.

  'From this submerged mother ship,' he explained, 'we explore the seabed with a variety of large and small Cybernetic Anthropomorphous Machine Systems, picking up exotic marine life, valuable lost treasure, and a wealth of normally unavailable minerals. The CAMS are either piloted by cyborgs, remote-controlled from this mother ship, or they are programmed to react robotically to certain stimuli, such as the moving of fish through water or even the gentlest swaying of plant life.'

  They were now entering another room, this one noticeably colder than the others and dimly lit. It contained another collection of glass cabinets, these ones illuminated from within to show their contents through the chilled glass. Gumshoe stopped walking automatically, temporarily shocked witless when he saw that the cabinets contained a collection of genetically and surgically mutated birds and animals. There were giant rats with humps, birds with rabbits' heads, cats with gills and fins, headless chickens, two-headed dogs and many similar nightmarish monstrosities.

  'Oh, Jesus!' Gumshoe whispered without thinking, even as some of the other abductees gasped with horror behind him. Gumshoe glanced over his shoulder to see two of the women automatically stepping backwards, obviously wanting to escape this hall of horrors. But the cyborgs prodded them with the stun guns, giving them small electrical shocks that made them gasp, this time with pain, and step forward again. When Gumshoe looked to the front, the man in black was on the move once more, leading them through the grim room.

  'This particular mother ship,' he continued as he led them past the mutated animals, 'sometimes surfaces to abduct the crew members of boats afloat in the West Atlantic Ocean, in the area known as the Bermuda Triangle, and, when required, to capture

  whole motor launches, complete with their passengers. Those captured are then indoctrinated into our ways' — clearly, he meant brain-implanted — 'and either remain here to be used for a variety of purposes or are returned to the surface, sometimes in the same boat, to work covertly for us. You, too, will be used as we see fit. You cannot say no.'

  One of the ways in which the abducted were used was now made nightmarishly clear to Gumshoe when, still at the head of the group, he followed the man in black into another dimly lit room and saw in more chilled glass cabinets . . . severed human heads, amputated limbs and, even worse, combinations of the two connected to hideous bionic torsos. As these were purely museum pieces, the cases containing them had been left open to show the sickening mass of preserved body parts, wires and cables inside them.

  Instinctively recoiling from that sight, but having the sense to keep moving, following the man in black, Gumshoe heard groans, sobs and gasps from the unfortunates behind him, indicating that they, too, were horrified. Now he felt that he was one of the damned in a lower level of hell.

  'I repeat/ the man in black said as he led them out of that second chamber of horrors and along another curving stretch of white-walled corridor, 'that you cannot escape. There is no way to escape. You must therefore accept your lot and show no resistance. What we will do to you will cause you no pain, so don't be afraid. Whatever we choose for you, you will accept because you won't have a choice. Right now, before we examine you, you must take your rest. This is where you will do so.'

  They were now in an expansive, curving room, the outer wall of which obviously formed part of the circular rim of the mother ship. Along the wall was a panoramic window looking out on the murky depths of the ocean, with the seabed illuminated to a short distance out with beams of artificial light. In those beams of light the seabed was darkly visible, with bizarrely shaped rocks 26a

  covered in plankton and algae, imperceptibly shifting sands, extraordinary, gigantic, languidly swaying plants and a variety of exotic sea life of a kind few human beings would ever lay eyes upon. But beyond the beams of light there was only a vast, absolute, eternal darkness that made Gumshoe shiver.

  Those windows are there for a purpose, he thought. To remind us of exactly where we are and of the absolute hopelessness of our position. This is the devil's playground.