'An STG laser surveillance system,' Richie explained. 'We use it to record conversations taking place on the three floors of the White House and transmit them back here. The transmitter's set on a line-of-sight path to the building, to direct an invisible beam onto a chosen front window.' Seeing Michael's frown of confusion, he added: 'Try to imagine the window as the diaphragm of a microphone with oscillating sound waves. The invisible beam bounces off the window, back to this optical receiver. The receiver converts the modulated beam into audio signals that are filtered, amplified and then converted into clear conversation. That conversation can be monitored through headphones and simultaneously recorded on a tape recorder. Pretty good for something from the Old Age, eh?'

  'Those are Old Age instruments?'

  'Yeah,' Richie confirmed. 'The cyborgs stopped production of all surveillance equipment as soon as they took over, but these were purchased covertly from members of a disbanded British Army regiment, the SAS — the Special Air Service — just before the cyborgs closed down the international airlines. There's a pretty lucrative underground trade in these items going on nowadays. They're relatively primitive compared to cyborg technology, but they do okay by us.'

  Michael glanced out of the damaged bell tower at the White House, that whitewashed sandstone structure reminiscent of a Georgian manor, with its columned porticos and balustrades and colonnaded wings to the east and the west. It was bathed in the eerie light of the flying saucer hovering soundlessly above it and it looked very beautiful.

  'So what have you learnt from the conversations and movements in there?' Michael asked.

  Ben sighed. 'Not too much so far, but enough to save quite a few of our own kind from being abducted.

  Like, when the cyborgs are planning some kind of big raid. We pick up on that and we can warn the potential victims beforehand.'

  'I thought that most of the cyborgs communicated telepathi-cally,' Michael said.

  'Most of them,' Ben emphasized. 'Not all of them. They haven't all had their mouths and noses replaced with those awful metal prosthetics. Then, of course, the clones are as human as you and me, and they converse with the cyborgs that can talk. What we want, though, what we're really trying to find out, is what's actually going on in there — in the south side of the building and, more importantly, in the massive anti-nuclear war shelter that was built years ago under the building. We can see them disappearing down there, but we can't see what's happening down there. We're just hoping that if we watch them long enough, we'll pick something more important up. You've got to live in hope, haven't you?'

  Yes,' Michael agreed. 'Do you do stuff like this all over the capital?'

  'Mainly the Pentagon,' Ben said. 'We can't watch it round the clock, but we send a team out to the Arlington National Cemetery at least once a week to survey it at night from the shelter of a group of trees located between Patton Drive and the Pentagon. You want to go over there?'

  'Yes.'

  'It's really dangerous 'cause there isn't any real protection and sooner or later a cyborg saucer or even a football might pick up the signals from our surveillance system.'

  'I'd still like to see it.'

  'Okay, let's go.'

  'Thanks,' Michael said to Lenny and Richie.

  'My pleasure,' Lenny said.

  'No sweat,' Richie said.

  They both waved languidly as Michael and Ben left the bell tower and made their way back down to the dark, dust-filled church. Leaving the church by its western side doors, they embarked on the long, dangerous walk to Arlington National Cemetery, which took them a sweaty, tension-filled fifty minutes, staying off the main drags. The worst part was the crossing of the Arlington Memorial Bridge, where they were completely exposed to the silvery-grey footballs spinning and gliding low enough overhead to detect their body movement. Luckily, the wide-open spaces above the waters of the Potomac also worked to their advantage in that they could see the footballs coming in from afar and simply freeze until they had moved on. This ensured that they would not be detected by the sensors of the footballs while, at the same time, it delayed their progress across the bridge. They were encouraged, however, by the knowledge that the Prowlers and SARGEs rarely went as far as Arlington and the bigger saucers were too high up to see them. Eventually, then, heaving a joint sigh of relief, they came off the bridge, crossed the Jefferson Davis Highway and made their way into the cemetery which, like so much else in the area, had been sadly neglected since the coming of the cyborgs and was now overgrown.

  The eternal flame marking the grave of John F. Kennedy had been extinguished by the cyborgs and the cemetery was in semi-darkness, lit only by the pale moonlight, as they made their way past the endless rows of gleaming white headstones, tombs and statues marking the graves of more than 240,000

  military personnel and their dependants. Many of the graves, Michael noticed, had been dug up and left exposed, and the bodies, as Ben now informed him, had been ruthlessly stolen away by the cyborgs.

  Seeing Ben's grim, outraged expression as he too glanced at the open graves, Michael understood what he must be feeling. He was relieved when they had left the graves behind and were crossing the hilly lawns that led to Patton Drive and, just beyond it, the trees that Ben had mentioned. Entering the shelter of those trees, they found the other two-man surveillance team, kneeling on the grass behind their tripod-mounted equipment. They both glanced up when they heard Ben and Michael approaching, then, upon recognizing the former, they simultaneously raised their thumbs in a welcoming gesture.

  'How's it going?' Ben asked, kneeling behind the team and motioning for Michael to do the same.

  'Okay,' the plump young man wearing a black beret said. Like the previous team, both members of the team were dressed in casual clothing of loose jackets and denims. That they did not look as outrageous as the Speed Freaks was almost certainly a deliberate attempt to keep from drawing attention to themselves. 'Nothing new to report.'

  Ben introduced Michael to them, naming the plump one with the black beret as Manny Shaw and the second, who looked like a blond-haired athlete, as Rick Binder. Glancing beyond them and their equipment, Michael saw the massive pentagonal structure of the appropriately named Pentagon, which had once housed the offices of the highest authorities of the armed services, with 20,000 personnel, but was now used only by the cyborgs and their clones and brain-implanted slave workers.

  'So why do we have it under surveillance?' Ben asked rhetorically, since no one had asked him that question.

  'You tell me,' Michael said.

  'Just look at it,' Ben said. 'It's the largest single-structure office building in the world. It contains six and a half million square feet. It has five concentric pentagons enclosing a five-acre central courtyard and over seventeen miles of corridors in those five pentagons. In fact, each of those pentagons is actually larger than the Capitol. There's nothing bigger anywhere.'

  'And that's why you're watching it?'

  'Right. I mean, whatever the cyborgs are doing in the White House, it's not nearly as big as that' — he nodded in the direction of the Pentagon — 'and it certainly doesn't hold as many people ... or cyborgs ...

  or clones . . . you name it.'

  'And you watch them and collect data with those,' Michael said, nodding to indicate the equipment on the tripods.

  'Right,' Manny Shaw said, removing his black beret to distractedly stroke what turned out to be a prematurely bald head. 'This,' he continued, tapping one instrument with his index finger, 'is an Old Age Davin Optical Modulux image-intensifier connected to a Nikon 35-mm SLR camera with interchangeable long-distance and binocular viewing lenses.'

  'And this,' Rick Binder added, stroking the bigger tripod-mounted instrument as if it was the naked thigh of a woman, 'is a Hawkeye Systems Model HTIO thermal-imaging camera capable of detecting men and vehicles at long distances, either in low light or in total darkness, while producing high-quality video pictures with up to seven times magnification. While the thermal picture can normally be displayed automatically on an integral video monitor for direct viewing, we can't carry that equipment with us, so we display the pictures on a separate monitor for remote applications, such as recording for later visual analysis.'

  'Combined,' Ben said, 'these instruments enable us to take photos of those entering or leaving the Pentagon, whether by day

  or by night, and ascertain if there's any pattern to their comings and goings.'

  'So what have you learnt so far?' Michael asked him.

  'We've learnt that while the cyborgs guard the White House even more rigorously than they guard this place, a hell of a lot more paddy wagons land and take off from here and a hell of a lot more Prowlers and SARGEs enter and leave here. It's our belief, therefore, that the Pentagon is the major holding tank for the thousands who have been abducted since the cyborgs took over. Our surveillance, which includes the keeping of meticulous records, is designed to find some kind of pattern concerning how

  often the paddy wagons, in particular, come and go and which direction they favour when they leave.

  So far, from what we've managed to ascertain, it seems that an awful lot of them fly between here and our major airports and air force bases, where, as we know, some of the mother ships are located. This in turn makes us believe that a lot of the abductees are transported initially to the Pentagon, brain-implanted there — or, God forbid, used in other ways; maybe surgically mutated into cyborgs — then transported in the same paddy wagons to one of the mother ships at, say, Langley Field or Andrews AFB and from there flown on to their final destination. That, we must assume, is a cyborg base located either in some desolate area right here on Earth, on the seabed or in a great lake. So that's why we watch the Pentagon as well as the White House.'

  Staring at the enormous building and thinking of what Ben had just said — his comments, in particular, about brain-implants and surgical mutations — Michael thought of Wilson's earliest experiments in those fields and decided that Ben was on the right track.

  Why are you telling me this?' he asked.

  Because I think you hate the cyborgs as much as we do —

  either because of your girlfriend or for some other reason — and

  if that's the case, we may be able to help each other. If there's another reason, you don't have to tell me. My only concern is

  that you should have a strong enough motivation to hate the cyborgs as much as we do and that you should want to bring them down. I know you do. You help us, we help you.'

  'How can I help you?'

  'By passing on anything you find out about the cyborgs during your search. In return, if there's any way we can help you, you've only to ask.'

  'It's a deal,' Michael said.

  Ben nodded and grinned. 'You want to go back now?'

  'I guess so,' Michael said. 'The effect of those drinks is starting to wear off and I'm getting real sleepy.'

  'Me, too,' Ben said. He turned to Manny and Rick. 'Keep up the good work, you guys, and I'll see you anon.'

  'You can bet on it,' Rick said.

  Leaving the surveillance team to their work, Michael and Ben headed back the way they had come, making their way through the thousands of gleaming white tombstones, the shockingly desecrated graves, and eventually emerging from the cemetery to cross back over the Arlington Memorial Bridge.

  Once more, as they crossed the bridge, with a cold wind howling across from the Potomac, Michael felt fearfully exposed; nevertheless, though they saw large flying saucers high in the sky, they made it back across without incident.

  It was when they were passing around the Lincoln Memorial that they ran into trouble.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Gumshoe took a long time to recover from the shock of seeing his parents and, even more, to accept what it was that Wilson was planning to do to him. Wilson wanted to chop off his head and attach it to

  that two-headed chimera — Wilson's word — composed of a pig's body and the heads of Gumshoe's mother and father. Wilson wanted to make it a three-headed human-animal obscenity and he had his good reasons.

  'We've taken the human body about as far as it can go,' he told Gumshoe as the latter was lying on his bed, recovering from the shock with the aid of sedation and, he assumed, other drugs that were designed to help him accept his forthcoming nightmarish fate. 'Soon we can dispense with experiments on it altogether in favour of total cloning. But unfortunately, even with the clones, we're presented with enormous psychological problems that must be resolved.'

  Though Gumshoe had recovered from the shock to the extent that he was, at least, able to endure what he had seen without actually losing his mind, still he could barely grasp what Wilson was saying to him, nor the inhumanly calm and reasoned manner in which he was saying it. Wilson was describing a living nightmare as if it was perfectly natural.

  Your parents, for instance,' Wilson continued as if lecturing in a classroom. 'Previous to our experiment with them, we'd

  always used subjects who were total strangers to each other for our two-headed chimera experiments.

  But this didn't help at all when it came to preserving their sanity which, invariably, collapsed as soon as they fully comprehended what had happened to them. In other words, the heads were functioning physiologically and neurologically just as if they had still been attached to their natural bodies. But self-awareness, which we were proud to have retained, was what actually destroyed them — as I say, when they realized exactly what had happened to them. We therefore decided to see what effect the power of love and mutual dependence would have in a similar situation — if it would give the two grafted heads, those separate but artificially joined mentalities, the strength to accept what they'd become and, taking courage from one another, stay sane, if not for the rest of their lives at least for longer than they had been doing in our experiments until then. In fact, this proved to be true when it came to your parents. They had a bad time at first, screaming and sobbing and so forth, but gradually, taking courage from one another, they came to accept it. Only after a year or two, given the stress of unrelieved inactivity, did they gradually start rambling and then sink into dementia, rather like ordinary humans do in old age. Now, of course, they're in that cocoon of self-protection that we define, rightly or wrongly, as a state of insanity. So this is our problem.'

  Gumshoe sat there on the bed, propped up against the pillows, keeping sane himself only through the strength of his revulsion and hatred, wanting to strangle Wilson, this cloned replica of the original, but having neither the strength nor the will to do so, being either drained by the shock of this whole experience or weakened by drugs.

  'For our final test,' Wilson continued, still speaking flady, academically, 'we wish to ascertain if the introduction of the head of a fully conscious offspring, in this instance yourself, able to communicate with them, will give them back the will to survive and help them to recover their sanity and become fully-functioning brains again. As you're their one and only child, we believe that their love for you, which should have prevailed even after their heads were severed from their original bodies, might do the trick.

  This is why we have brought you here.'

  Gumshoe said nothing, being rendered literally speechless, merely listening to Wilson as if in a trance, though the strength of his revulsion and hatred kept his thoughts focused. The language of science, he realized, could be like the language of modern warfare, using words that obscured the true horror of what was being discussed. The word 'chimera' was a good example. It was a very pretty word, almost musical, with a belllike quality — though, in fact, it was the name for a mythical, fabulous, fire-

  spouting monster with a lion's head, a serpent's tail and a goat's body. Clearly, Wilson had been thinking of this when he used the same romantic, musical word to describe his surgically mutated monstrosities: part human, part animal, part machine; two-headed, limbless, sometimes deaf, dumb and blind; created from appalling pain and mental anguish — and all in the name of scientific progress.

  Wilson, the original Wilson, had eschewed human emotions in favour of pure, ruthless logic and this was where it had finally led him. The march of science was creating a new Dark Age and Wilson was leading the way. He, the old Wilson in the new, could not see what was wrong with this.

  As if sensing what Gumshoe was thinking, Wilson sighed. It was the nearest that he had come to a display of human emotion and hearing it actually startled Gumshoe. Being startled was, however, a heartening indication that he was recovering from his shock, despite the bitter anguish he still felt. . .

  the anguish and the rage. He would keep that and use it.

  You've disappointed me,' Wilson said. 'We have an extensive profile on you and from a perusal of it I'd assumed that you'd be stronger than you were: more ready to deal with the shock for which we had, in fact, so carefully prepared you.'

  'Prepared me?' Gumshoe asked, speaking for the first time and shocked by the sound of his own voice, which seemed like that of a stranger.

  'Your nightmares,' Wilson explained. 'Those nightmares about your parents that turned out to be true.

  They turned out to be true because they weren't nightmares in the first place. In fact, we took you to see your parents the first day you arrived here, but only when we had you in an interestingly drugged condition, fully aware of your surroundings, of what was happening to you, but distanced from it by a variety of sedatives. The idea was to let the knowledge of what had happened sink into you, into your subconscious, while you were emotionally neutralized by the drugs. We had hoped that by doing this, by preparing you, as it were, for the real thing, for the fully conscious experience, you would have suffered less when seeing your parents properly, unprotected by drugs. This, in turn, might have made it easier for you to accept your fate when, after the operation, you awoke as the third head of that chimera, attached for good to your mother and father: three heads on the neck of a pig. So, naturally, I was disappointed to see how badly you took it.'