Slide turned to Nephredana. "How does the text go?"

Nephredana recited from memoiy. " 'And a man shall come among them, a man who was a leader of men but who fell from the favor of his followers, a man who crossed the great divide and, arriving in the country beyond, took up arms and slew the king of that country.' Those are the Four Requirements, you want me to go on?"

Slide nodded. "Yeah, get on to the part about entering the Realm of Gods."

Nephredana picked up the thread. " 'And, taking flight, he came with companions to the place between worlds where the Portal was made known to him and he entered the Realm of Gods where the Sleeper lay and he spoke with the Sleeper of the time that He might wake.' "

Gibson frowned. "That's all very fancy, but how does it apply to me?"

"Leader of men, right?"

Gibson laughed in amazement. "The last thing that I've ever been is a leader of men. "

"Anyone one who can fill Madison Square Garden has to be a leader of some kind. Young men all over the world were copying your clothes and your walk, your haircut and your sneer, even your brand of sunglasses. Think you weren't a leader? And you certainly fell from favor, you can't deny that. You've moved from one dimension to another, and as for killing the king…"

At that moment, Yop Boy cut in with a warning. "Lights up ahead, boss."

Yop Boy must have had extraordinary eyes, because Gibson couldn't see a thing. Slide, too, who nodded in reply. "I got 'em."

Yop Boy was still peering into the darkness. "Looks like a cop roadblock. I guess they must have penetrated the whammy."

Slide grinned back at Gibson. "Watch this, kid."

Slide seemed to find an extra surge of power somewhere inside the car. Up ahead, four police cruisers were drawn across the highway, completely blocking the four lanes. Uniformed figures were clustered around the cars, and Gibson could imagine the tension and the weapons clutched tightly in their hands. The Hudson was charging straight at them. It no longer felt as though they were riding in a simulator. The car was vibrating wildly.

Slide glanced at Yop Boy. "We got a power window?"

Yop Boy nodded. "Anything we want. Full banshee halo if we need it."

Slide's grin was truly demonic. "Ha!"

He hit a number of buttons on the car's control panel, and the Hudson was immediately enveloped in orange flame. At the same time, there was a hideous howling from outside the car.

Gibson looked round in alarm. "Are we on fire?"

Nephredana shook her head. "Just scaring the hell out of these cops."

It was certainly working. Through the flame envelope in front of the windshield, Gibson could see the cops leaving the cars that were blocking the road and running for their lives. The cars remained, however, and it looked as though the Hudson was going to plow into them and total itself. Then, as Gibson watched in complete amazement, an unseen force lifted first one car and then a second clear into the air and threw them violently aside. It was as though they were the toys of a giant, invisible, and very petulant child who had hurled them away in a fit of pique. One landed on its roof about twenty yards on down the road while the other arced straight up, turned over, took a nosedive into the hard shoulder, and folded up like a concertina. The Hudson raced through the gap that had been left in the roadblock, and, as they flashed past the police cruiser that was lying on its crushed roof, its gas tank exploded and it burst into flame. The fire envelope that surrounded the Hudson was suddenly gone.

Slide was chortling. "Did you see those guys run?" He glanced at Gibson. "Do you know what that was, kid?"

Gibson shook his head. "Never seen anything like it."

"Threw a banshee halo round the car."

"Was that difficult? "

Slide made a dismissive gesture. "Piece of cake. Unpotentialized psychic power. All you gotta do is focus it and it'll do what you want. There's always plenty of loose spook energy around. Most of it's too stupid to do anything for itself except maybe condense into a half-assed apparition and make a few moaning noises, but if you give it a focus, it'll go the whole nine yards for you. Nothing spook energy likes better than to be given something violent to do."

Gibson slipped down in his seat and closed his eyes. Slide, on the other hand, seemed to treat running a police roadblock as no big thing. He went back to the previous conversation as though nothing had happened.

"So you see how you qualify for the Four Requirements of Anu Enlil."

Gibson took a deep breath. "It all seems a little farfetched. For one thing, I didn't kill the king. I only took the rap for it."

"Everybody thinks you did and that may be enough for the prophecy. A lot of prophecies are really just a matter of perception."

Gibson started shaking his head as if by doing it he could ward off this new idea. "If it's all the same to everyone, I really don't think I want to have anything to do with this Anu Enlil business. I gave at the office."

Nephredana took out a compact and, still chewing gum, checked her makeup. "You may not have much choice in the matter."

Gibson scowled. "Why didn't I guess that? So what happens to me if I qualify for the prophecy, do I get taken out and burnt at the stake or what?"

Slide grinned. "Hell, no. You do okay on this one. When He wakes and returns, you become the Master of Humans in your dimension."

"He?"

Slide's grin faded. "Don't make me say his name."

"You mean Necrom?"

Slide winced. "I wish you wouldn't do that."

Gibson blinked. "I'm not sure I want to be Master of Humans in my dimension."

Apparently satisfied with her face, Nephredana put away her compact. "It sure beats living as a bond slave, or, worse still, culled out with the excess."

Gibson frowned. "Culled out with the excess."

"When He walks again, the numbers of your species will be appreciably thinned out."

Gibson swallowed hard. "Thinned out."

"Well, you have been rather overbreeding for the last few centuries."

Gibson couldn't believe what he was hearing. "Thinned out? Just like that?"

"What did you humans expect? To go on breeding exponentially until you'd filled up the known universe?"

Gibson leaned forward and clasped his head in his hands. It was starting to hurt. "I wish someone would offer me a drink."

Nephredana produced a flat, one-pint, sterling-silver flask and handed it to Gibson. "Why didn't you ask?"

Gibson took a grateful pull on the flask, and fire exploded in his throat, than roared through his head and chest. He coughed and his eyes watered. "What the hell was that?"

"I call it a sheer drop."

"No kidding."

He remembered the frightening cocktails that Nephredana had ordered in the bar and at Raus's party and was thankful that he couldn't see what he had just drunk. Damn, but he wished that he had some more of the streamheat's hero serum. Being pitchforked from police headquarters into a car full of mad demons who proceeded to inform him that it was the eve of destruction and that the cause of all his troubles might well be because he was the subject of some ancient prophecy was taking a sorry toll on his nerves, and he needed something to dull the edge. Despite the taste, he took a second hit from Nephredana's silver flask, and after the rerun explosion had rippled through his nervous system, he let loose a long sigh. "You know, all I really want is for the world to leave me alone for a while."

Nephredana's smile was brittle and impatient. "Didn't you hear, Joe? You can't always get what you want."

Gibson nodded. "I imagine there's also a catch to all this prophecy business."

Slide quoted in a low voice. " 'And qualifying according to the prophecy, the man shall pass the Portal and, entering the Realm of Gods, shall look upon the Sleeper in the act of waking.' "