"I'm going to have to do something about you. The question is what."

At that moment a flight of jets roared across the sky heading east. It was too dark to make out anything but the faint flare of their exhausts. Whatever the jets were and wherever they had come from, they were traveling without navigation lights.

Gibson looked at the dark sky in alarm. "Are those the enemy bombers?"

Slide was also looking at the sky. "Kamerian interceptors, but the Hind-Mancu wings can't be far away. We have to do something about this fucking saucer or we're going to find ourselves caught out in the firestorm."

Nephredana retrieved the flask and upended it. Slide had finished off the booze. "So what do you do about a flying saucer?"

Slide paced round in a small frustrated circle three times before he halted and slapped his fist into his palm.

"That's it, I can't fuck around any longer." He gestured to Yop Boy. "Fetch the doombeam."

Yop Boy looked at him doubtfully. "Are you sure about this, boss?"

"Just get the damned thing."

Yop Boy started back toward the car. Nephredana was also staring dubiously at Slide. She didn't even have to say anything for him to snarl angrily. "Don't you start."

"The last time you tried to use the doombeam you blew away half of that Mexican village and all but discorporated yourself."

"You have a better idea?"

Nephredana shook her head. "I'm not sure that the doombeam is an idea at all. What do you hope to do to the saucer with that thing? Blow it up?"

"At the very least, I'll annoy it."

Nephredana shook her head in disbelief, "Now we're annoying flying saucers."

Further argument was halted by the arrival of Yop Boy with the doombeam. Gibson could hardly believe what he was seeing. The thing looked like an antique, art-deco vacuum cleaner mounted on a telescopic steel tripod. It resembled something that might have been pressed into service as a prop in a 1930s Flash Gordon serial.

"Where the hell did you get that thing?"

"Don't ask."

Nephredana supplied the answer. "He built it. Yancey always wanted a genuine raygun. Some of it's made from stuff that the AEC had locked up in a vault at Oak Ridge until Yancey and some of his friends broke in and stole it. He matched that up with some black-market streamheat components and a few odds and ends that he got from this weird dimension where reptiles developed a civilization and eventually he created a weapon that's probably too dangerous to be fired."

Slide ignored her. He was bending over the tripod, carefully sighting the device. When he was satisfied, he stepped back. "You'd better all take cover."

Nephredana started walking quickly away.

"I'm taking cover all the way back to the car."

Yop Boy remained beside Slide, but Gibson turned and followed Nephredana. Being one of the boys was okay, but there were limits. The two of them had no sooner reached the car than a massive and blinding fireball filled the space beneath the saucer. At the same time a thunderclap of an explosion almost deafened them. Gibson's jaw dropped.

"Sweet Jesus Christ!"

It seemed impossible for Slide and Yop Boy to have survived the blast and conflagration. The doombeam had the desired effect, however, and the saucer flipped up as though it had been given a hot foot. The gold light narrowed down to a tight pencil beam and skittered over the ground as though it was searching for who or what was responsible, then the saucer went straight up and zigzagged away at high speed.

Gibson looked on in horror: the actual surface of the road was burning. "There's no way that they're going to walk out of that."

Nephredana was surprisingly unconcerned. "I know I tend to bait Yancey but you shouldn't underestimate him. He's virtually indestructible."

In confirmation, two figures came walking out of the flames. Their clothes were trailing ribbons of smoke, and the right sleeve of Yop Boy's ninja suit was actually burning. Despite a certain charring of his duster, Slide was grinning like a maniac. "I said I'd annoy them."

Nephredana yawned. "My hero."

Slide rubbed his hands together. "Okay, let's all get in the car and get going."

In the moment that he spoke, the sky behind the car became brilliant, blinding white. It was as though a star had exploded just beyond the horizon, and Gibson, even the three demons, cringed away from it. A brief moment of the most terrible silence made the world seem as though all sound had been drained away and replaced by light, a hideous killing light that rapidly condensed into a single brilliant fireball, blazing over the city of Luxor like a new sun, while evil smoke roiled up around it, beginning to form into the familiar mushroom cloud.

Even Slide stood awed. "One of their bombers made it through early."

Then the spell broke and he was galvanized into action. "Get going! Get into the car!"

The shock wave hit moments after they were all inside. Slide's hands flew over the control panel as the Hudson bucked and shuddered on its springs in the grip of an instant hurricane and debris slammed into the car's windows and bodywork. The engine caught and it roared forward, accelerating like a dragster for fifty yards as nuclear hell howled all around. When he reached the spot over where the saucer had been hovering, Slide slammed on the brakes. He worked on the panel again and then sat back.

"Okay, here we go. Leaving town one jump ahead of the holocaust."

Gibson braced himself for the same kind of mind-wrenching hallucinations that had accompanied his previous transfer from dimension to dimension. To his surprise, nothing happened except that the Hudson sank smoothly into the ground.

GIBSON HAD IT figured. After three weeks of intensively studying the minutest workings of the small and very exclusive clinic, the theft of an old discarded raincoat that had been left behind by a crew of workmen who were repainting the clinic's dayroom, and a trade of his accumulated candy ration with another inmate in return for a blue Mets baseball cap, he believed that he was ready to go. He'd discovered that there was a loophole that happened every day during the lunch period. For over two months, Gibson had been taking his lunch in the dayroom with the other patients who were trusted to eat outside their rooms. It was supposed to be an advanced level in patient interaction. Gibson had initially hated this communal lunching and would have much preferred to have gone on eating in his room. Most of his mealtime companions were doped to the eyeballs and had trouble finding their mouths, and, since the lunches served at the clinic uniformly consisted of various flavors of semiliquid goop, it was always a messy and unsightly affair. Even John West, who was an urbane sophisticate by inmate standards, occasionally missed his mouth with a plastic spoonful of creamed spinach or strained beats, and some of the others looked like ambulatory Jackson Pollacks by the time they had made it through to dessert.

Lunch became considerably more attractive after Gibson noticed that, toward the end of the meal, if it had gone without incident, the three burly male nurses who supervised them while they were eating made a habit of vanishing two at a time into the storeroom in back of the glassed-in nurses' station by the door. While one remained in the station to watch the inmates, the other two were in back, probably smoking a joint or snorting coke. Gibson, having clandestinely curtailed his own medication, was a much more skilled eater than most of the other inmates, and consequently finished much sooner than the rest. After he was done, he made a practice of going to the bathroom that was down the hall from the dayioom at exactly the same time as the nurses were getting high. According to the rules, a nurse was supposed to go with him, but Gibson had become so trusted that the one who was looking out while the other two were taking their turn in the storeroom just waved him through, unlocking the door from inside the station.