Gibson tried this five times before he decided that it was the route for the great escape. He had already stashed the raincoat and the Mets cap in the bottom of a cupboard in the bathroom that was used for mops and buckets and toilet paper, and nobody seemed to have noticed them. Once he was in the bathroom, it was a simple matter to slip into the coat and hat and walk down to the final checkpoint at the front door. He'd gleaned from the conversations of the painters that security on the front door was also fairly lax. The reception desk in the lobby was manned by rent-a-cops and not clinic nurses, and they paid more attention to who was coming in rather than who was going out unless it was obviously a patient. The rent-a-cops wouldn't be familiar with his face, and his only real problem was his white hospital pants and slippers. He was hoping the coat and hat would do it and if they noticed his pants at all they'd assume that he was a painter on his break.

On the day that he picked for the escape, Gibson found that he was almost too nervous to force down his food. The chipped beef and mashed potatoes, at the best of times, turned into wallpaper paste in his mouth, but on this day they threatened to choke him. He couldn't even contemplate the lime jello. As soon as the nurses had retired to their station and the storeroom, Gibson stood up and started for the bathroom. The nurse waved him through without a second glance. A swift walk along the corridor and he was in the bathroom. On with the raincoat and the Mets cap. They didn't install mirrors in the patients' bathrooms, so there was no way of checking his appearance or reassuring himself that he could bluff his way past the front desk. Down the rest of the corridor. An orderly was mopping the floor, but the man didn't give him a second glance as he walked by. Down the stairs and on to the final obstacle. Just a single rent-a-cop was on duty, and he was deep in conversation with a pretty occupational therapist. Gibson mumbled something about going out for coffee and doughnuts. The rent-a-cop nodded. He was too busy dying to peer down the occupational therapist's uniform. Gibson walked out of the main door, doing his best not to run. Suddenly he was out, out in the roar of New York traffic heading for the corner of 28th Street and Third Avenue.

YANCEY SLIDE LIT yet another cheroot. "It was a magic age, I've got to tell you that, boy. I know eveiyone is getting twisted about His coming again, but, when He was in the world before, I personally had the best time of my whole, extremely long life, up until the end, that is, when things went a little wrong. Hell, I doubt you could even imagine it. We were lords of creation, cruising round in our aircars and living in the lap of luxury. I kid you not, the Great City between the Twin Rivers was a wonder to behold, what with the waterways, the flame groves, the floating gardens, and the whole system of streets and avenues on ten different levels, and the dreaming needle spires and the white stones of the piazzas in the blazing sun, and the great ziggurat towering over everything, close to half a mile high and black as the ace of spades, devouring energy and in total control of all who looked upon it. You should have seen that place, Joe Gibson, power entities coming and going like a bright shimmer across the sky that could stretch back to the horizon, and the ilalassu and the eagles and the little flying cars skipping in and out of the force skeins of their being and soaring in the backwash, so the air was as alive as the ground. And the nights, boy, the wine-dark nights and the women, heavy heat, and dangerous perfume on the wind off the sand, dark-eyed beauties with soft words and wicked mouths, and you couldn't even tell if they were djinn or human, and you were damned if you cared. It was an age of magic, boy, make no mistake about that."

Slide nodded to himself, and it was the first time that Gibson had ever seen him look wistful. Gibson took a pull from the jug, and the idimmu corn spirit warmed him through to the deep of his soul. It was hard to pin down time in the Hole of the Void, but Gibson was certain that he'd been warming his soul for at least three straight days with the result that his speech was slurred and objective reality was becoming elusive."It sounds idyllic."

Slide continued to nod. "You're fucking right about that, boy. It was idyllic." He paused to swat at one of the tiny cartoon things that flittered through the air like miniature bats or maybe large leather butterflies. Failing to hit it, he lay back, staring up at the constantly changing sky..

"Of course, there were times when it wasn't quite so perfect. I mean, there were bloody nearly ten thousand years of it. That's probably something else that you can't imagine. In a period of that length, you've got to expect a few ups and downs."

"That's understandable."

"When He was on a jag, things could become downright dangerous."

Slide lay reflecting on this for so long that Gibson was forced to nudge him back to speech.

"How dangerous?"

"You should have seen the armies go out at the start of the Five Thousand Day War, banners streaming, armor flashing, and the lightleak from their weapons hanging above them like a snow cloud of silver. Or the endgame Battle of Kia Mass when Suhgurim sent in the trolls of his own breeding to massacre the demahim with their knives and electric clubs and might even have held the day if the stormcrows hadn't dropped on them like avenging vultures, ripping and tearing the trolls' weird flesh with their steel claws. Damn it, boy, you've never seen so much blood, I swear we were wading in it up to our knees."

Gibson and Slide had taken themselves and their jug of corn to the crest of one of the low hills that overlooked the valley and the bizarre, ill-assorted collection of buildings that were the heart of the Hole in the Void. Gibson had been grateful for his introduction to the idimmu corn liquor; even though the transition from Luxor had been quite painless, coming down from the hero serum had been making him feel quite ill. It had the effect of numbing him against the irrational fears and constant dull ache that seemed to be the aftermath of the streamheat instant courage.

Slide had never satisfactorily explained the Hole in the Void to Gibson, and Gibson had some doubts that the demon really understood it himself. When he tried, he came out with little more than vague analogies. "Think of it as a glitch, something that shouldn't be there, a twist in the fabric of whatever makes up the space between dimensions,"

When Gibson pressed him, he simply retreated into anger. "Think of it as a cancer cell on the sunburned ass of time if it makes you any happier."

Certainly it was the strangest place that Gibson had ever been, making him feel, in fact, that he was as good as on another planet. As a kid, he always wanted to go to another planet-that was, until he discovered that other planets, at least those that might be accessible to him during his lifetime, were essentially boring. When he found out that Mars was without either Martians or even a system of canals, that Venus had no exotic tropical jungles and wasn't ruled over by the Treens, and that Jupiter was just plain impossible, it came as more of a shock than finding out there was no Santa Glaus, whom he'd always found a little implausible at the best of times. He had decided that he wasn't going to be an astronaut after all and concentrated on rock 'n' roll.

The ground on which he and Slide had stretched out was a weird, bright orange-porous substance, and Gibson wouldn't have taken bets that it was even a mineral. Here and there, it appeared to sweat, exuding a sticky yellow liquid that first hardened and crystalized and then, after a few hours, crumbled to dust and blew away. The sky above them was without a sun and, for all the world, looked like a huge cathode screen in the blazing grip of wild interference. Juddering snags of white light blipped across psychedelic washes of color and line patterns that waved and contorted like the encephalograph of a madman, always rolling from east to west like someone had been screwing around with cosmic vertical hold. The Hole in the Void was far from being a restful place.