NECROM

The first empty cab that he attempted to wave down went right past without stopping. At the last minute, he spotted a small purple-eagle sticker on the windshield, just like the teenagers' ba

"Where to?"

"I'm a stranger in town and I'm looking for a place to get drunk."

The driver didn't treat it as an at all unusual request. "You want it quiet or rowdy?"

Gibson gri

It wasn't just a matter of natural inclination. Gibson had decided rowdy would give him a good deal more natural cover. The driver set the cab in motion. "I'll drop you at the corner of Pomus and Schulman. That's pretty much the heart of the Strip."

Gibson nodded. "The Strip sounds good to me."

"Watch your money, though. The place is lousy with thieves."

"Isn't everywhere, these days?"

The driver nodded. "You said it, pal."

They passed yet another of the billboards with a giant picture of Jaim Lancer on it. Gibson wondered where the president stood on the matter of freak hatred. He suspected that the president was the kind that rode the fence, deploring it in public but tipping the wink to the local nazis in private. He had that kind of look about him.

Very soon they were passing through an area of gaudy neon and busy sidewalks. Gibson felt a little more encouraged. This was more like it. The pulsing, rippling lights and their mirror images on the wet street were beacons of vibrant trashy humanity against a darkness that, from where Gibson was sitting, seemed increasingly cold, threatening, and polluted. Ever since he'd been a kid, Gibson had been drawn to the bright lights of big cities. They'd been both his strength and quite possibly a part of his downfall. Certainly they'd always been there, offering their comfort, winking and blinking and constantly renewing their tawdry promises, so no matter how many times he'd been stung or cheated or washed up and left for dead in the cold daylight, he always went back.

The driver turned in his seat. "You see anything you fancy in this sink of iniquity?"

Gibson stared out of the window at the passing show. "Yeah, a whole bunch of things."

What Gibson mainly saw were the crowds, and in their numbers he knew he had his best chance of safety. They moved along the sidewalks like the crowds in every red-light district he'd ever been in, strictly divided into two groups, the prey and the predators, the suckers and the players. The suckers always moved with a slow aimlessness, always looking for the forbidden thrills, always hoping and too stupid or too desperate to give up and go home, even when they must have realized that those thrills were just myth or imagined shadows. The predators only moved when they had to. With some, movement was a matter of open display, as with the prostitutes who swung their hips and lazily chewed their gum, or the corner cardsharps who flashed their cuffs and recited the soft come on. Others merely waited in the shadows, like the smooth, watchful, well-fed pimps in their sharkskin and gold checking on their stables, or the nervous takeoff artists laying for the careless or the drunk and ready to melt away at the first approach of a cop. Streets like this were a beckoning refuge for anyone on the run or with a need to disappear. There were already so many criminals, marginals, and illegals living on them that an organic system of boltholes, hiding places, warnings, and alarms was firmly in place. Streets like the Luxor Strip might take no prisoners, but they also asked very few questions.

The driver pulled over to the curb. "I'll let you off here if that's okay."

Gibson squinted at the meter. If he was reading the numbers right, the fare was 3.75. Gibson had yet to learn the name of the smaller unit of UKR currency that was one-hundredth of a kudo. His reckoning must have been correct, because the driver seemed quite satisfied with his kudo-and-a-half tip.

As Gibson climbed out of the cab, the driver raised a hand. "You watch your ass now, you hear?"

Gibson gri

The first thing that Gibson heard was the sound of bebop: a tune that sounded unca

He couldn't read the neon signs, but the majority of their messages were loud and clear. Sex seemed once again to be the major selling point, and half the places that he passed featured some variation of striptease or girly show. On the other side of the street a blue neon woman with an hourglass figure and vibrant yellow hair towered three stories above the sidewalk, swinging her electric-light hips while her red bikini flashed on and off. When the bikini was in the off phase, pink nipples glowed in the center of her massive breasts. On the same sidewalk a gang of teenage boys shouldered their way through the slower-moving crowds with the nervous urgency of a gang on the prowl, obviously out of their own neighborhood but determined to play it tough in front of the more serious lowlifes who really operated on the Strip and called it home. In their black leather jackets, Hawaiian shirts, and black dungarees, they resembled the chorus from a revival of West Side Story. Gibson smiled to himself. What would they be getting next in this town, James Dean movies?

As he approached the next corner he spotted another group of people who seemed to be going against the general flow. A half-dozen hard-faced men in riding boots and field-green military-style uniforms were aggressively handing out leaflets, thrusting them into the hands of unwary passersby with intimidating looks that challenged the recipient to either refuse the flyer or try and hand it back if he dared. Gibson immediately recognized the emblem on their red arm bands. He was seeing altogether too much of the sinister purple eagle, and he quickly altered direction to give them the widest possible berth, A hooker in a red skirt slit to her thigh saw what he was doing and flashed him a fleeting smile of sympathy. Gibson had stopped believing in whores with hearts of gold a long time ago, but the smile gave him a moment of pause. Then he noticed that she, too, was wearing sunglasses after dark. Perhaps, under the thick pancake makeup, she was just a fellow albino expressing solidarity.

From the moment that he'd left the cab, Gibson had started noticing just how many genetic aberrations there were walking the streets of Luxor. Even allowing that there would be a higher proportion of freaks and misfits around a place like the Strip than maybe in other parts of the city, the numbers were startling. Gibson had spotted at least a dozen individuals with facial deformities in the space of two blocks, plus two more albinos and a beanpole of a man who had to be well over seven feet tall. The dwarfs were so numerous that they almost formed a second stratum on the sidewalk. The genetic damage in this dimension was completely out of control, and Gibson wished that the advocates of limited nuclear war back home could see what a bunch of dirty little bombs could do.