Comeback Tour

cash-in song, 'Bye-bye Gavin.'

'Look,' said Tozer, 'there seems to be some pattern…'

The blips were converging, amassing. There must be some sort of jungle telegraph. Duroc remembered his uncle taking him to see Johnny Weissmuller films as a child. He imagined hordes of animals crashing through the mud calling out to each other.

'Where is that place?'

Tozer pressed a key, and place names were superimposed over the large-scale map.

'Narcoossee? What's there?'

Tozer asked the map a question, and got a read-out. He whistled.

''Tis a GenTech research establishment, Elder. BioDiv. Classified, of course. They're supposed to be conducting a long-term investigation into immune reactions.'

The green blips were joining together, forming a large blobby mass.

'Immune reactions?'

'That's what they say.'

'Nonsense. They're creating monsters.'

Tozer agreed. 'That's possible. The godless multinats have been trying to get round the legal restrictions on altering the divinely-designed human form for years.'

Duroc saw it immediately.

'And they've got a good source of human raw material in the indentees. They can write their own ticket out here.'

Duroc wasn't sure how he should proceed. The Church was powerful, and every day its worldly influence grew, but GenTech was the largest organization on the planet. It had more employees than most countries had citizens, and its economy was stronger than that of every nation in the world. He didn't want to get the Church of Joseph into a shooting war with the corp. As the Soviet Union was rapidly finding out, that was a conflict that could only be resolved in the favour of the businessmen.

'Pull in all the patrols that are still out there,' he ordered. 'I'm going to have to consult with Salt Lake on this.'

Tozer saluted. 'Blessed be, Elder.'

A comedian was delivering Gavin Mantle's funeral oration in a cathedral full of mourners, doing a series of 'bolt out of the blue' jokes. He was getting nervous laughs.

'Divine lightning' was the expression that was being mainly used to 'explain' the Blotto Lotto winner's sudden death.

Duroc felt unusually on edge. So many of the current circumstances were beyond his control. Tomorrow, when the world was held tight in a Josephite fist, he would breathe again.

He wondered where Simone was. The girl was spooked too, he knew, and he hadn't had time to find out what was wrong.

He left the armoury, and stood on the expanse of cracked, drying concrete. The swamp smell was still strong, and rancid clumps of rotting vegetation were still lying around. He would have them cleared when the crisis point was passed.

The shadow of the rusting gantry fell over the launchpad. Duroc rubbed his eyes. He could have sworn that there was a smudgy shadow in the air by the thing. It was indistinct, but there seemed to be a shape taking form.

'Elder,' said a Donny, 'would you come over and look at this?'

He was smiling, and had a pipe in his hand. They all had pipes, but he had never seen one smoke.

He followed the terminal-stage Josephite over to the gantry. Close-up, the rotting pile was more ominous. It shifted slightly, creaking. It was probably dangerous, and ought to be pulled down.

He looked up. The shadow was still there.

'Look. These have appeared…'

The Donny pointed into the pit. It had been drained. The bottom was blackened from the immense discharge of a Titan 7 rocket. There had been a bad accident here, he had heard.

At the bottom of the pit, outlined a stark white against the sooty black, were three Hiroshima-blast shadows.

They were negative people, with large round heads and thick limbs.

Duroc looked at the Donny. He was calm, his handsome face expressionless, unreadable. He wondered whether the thing could have curiosity, fear, love…

He looked back at the silhouette astronauts.

'But…'

They had moved. He stared at them for a few seconds, and they were still. One seemed to be reaching out, as if to make a reduced-gravity hop on the moon and languidly drift for fifteen yards. Another was rising from a kneeling position, as if finishing prayers. They didn't move.

He looked at the Donny again, and looked back. The leaper was in the air, his lower-legs bent back from the knees, the riser was nearly upright.

The Donny wandered away silently. Night was falling. The white astronaut shapes were brighter in the darkness.

This was one more thing for Duroc to worry about.

He left the gantry, putting the three blast ghosts out of his mind, and looked for Simone.

He found the indenture girl in the bungalow, and she made him forget all his worries for too-short minutes.

The sun went down on the Cape.

XIII

Elder Nguyen Seth, the Summoner, concentrated on the bowl of blood, and his consciousness left his ancient body to roam beyond. In the Outer Darkness, the Dark Ones waited patiently, as they had always done, but Seth could feel their excitement building. After millennia, the scant months that stood between the present and the Day of the Summoning were like seconds. Time had always been the one thing Seth had in abundance, but now there were so many things to be done, and so many sacrifices to be seen to.

Elder Seth looked down upon the gently revolving globe, the Needlepoint satellites sharply outlined against the clouds and the oceans. Lights winked on their years-dead exterior surfaces as they communicated with Sister Addams in Cape Canaveral. The ring of satellite weapons felt comfortable. The Elder slipped into them, and took them as a body. He allowed the IFF transmissions to continue, feeling a tingle as each of the links in the Needlepoint Ring came on line.

Down there, humans swarmed towards their predestined End. Seth thought of his favoured followers: Dune in Florida, serving as his family always had done; Priapus in Berlin, the anarchic satyr ejaculating hate with each thrust; the Waiting Snake in Rome, preparing to strike fatally at the heart of the Vatican. He considered the hordes pouring into Salt Lake City, making it a Paradise on Earth, and of their gradual transformation into Waltons, as their hair blonded and stiffened, their features melted and reformed as handsome masks, and their bodies turned to mannequins. How few of them would be among the Elect, the favoured of the Dark Ones.

For his part, Nguyen Seth hungered for oblivion. His centuries weighted him like chains. With the world's end, and the achievement of the Dark Purpose, his ordeals would be over.

'Old man?'

It was Krokodil, still inside his mind like a nestling parasite, trying to eat away at him.

'It's nearly over, old man.'

If he was still capable of it, Seth loved Krokodil for her wrong-headed persistence. She contained in