Mick Farren - Slide On The Run

Slide's eyes narrowed. "Mina Murray that…"

"Mina Harker that was."

"She who mind melded with Count Dracula?"

Zen nodded with an express of inscrutable amusement. "The very same."

"No bullshit?"

"No bullshit."

"So they've got vampires up on Mars?"

"They're Victorians aren't they?"

They both knew how Slide felt about vampires. They both knew that Slide was intrigued, but form dictated he should raise one more objection. "How the fuck am I supposed to get to Mars in the shape I'm in? Not to mention the almighty goddamned timeleap."

Doc Zen trumped the problem "We have a Carter Machine out back."

"A Carter Machine?"

"Right."

Now Slide was really impressed. "Where the fuck did you get a Carter Machine?"

"I bought it from a traveling Gnostic who was a Dealer in Devices.

"You're kidding me?"

"How do you think I got Ernst and the other Hormad synthetics?"

Slide and Zen exited by a rear door and descended into a sub-basement by means of a freight elevator. Doc Zen's domicile was also larger on the inside than the out, and the basement was like that of a major museum, with irregular lines and groupings of large and dusty, drop-cloth shrouded objects, and long ranks of warehouse style selves on which the smaller items were stacked in piles. Doc Zen had a reputation for hoarding all manner of stuff and especially devices of arcane obscurity, and usually of little or no relevance to the time period in which he was residing. For a minute or more he stood frowning, as though unable to recollect where the hell he had put the damned thing. Then memory seemed to reassert itself. He walked with increasing confidence among the remarkable and extensive collection of junk, finally halting in front of something looked like a sheeted-up hotdog stand with its parasol still open. With a collector's pride, he whipped away the cover, revealing the umbrella canopy of a Gridley Wave generator above a comfortable 19th century style, padded leather armchair with a hinged set of brass and crystal controls that could be swung in front of the seated operator/passenger.

Slide stared at it a slightly bemused expression even for a demon who had seen most things. "That is definitely a Carter Machine."

"I just have to find the power source."

Doc Zen rummaged and eventually located a light absorbing cube that appeared uncomfortable in the relative space it occupied. Slide took a step back. "Is that what I think it is?"

"A simple little matter/anti-matter unit."

"You're messing round with matter/anti-matter in the middle of a highly populated city?

Doc Zen didn't seem at all concerned. "Fuck 'em if they can't take a cosmic joke. And anyway, I'm careful."

Slide seated himself in the chair of the Carter Machine, trying it for size, but, at the same time, he couldn't help remembering that, as far as his information went, the Carter Machine didn't have an exactly unblemished safety record. He had heard tales of how people had checked out under the spinning canopy but then never checked in again. "I'm still not sure I can do this without tetradetoxin, Doc."

Doc Zen's voice took on a tone of provoked impatience. "Fuck, Yancey, don't you ever stop creating problems? You seriously think Doc Zen is without tetradetoxin?

After Slide had been suitably drugged and otherwise prepared for his departure through space and time, and deprived of his weapon because the Gridley Wave would never support even that mass of metal, Doc Zen leaned in and made sure his seat belt was securely fastened, and then stepped back to a safe distance. "The coordinates are all set. You need only to press forward on the main control lever."

Still Slide hesitated. "I don't know, Doc. I don't know about any of this."

"Fuck you, Yancey, get going, or I'll turn you in to the IIA myself."

With his brain now awash in tetradetoxin, Slide could only do as he was told and go. He pressed forward on the main control lever, and then looked up as the

canopy commenced to turn, allowing himself to be hypnotized by its accelerating rotation. Initially the hallucinations were routine, flapping wings leaving rainbow contrails, and stars streaming down the curvature of space-time like a sparkling mercury fountain, then, fleetingly, as the intergalactic dust clouds rushed past, he crossed the space lanes of the Great Ships of the Ancients, the star-hammers and death-asteroids in which the Shining Ones waged their majestic war on The Great Chalcedon, the Destroyer of Worlds, and he was hurried witness to the carnage and conflagration that resulted when the absolute masters of planetary systems, and the lords of vast gas nebulae clashed in a conflict that he knew would drag on for countless millennia. As he sped across a hundred or more million miles and eighty thousand human centuries, riding the impossible Gridley Wave like the course of the Starchild, he also briefly traversed the black vacuum ranges where the squid-like hydrogen feeders, conceived in the fiery afterbirth of the Big Bang, grazed on the void as they probably would all the way to an approximation of infinity, but then, in an instant he had entered quadrants of light and sound that were impossible to describe even for an idimmu, and where ethereal voices whispered galactic conspiracy in a language he had never encountered before in all his long days, but whose tone was precise enough for Slide to recognize an overpowering evil intent.

When it came, his arrival at his destination was in abrupt and in untoward contrast to the strange and awesome magnificence of the transit. Without warning, he was slammed sideways into hard hot red sand with the force of a dead fall of maybe ten or fifteen feet. For an few moments, Yancey Slide lay stunned and winded, unable to accurately recognize so much as up, light headed in the thin atmosphere, and cautious to make his first move in the reduced gravity. He also realized very quickly that the Carter Machine had not landed with him, and neither had the clothes he had been wearing. He was as bare ass naked as a new born human, without so much as a shirt to cover himself, or any of the small and useful items he had secreted in his pockets before his departure from Doc Zen's. It was more that sufficient to cause him to curse out loud.

"Fuck this for unacceptable shit."

"You must have been extremely drunk."

"What?" The perfect incongruity of the shrill squeaky and over-sibilant voice, with it's slightly affected and decidedly campy English lisp, fitted with the rest of Slide's current predicament so exactly that he moved his head enough to observe that the speaker, was small, barely eighteen inches tall, and resembled a Maine lobster on spindly tripod legs.

"This far down the canal and bareass naked."

"What?"

"I said you must have been extremely drunk to get all this way out of town and lose your clothes into the bargain. You sure must have tied one on."

"Did you see how I got here?"

"No memory?"

Slide was getting tried of this crustacean assuming he was a mislaid drunk. "Just answer the question."

The lobster boy made a negatory gesture with a antennae. "No. I didn't see how you got here. You were fully here when I came sashaying by, out cold in your birthday suit."

"I came a long way to be here. All the fucking way from Earth."

"Are you telling me you're John Carter? Because, if you are, I'm flatly not going to believe you."

"I'm not John Carter, and neither am I Ulysses Paxton, but I arrived here by a similar means of transport."

"So welcome to Malecandra, or Barsoom, or Mars if you prefer it."

"Mars will do."

"My name is Mahdjfb.