Goodly nodded. “From his point of view, anyway.”
“And from ours?”
“He’s dangerous,” Goodly answered, “but not just yet. And that’s the other thing about his psychological profile: the fact that only a very thin wire separates his genius from downright instability. And just like a tightrope, that’s a wire we daren’t jerk about too much. So for the moment, while I admit I’m itchy, I’m not yet sweating.”
“And when you start to sweat?”
The precog nodded, promising, “You’ll be the first to know it.”
Looking at Goodly, Trask made no reply. He knew that the precog would be right, but he couldn’t help wishing he didn’t look so much like a mortician …
Later, Tzonov guided his guests through Perchorsk’s labyrinth of corridors and levels down towards its core, which the handful of men who knew of its existence had christened “the Gate.”
“You probably know the background to all of this as well as I do,” he said. “I was a mere youth at the time, an avid student of ESPionage at the Moscow academy. I knew nothing of all this; my forte was metaphysics, not physics. Anyway, when they tested their device it backfired, and the energy it released was unbelievable! In the immediate vicinity of the pile matter flowed like water, and radiating outwards from it … I’m told there were three kinds of ‘heat.’ Nuclear radiation, though not as much as one might expect; then the physical heat of combustion; and finally an alien heat which warped, melted and fused things together, but without burning.”
Tzonov paused to open a door-sized hatch in a steel bulkhead, ushered Trask and Goodly through, and followed on behind. “As for the radioactivity,” he continued on the other side, “it has been cleared up now. A very few hot spots remain. But don’t worry, we shall of course avoid them. There are several places we cannot avoid, however, which define various zones of contamination: the areas in which those common—and alien—heat energies which I mentioned expended themselves. This corridor is an example of ‘common’ heat, the sort that burns.”
Beyond the bulkhead door, the corridor reached out ahead, wound to the left and receded from sight. Strip lighting in the ceiling loaned everything a blue-tinged sheen and flicker, humming electrically where sections of old neon tube were starting to short out. Despite the absence of tracks, platform, benches, still Trask found the place strangely reminiscent of a certain neglected London tube station in the wee small hours, one which he must have used frequently fifteen years ago before they were all refitted, but couldn’t name or bring to mind now except as an echo of this place.
But there was one other big difference between some nameless underground station of the early nineties and this place: evidence of that terrific physical heat which Tzonov had mentioned, sufficient to blacken and even partially melt the rough rock of the ceiling, until it had run down like lava to solidify on the cooler metal of wall panels and bulky steel stanchions. Underfoot, rubber floor tiles had burned through to naked steel plates which themselves were buckled right out of alignment; while in the walls, veins and drips and splashes of red, fused copper were all that remained of ancient wiring.
Leading the way, Tzonov nodded curtly to a group of lab-smocked scientists where they leaned against a pockmarked wall and compared notes. “They still study this place as avidly—should I perhaps say as morbidly?—as ever,” he wryly commented, when the scientists had been left behind. “They measure, examine, photograph, and sample, without ever reaching any positive conclusion other than the one Viktor Luchov reached all those years ago: that when the blowback occurred the pile ate itself and mundane matter bent inwards and outwards, and even backwards, in space-time—until it warped through the ‘wall’ of this universe and created the Gate.”
Tzonov glanced at his guests and quickly added, “Oh, don’t worry, I’m not going to give too much away! What? Why, our best physicists have been working at it for twenty years and getting nowhere, so don’t take it as an insult if I doubt that you two will discover the secrets of the universe in a few short hours, days, or even weeks! Anyway, your agent Michael J. Simmons was here that time, and the Necroscope Harry Keogh, too, before you chased him out of this world. Surely one or both of them have already filled in most of the blank spots for you.”
Trask shook his head. “Harry was never able to stay here too long,” he said, looking the Russian straight in the eye. “And even he had to admit that the math was too much for him. The Gate was an accident, when the universe suffered a power surge and its computer crashed. That was how he explained it, anyway. As for Jazz Simmons: he never returned to England and lives in the Greek islands still. In those days our Department of Dirty Tricks pulled a fast one on him. He’s never forgiven us, and I for one don’t blame him. The same must be said for Zek Föener, but in her case it was your people who gave her the runaround.”
Tzonov shrugged. Trask had given him the opportunity to read his mind, and he hadn’t wasted it. Every word the British esper had spoken had been the truth, as he saw it. “Well, times change,” the Russian said. And by way of changing the subject: “So actually, this is all quite new to you?”
“Most of it,” Trask told him. “The sight and feel of it, certainly. A picture is better than a hundred words. The physical reality is better than a blueprint.”
“Oh?” Tzonov raised a thin eyebrow as he came to a halt at the head of a flight of aluminum stairs, which from their bright sheen were a recent fitment. “It’s better to see something than to have an accurate description? Well, I take your meaning, of course, and normally would agree with you. Except there are things here which were better sight unseen. They lie in an area that suffered the other sort of heat, which may only be experienced in the melting pot of space-time. If it were my choice I would not show such things to you, but since they lie between us and the Gate …” He shrugged again and led the way down the stairs. “I’m told that Viktor Luchov called these the magmass levels.”
“Magmass?” Ian Goodly was trembling slightly where he followed on after the others on uncertain legs, descending into a dimly lighted region between levels proper. Trask sensed the tremor in his colleague’s voice and guessed it was his talent working. Well, Tzonov had tried to warn them. And:
“Yes,” the Russian answered, but very quietly now, as he came to a halt. And quite unnecessarily, he pointed. “Magmass. Now you can have the ‘sight’ and ‘feel’ of it, and perhaps you will even feel something of what it must have been like, when Perchorsk was gutted like a soft-bellied fish.”
Trask and Goodly looked, and knew that they had entered a region of sheerest fantasy. They stared into the dim recesses of a weird chaos, a vastly disordered cavern or vault, where the lighting was deliberately subdued so as to hide the most monstrous effects. For certainly what little could be seen was frightening, or disconcerting to say the least. It was as if the stairs had carried them out of this universe into a place where human laws no longer applied, where geometry and substance and science itself had failed … and the magmass had taken over.
Tzonov was on the move again, and drawn in his footsteps the British espers followed, silent where they gazed on these creations of drugged hallucination and madness. Down through a tangle of warped plastic, fused stone, and blistered metal they passed, where on both sides amazingly consistent (in so much inconsistency) smooth-bored tunnels some two or three feet in diameter wound and twisted like the wormholes of ocean parasites in rotting coral, except they drove through solid rock, crumpled girders, and other, far less recognizable debris or residua.
And Trask thought: It’s like an alien alchemy! Some titan force tried to make everything one here, or change it all to a new unreality.
Looking at him, Tzonov nodded. “Yes,” he said. “To change it, or deform it beyond all recognition. It’s not so much that the various materials have been fused by heat and fire, rather that they’ve been folded in like a mass of dough, or plasticine in the hands of a vast mad child. But this is only a small par
t of it, and I certainly won’t show you the worst. No, for metal and plastic and rock were not the only materials which suffered this awful magmass change, but at least they are not … what? Biodegradable? I am sure you take my meaning.”
Goodly shuddered. “What a horror!” he said.
Tzonov agreed. “The more accessible areas were cleansed with hard acids, while other places were simply sealed off. A good many of the magmass moulds simply don’t bear scrutiny.”
The stairs had descended to a bed of magmass, leveling into a catwalk along a vertical wall of unbroken rock like the face of a cliff. Seen over the aluminum handrails and through the metal lattice of the walkway, the floor was chaotically humped and anomalous, where different materials were so mixed as to have no individual identity whatsoever. And looping the loop—twisting and twining through all the warped, congealed mass of this earthly yet hideously immundane material—there ran those weird wormhole energy channels which had carried the flux of a nightmarish nuclear cancer through the heart of Perchorsk, reducing it to this.
Looking at it (and Trask found that he must look at it, that his eyes were drawn to it as in some morbid fascination), he began to feel nauseous and was sure that Goodly must feel the same. Until suddenly, looming on the left of the walkway and bringing a sense of renewed reality, a perfectly circular opening appeared in the face of the wall of warped rock. Here the catwalk turned left into the mouth of the shaft, widened out to become a rubber-coated stairway, then continued its descent towards a region of eerie illumination down below.
“The core,” Tzonov informed his guests tonelessly as a group of armed, uniformed soldiers came clattering up through the shaft, heading in the opposite direction. “The hole or cavern which was eaten out of the solid rock when the atomic pile imploded and formed the Gate: a most unnatural cavern, as you will see. The guard has just now been changed and these soldiers released from duty. Ah, but see how eager they are! The core is not a pleasant place. And even though the Gate is now secure, made safe to the very best of our ability, still we guard it. One can never tell …”
At the lower end of the shaft there was a railed landing, this time of steel and supported on steel stanchions. Flanked by Trask and Goodly, Tzonov went to the rail and leaned on it, staring grimly at the scene below. He had called this place a “cavern” of sorts, but a most unnatural one. Now the British espers could see why.
It was like being in a cavern, but there was no way one might mistake it for any ordinary sort of cave. The solid rock had been hollowed out in the shape of a perfect sphere, a giant bubble in the very roots of the Ural Mountains—but a bubble well over a hundred and twenty feet in diameter! The curving, shiny-black wall all around was glass-smooth except for the wormholes which riddled it everywhere, even in the domed ceiling. Where the three men were standing, the mouth of the shaft pointed downwards at forty-five degrees directly at the centre of the space—the core itself—which was occupied by what looked like a huge steel ball supported on a tripod of massive hydraulic rams. The ball would have to be a little more than thirty feet in diameter.
“Inside it, the Gate,” Tzonov explained. “We cased it in carbon steel a foot thick, welded together in three sections. The rams support the sections and can apply massive pressure to keep them welded together, if it were ever necessary. But within the shell … the Gate supports itself, floating there dead centre, right where it was born on the night of the accident, when the test was aborted.”
Trask looked at him in the painful blue-white glare of faulty strip lighting. “And that’s where you’ve trapped your visitor? In there? Inside the Gate?”
“Obviously. No way we can let him through, until we know what we’re dealing with.”
“I think it’s time we saw him,” Trask said. “How long has he been here?”
“Four days,” Tzonov told him. “After Premier Turchin himself was informed, I was the first to know of his arrival. Ordered here from Moscow, I saw, assessed, contacted you. You know the rest. You’ll understand, of course, that the complex isn’t my ordinary place of work. Until now my interest in Perchorsk has been purely academic.” (He had made a simple mistake! Trask saw the lie immediately, but knew that it wouldn’t be to his advantage to point it out. He said nothing, letting Tzonov continue.) “When one considers the esoteric aspect of this latest incident … obviously I was the right man for the job.”
Goodly seemed puzzled. “But four days, in there? He must be starving!”
Tzonov looked at him reprovingly. “Do you think we’re all barbarians, then? He has been fed, of course. Indeed, it was an opportunity we really couldn’t afford to miss: to find out what he eats. Oh yes, for other creatures have come through the Gate before this one, Ian, whose appetites were … well, suspect, to say the least!” Without another word he led the way down steel steps to a perimeter walkway, and out over a wide gantry catwalk to the enigmatic, shining ball of carbon steel …
2
The Visitor, and a Visit
Around the steel sphere, encircling it like an inner ring of Saturn, but so close as to almost touch the ball itself, the railed catwalk was maybe ten feet wide; it was equipped with consoles, computers, viewscreens. A handful of scientists and technicians were seated at a master console; others moved around the core’s catwalk, carefully measuring and examining, concentrating on their various instruments and tasks.
Crossing the gantry, Trask had absorbed all he could of the so-called cavern. There were no soldiers in attendance at the core itself, but a trio of emplacements on the perimeter under the inward curving walls were manned and equipped with high-velocity cannon, and the battery directly opposite the master console was further equipped with a small tracked vehicle bearing a dull metal container and the obscene, squat-nozzled hoses of what could only be a flamethrower unit. Well read in what few documents were available concerning the Perchorsk Gate, Trask knew enough to appreciate the significance of all of these “precautions.”
Likewise he understood the meaning of a trio of scaffolding towers which reached up from the curving floor higher than the gantry, consoles, and central sphere itself, to where a triangular framework suspended from the ceiling joined them up and strengthened the structure. Central in this metal web, a nest of carboys was connected to a sprinkler system whose outlets were aimed down onto the inner walkway and gantry. Should the system be activated, a hard acid rain would drench this entire area. So much for scientists, consoles, and catwalk! Draconian but effective, the system left no room for speculation about the inimical nature of what these people might be called upon to deal with down here.
And everywhere Trask looked, the claustrophobic wall of the bubble cavern formed a shiny-black backdrop, glass-smooth except for the wormholes riddling it through all its quarters, in the upward curving floor, encircling walls, and domed ceiling alike; that dull black glitter of all-enclosing, seemingly endless surface, alive with its myriad firefly reflections of the inadequate lighting system: like standing in the heart of some strange dark crystal. As for what Turkur Tzonov had said—that the core was not a “pleasant” place—well, that had to be the understatement of the century! Trask knew that if he were a Russian soldier, he’d consider Perchorsk a punishment posting!
As the three men approached the master console, one of the seated scientists turned, saw them, and gave a small, involuntary start. He reached out and flipped a switch. Viewscreens dissolved at once into white static and dazzling oscillations, quiet conversations tailed into silence, all heads turned and cold stares greeted the newcomers. Tzonov, smiling thinly, told Trask and Goodly, “As you see, they don’t even trust me yet, let alone you two! They consider me ‘muscle’—like the KGB—and here in the United Soviet States we don’t yet have your own degree of cooperation between mind and muscle. Also, they are scientists, while we are mere metaphysicians, fakirs in whom they have no great faith. Fortunately we know that we are more truly mind than they could ever give us credit for. And in any case, no one
here may gainsay me.”
His smile went out like a light turned off as he snapped some order in Russian at the console controller. The man sat there staring at him for a moment, but Tzonov’s authority—and his eyes—had already won the battle of wills. The scientist’s lips twitched a little in the left-hand corner as he switched the screens on again. And:
“Our visitor,” said Tzonov.
It was sudden, but the British espers had been expecting something like it and were able to cover their astonishment. At first the white dazzle—a backdrop of pure white, a veritable snowfield—got in the way, but as their eyes adjusted to the blaze and focused on the man on the screens, they saw that he was Harry Keogh—or Alec Kyle—or both of them. He was the Necroscope, or a twenty-year-old version of him, anyway!
Harry Junior! Trask and Goodly could scarcely be blamed for thinking the selfsame thought, which they kept to themselves as best they could. As it happened they were right in one sense, and totally wrong in another; but out of the corner of his eye Trask saw Turkur Tzonov’s satisfied nod, and wondered if the telepath had zoomed in on them. Tzonov didn’t keep him in suspense.
“I think so, too,” he said, an indicator that Trask could stop trying to conceal his suspicions and give his full attention to the scene in the scanners. He did so.
Goodly, on the other hand, chose to hide his thoughts and feelings behind a screen of questions. “Closed-circuit TV? You have cameras on the inside?”