Before retiring she called for Wolf (a real wolf, born on Starside), and when he came from the dark, scented cover of the Mediterranean pines, stationed him at her door. And: Wake me if they should move, she told him . . .
At midnight Harry woke up and went to Perchorsk in the USSR’s Ural’skiy Khrebet. Zek watched him go and wished him luck.
In the Urals it was 3:30 in the morning, and in the depths of the Perchorsk Projekt Viktor Luchov was asleep and nightmaring. He always would nightmare, as long as they kept him here. But now, since British E-Branch’s warning, the nightmares were that much worse.
‘What exactly did that warning consist of?’ a vague, shadowy Harry Keogh inquired of him in his dream. ‘No, don’t tell me – let me take a shot at it, have a go at guessing it. It had to do with me, right?’
Luchov, the Projekt Direktor, didn’t know where Harry had come from but suddenly he was there, pacing the disc’s bolted metal plates with him in the glare of the sphere Gate, arm in arm like old friends in the harrowing heart of Perchorsk, in the very roots of the mountains. And finally he answered, ‘What’s that you ask? Did it have to do with you? But you sell yourself short, Harry. Why, you were all of it!’
They told you about me?’
‘Your E-Branch, yes. I mean, not me specifically. They didn’t tell me. But they did warn the new man in charge of our own ESPionage Group, who of course passed it on to me. Except, I’m not sure I should be repeating it to you.’
‘Not even in a dream?’
‘Dream?’ Luchov shuddered, his subconscious mind briefly, however unwillingly, returning to the horror of what had gone before. He considered that for a moment . . . and in the next recoiled from it as if scalded. ‘My God – but the whole monstrous business was a nightmare! In fact, and for all that you scared me witless, you were one of the few human things about it.’
‘Human, yes,’ said Harry, nodding. ‘But that was then and this is now.’
Luchov disengaged his arm and moved a little apart, then turned and looked at the Necroscope – stared hard, curiously, even fearfully at him – as if to bring him into definition. But Harry’s outline was fuzzy; he wouldn’t come into focus; against the glare of the Gate where its dome came up through the disc, he was a silhouette whose rim was punctuated and perforated with brilliant lances of white light. They say that you . . . that you’re . . .’
That I’m a vampire?’
‘Are you?’ Luchov lay still a minute in his bed and stopped breathing, waiting for the other’s answer.
‘Are you asking: do I kill men for their blood? Has my bite turned men into monsters? Have I myself been turned into a monster by a vampire’s bite? Then I can only tell you . . . no.’ His answer wasn’t entirely a lie. Not yet.
Luchov breathed again, began tossing in his bed as before; and he and Harry continued their tour of inspection around the rim of the glaring sphere Gate. As they went so the Necroscope used a basic form of ESPionage, telepathy, to study the Projekt’s secret core, its awesome nucleus where it was mirrored in the Russian scientist’s subconscious mind. He saw it, that great spherical cavity carved in the mountain’s solid rock, eaten out by unimaginable forces; and in Luchov’s mind the enigmatic Gate was the gravity-defying maggot at its centre, coiled into a perfect ball of matterless white light, motionless, still glutted on energy absorbed in the first moments of its creation. The Gate, floating there like an alien chrysalis, with everything it contained waiting to break loose, to break out.
But Harry also saw that certain things had changed. Some things, anyway. The last time he was here (or rather there, physically there, at the core) it had been like this:
A spidery web of scaffolding had been built halfway up the curving wall at its perimeter, supporting a platform of timber flooring which surrounded the glaring Gate or portal floating on thin air at the cavern’s centre. The effect had been to make the sphere look like the planet Saturn, with a ring-system composed of the encircling timber floor. The cavern was a little more than forty metres in diameter, and the central sphere a little less than quarter of that. There had been a gap of a few inches between the innermost timbers and the event horizon which was the sphere’s ‘skin’.