Even now, yes . . .
It was different, Harry observed, but not that different. For one thing the wooden floorboards of the Saturn’s rings platform had been replaced by these steel plates, radiating outwards from the sphere like giant fish scales.
The Katushevs had gone, too, leaving the Gate surrounded at its own height by a system of ominous-looking sprinklers. And higher up the curving wall of the cavern, on platforms of their own, were the great glass carboys which contained the liquid agent for this sprinkler system: many gallons of highly corrosive acid. The steel plates of the rings sloped slightly downwards towards the centre, so that any spilled acid would run that way; below the sphere Gate, central on the magmass floor, a huge glass tank served as a catchment area for the acid when its work was done.
Its ‘work’, of course, would be to blind, incapacitate, and rapidly reduce to fumes anything that should come through from the other side; for after the last grotesque emergence – of a Wamphyri warrior creature – Viktor Luchov had known that exploding steel or a team of men with conventional flamethrowers just wouldn’t be enough. Not for that sort of thing.
What had been enough was the failsafe system which was in use at that time, which poured thousands of gallons of explosive fuel into the core and then ignited it. Except it had also reduced the complex to a shell. Since when –
‘Why didn’t you get out then?’ Harry inquired, when he’d seen everything he needed to see. ‘Why didn’t you just quit the place, close it up?’
‘Oh, we did – briefly,’ Luchov answered, blinking rapidly where he peered at his dream visitor in the glare of the Gate. ‘We got out, sealed off the tunnels, filled all the horizontal ventilation and service shafts into the ravine with concrete, built a gigantic steel door onto the old entrance like a door on a bank vault. Why, we did as good a job on the Perchorsk Projekt as they’d later do on the reactor at Chernobyl! And then we had people sitting out there in the ravine with their sensors, listening to it … until we realized that we just couldn’t stand the silence!’
Harry knew what he meant. The horror at Chernobyl couldn’t reactivate itself; it wasn’t likely to become sentient. But if sentient minds could plug the holes at Perchorsk, others – however alien – might always unplug them.
‘We had to know, to be able to see for ourselves, that all was well down here,’ Luchov continued. ‘At least until we could deal with it on a more permanent basis.’
‘Oh?’ Harry was keenly interested. ‘Deal with it permanently? Will you explain?’
And Luchov might have done just that, except Harry had allowed himself to become just a fraction too intense, too real. And suddenly the Projekt Direktor had known that this was more than any ordinary dream.
Starting awake in his austere, cell-like room, the Russian jerked upright in his bed and saw Harry sitting there, staring at him with eyes like clots of fluorescent blood in the room’s darkness. Then, remembering his dream, and panting his shock where he pressed himself to the bare steel wall, Luchov gasped, ‘Harry Keogh! It is you! You . . . you liar!’
Again Harry knew what he meant. But he shook his head. ‘I told you no lie, Viktor. I haven’t killed men for their blood, I’ve created no vampires, and I wasn’t myself infected that way.’
‘That’s as may be,’ the other gasped, ‘but you are a vampire!’
Harry smiled, however terribly. ‘Look at me,’ he said, his voice very soft, almost warm, even reasonable. ‘I mean, I can hardly deny it, can I?’ And he leaned himself a little closer to Luchov.
The Russian was as Harry remembered him; his skin might be a shade more sallow, his eyes more feverish, but basically he was the same man. Small and thin, he was badly scarred and the hair was absent from the left half of his face and yellow-veined skull. But however vulnerable Luchov might seem, Harry knew that in fact he was a survivor. He had survived the awful accident which created the Gate, survived all of the Things which subsequently came through it, even survived the final holocaust. Yes, survived everything. So far, anyway.