‘Indeed I am!’ Luchov was vehement. ‘As Guardian of the Earth, yes!’
‘Guardian of . . .?’
‘Press it!’ Luchov whispered, cutting him short. ‘If anything should happen to me, press the bloody thing! Don’t delay – don’t waste time phoning Gorbachev or those mumbling cretins who so poorly serve him – but press the button! Get it over and done with and send your exorcets on a real mission of exorcism, into the world beyond the Gate, before the devil himself comes spewing out of there right into your face! Have you got that?’
The Major took a pace to the rear. His eyes were very wide now, very concerned; and still Luchov held his arm in a steel grasp. ‘Sir, I . . .’
Abruptly Luchov released him, straightened up a little and stiffened his back and shoulders, then glanced away. ‘Say nothing.’ He gave a curt, almost dismissive nod. ‘For the moment, don’t say anything at all. But neither must you forget what I said. Don’t you dare forget it, that’s all!’
How to answer him? With a smile, which might be misinterpreted? With words? But Luchov had advised him to say nothing, and anyway the Major had no words. Perhaps it were better if he simply forgot the whole incident. Except Luchov had warned him about that, too. And anyway, would it be a wise move: to forget that this possibly dangerous man was in charge here? And in so doing, to forget what he was in charge of …
Saving the Major from further embarrassment and possibly worse, a hatch in the fish-scale plates clanged back on its hinges and a maintenance engineer came up from below. Staggering a little as he stood up in the glare of the Gate, he wrenched breathing apparatus from his pale damp face and put on plastic goggles. Then he reached out a groping hand, as if seeking support, and staggered again.
Luchov recognized him, went to him at once with the Major following on behind. ‘Felix Szalny?’ The Projekt Direktor took the man’s arm, steadied him. ‘Is it you, Felix?’ (He could be familiar when he thought the situation required it.) ‘But you look like you saw a ghost!’
The coveralled maintenance man, small, balding, smudged with grime, nodded. He blinked his eyes rapidly and glanced back towards the open hatch. ‘The next best thing, anyway, Direktor,’ he muttered almost to himself, wiping cold sweat from his brow with a rag.
‘What is it?’ Luchov felt the short hairs rising at the back of his neck, which they were wont to do all too often in this place. ‘Something below?’
‘Down there, in one of the sealed shafts which was part of the original complex, yes,’ Szalny answered. ‘I was checking a wormhole hotspot. Curiously, the radiation has decreased almost to background; it’s no longer dangerous, anyway. So I opened up the seal and . . . and entered. Eventually the wormhole came out into the old abandoned reactor maintenance level. In there … I found magmass, of course.’
‘Ah!’ Luchov knew what had happened. Or thought he did. ‘There were bodies!’
‘Bodies, yes,’ Szalny answered, nodding. ‘That was part of it, at least. They’d been roasted, inverted, transformed. Some were half-in, half-out of the magmass, like mummies wrapped in warped rock, rubber and plastic. And even after all these long years of entombment, Lord, still I fancied I could hear their screams!’
Luchov was well able to picture it. He had been a scientist here in Perchorsk when the hideous accident happened; he still bore the scars, both upon his seared parchment skull and more permanently in his mind, which was why he now shuddered. ‘It’s as well you came up out of there,’ he said. ‘Later you can take a team down and clean the place out, but for now . . .’
‘I … I tripped over something.’ Szalny was still dazed, still talking almost to himself, because as yet he hadn’t told it all. ‘Something crumbled into dust where I stepped on it, so that I stumbled and crashed against a cyst – which immediately shattered!’
The young Major touched Luchov’s elbow, but this time very carefully. ‘Did he say something about a cyst?’