His audience laughed.
‘Mainly – !’ Klepko held up a warning hand to silence them,’ – this is to let you see how short a span six minutes really is.’ And he pressed a red button on a box seated in front of him on top of his lectern.
Major Byzarnov had seen the simulation before. He wasn’t especially interested in that, but he was interested in the expression on Viktor Luchov’s face. One of rapt fascination. Byzarnov took two paces backwards onto the perimeter walkway, edged up quietly on the gaunt scientist and coughed quietly in the back of his throat.
Luchov turned his head to stare at the Major. ‘You still think this is some kind of game, don’t you?’ he accused.
‘No,’ Byzarnov answered, ‘and I never did.’
‘I note that any order I might give on the use of these weapons is to be “qualified” by you or your 2 I/C. Do you suspect I might order their use frivolously, then?’
‘Not at all.’ The Major shook his head, only too well aware of several close-typed, folded sheets of paper where they bulked out his pocket: Luchov’s current psychological profile as supplied by the Projekt’s psychiatrist. And to himself: Insanely, yes, but not frivolously.
Luchov’s eyes were suddenly vacant. ‘I sometimes feel that I’m being punished,’ he said.
‘Oh?’
‘Yes, for my part in all of this. I mean, I helped build the original Perchorsk. In those days Franz Ayvaz was the Direktor, but he died in the accident and so paid for his part in it. Since when the responsibility has been mine.’
‘A heavy enough load for any man.’ Byzarnov nodded, moved apart a little, and decided to change the subject. ‘I saw you come up from below, before Klepko started on his demonstration. You were . . . down in the abandoned magmass levels?’
Luchov shuddered, and whispered: ‘God, what a mess things are in, down there! So many of them were trapped, sealed in. I opened a cyst. The thing inside it was like . . . it was an alien mummy. Not rotten or liquid this time, just a grotesque mass of inverted, half-fossilized flesh. Several major organs were visible on the outside, along with a good many curious – I don’t know, appendages? – of rubber, plastic, stone and . . . and . . . and et cetera.’
Byzarnov felt sorry for him. Luchov had been here too long. But not for much longer, not if Moscow would act quickly on the Major’s recommendation. ‘It is terrible down there, Viktor,’ he agreed. ‘And it might be best if you kept out of it.’
Viktor? And Byzarnov’s tone of voice: what, pity? Luchov glanced at him, glared at him, abruptly turned away. And over his shoulder, stridently: ‘So long as I am Projekt Direktor, Major, I’ll come and go as I will!’ And then he made away.
Byzarnov approached Klepko. By now the twin dart shapes moving jerkily across the computer screen had popped into oblivion; the simulation was over; Klepko was finishing off: ‘. . . will still be filled with toxic exhaust fumes and could well be highly radioactive! But of course we shall all be well out of it.’ The Major waited until Klepko had given the dismiss then took him to one side and talked to him briefly, urgently.
About Luchov.
The Necroscope dreamed.
He dreamed of a boy called Harry Keogh who talked to dead people and was their friend, their one light in otherwise universal darkness. He dreamed of the youth’s loves and lives, the minds he’d visited, bodies he’d inhabited, places he had known now, in the past and future, and in two worlds. It was a very weird dream and fantastical – more so because it was true – and for all that the Necroscope dreamed about himself, his own life, still it was as if he dreamed of another.
Finally he dreamed of his son, a wolf . . . except this part was real and not just a memory from another world. And his son came to him, tongue lolling, and said: Father, they’re coming!
Harry came awake on the instant, slid from Karen’s bed, went swift and sinuous to the window embrasure where he drew aside the drapes. He was wary, kept himself well to one side, was ready to snatch back his hand in a moment if that should be necessary. But it wasn’t, for it was sundown. Shadows crept on the mountain divide, usurping the gold from the peaks. Stars at first scarcely visible, came more glowingly alive moment by moment. The darkness was here, and more darkness was coming.