Which led to his next line of enquiry: Mobius himself.
August Ferdinand Mobius (1790-1868), a German mathematician and astronomer, lay in his grave in a Leipzig cemetery. His dust was there, anyway, which to Harry Keogh, Necroscope, was one and the same thing. Harry had been to see Mobius before, to discover the secret of the Mobius Continuum. In life Mobius had invented it (though he personally had denied that, telling Harry that in fact he’d merely ‘noticed’ it) and in death he’d gone on to develop his theories into precise sciences, albeit sciences no living person would ever comprehend. None, that is, except Harry Keogh himself. And Harry’s son, of course.
The last time Harry was here he’d come by rather more conventional means: by air to Berlin, then through Check-Point Charlie to the east – as a tourist! But mundane as his arrival had been, his exit from Leipzig had been along an entirely different route – through a Mobius door. That had been Harry’s first experience of the Mobius Continuum, since when he’d become an expert in his own right.
But there had been far more than that to Harry’s visit, and even now he might not have discovered the correct mental formulae but for the spur he’d received at that time. Harry had been on the ‘wanted’ list of the Soviet E-Branch. The emerging vampire Boris Dragosani, a member of that branch, had wanted to take Harry – alive if possible – and draw from him the secret of his weird talents. Dragosani was a necromancer who ripped the private thoughts of the dead out of their ravaged bodies, who read their secrets in brain fluids and torn ligaments, in ruptured organs and eviscerated guts. It would be so much easier if he could simply talk to the dead, like Harry. They might not respect him as they did Harry, but the threat of defilement should suffice to open them up. If not . . . well, there was always the other way.
Dragosani had issued a detention warrant, ordering the East German Grenzpolizei to pick Harry up on trumped-up charges. They had tried, and out of necessity Harry had solved the final equation of Mobius’s metaphysical space-time dimension, with which he could summon ‘doors’ on the entire space-time universe. Barely in time, Harry had used one of these doors. Ironically, perhaps, it had floated into view (but only Harry’s view) across the face of Mobius’s headstone!
From then on Harry’s invasion of the Soviet E-Branch and the destruction of Dragosani had been an inexorable process, in the course of which his own body had been destroyed and abandoned as once more he escaped to the Mobius Continuum. There, as an incorporeal being, a bodiless mind and soul, eventually he had discovered and entered into the drained shell of Alec Kyle. This had been an almost involuntary event – Kyle’s body, a living vacuum, had seemed to reach out and suck Harry in – but it had given him a place among men again and ended what was otherwise an interminable existence in the matterless Mobius Continuum.
And now Harry was back in Leipzig, standing by Mobius’s grave as before. Almost nine years had passed since last he was here, but he hadn’t forgotten those events which terminated his first visit. And so on this occasion he’d come by night.
A moon hung low over the city’s skyline, and the stars were very bright between streamers of fast-fleeing cloud. The night wind, moaning through the headstones, sent wrinkled leaves scurrying like mice, and Harry felt a chill in his bones which was born partly of the natural cold of a November night, and partly of his feeling of alienation here in this place. But the cemetery gates were closed for the night, the lights in the city subdued, and apart from the scrape of leaves all was silence.
He sought Mobius out and found him, and as before the great mathematician was busy with his formulae and his calculations. Tables of planetary mass and motion, the ‘weights’ of the sun and her satellite worlds in their careening round, were balanced against orbital velocities and gravitic forces; formulae so complex that even Harry’s intuitive grasp found their purpose elusive, together with simultaneous equations whose answers filled themselves in even as he watched; all of these figures and configurations beat on Harry’s awareness like the ever-changing results of an on-going process on the screen of some vast computer. And Harry saw that the problem was so complex and so close to completion that he let it go on undisturbed by his presence to the end. At which time the screen went blank and Mobius sighed. It was a strange thing, even now, to hear the ‘sigh’ of a dead man.