Then it had been Yuri’s turn again: ‘And that’s where they built the weapon – under the mountain! Then came the time when they tested it. My father and me, we’d been setting a few traps and were late getting home that night. I remember it clearly: it was a night much like tonight, bright and clear. Where it was darkest in the woods, we could look through the treetops and see aurora borealis shimmering like a strange pale curtain in the northern sky . . .
The humming of the turbines was the loudest it had ever been, so that the air seemed to throb with it. But it was a distant throbbing, you understand, for of course the Projekt is about ten kilometres from here. My father and me, we were somewhere in the middle, maybe four or five kilometres from the source. Anyway, that should give you some sort of idea of the raw power they were drawing from the river.’
‘At the top of Grigor’s Crest,’ Kazimir took up the thread, ‘we stopped and looked back. A wash of light, like the aurora, was playing all along the rim of the Perchorsk ravine. Now, I was one of the first men to settle this place – one of the first victims of Khrushchev’s scheme, you might say – and in all those years I’d seen nothing like this. It wasn’t nature, no, it was the machine, the weapon! Then – ‘ he shook his head, momentarily lost for words, ‘ – what happened next was awesome!’
At this point Yuri had grown excited and once again took over. The turbines had wound themselves up to a high pitch of whining,’ he said. ‘Suddenly … it seemed there was a great gasp or a sigh! A beam of light – no, a tube of light, like a great brilliant cylinder – shot up from the ravine, lit up the peaks bright as day, went bounding into the sky. But fast? – lightning is slow by comparison!
That’s how it seemed, anyway. It was a pulse of light; you didn’t actually see it, just its after-image burning on your eyeballs. And in the next moment it was gone, fired like a rocket into space. Lightning in reverse. A laser? A giant searchlight? No, nothing like that – it had been more nearly solid.’
At that Jazz had smiled, but not old Kazimir. ‘Yuri is right!’ he’d declared. ‘It was a clear night when this happened, but within the hour clouds boiled up out of nowhere and it rained warm rain. Then there blew a hot wind, like the breath of some beast, outwards from the mountains. And in the morning birds came down out of the peaks and high passes to die. Thousands of them! Animals, too! No beam of simple light, no matter how powerful, can do all that. And that’s not all, for right after they’d tested it – after the bar of light shot up into the sky – then there came that smell of burning. Of electrical burning, you know? Ozone, maybe? And after that we heard their sirens.’
‘Sirens?’ Jazz had been especially interested. ‘From the Projekt?’
‘Of course, where else?’ Kazimir had answered. Their alert sirens, their alarms! There’d been an accident, a big one. Oh, we heard rumours. And during the next two or three weeks . . . helicopters flying in and out, ambulances on the new road, men in radiation suits decontaminating the walls of the ravine. And the word was this: blow-back! The weapon had discharged itself into the sky, all right – but it had also backfired into the cavern that housed it. It was like an incinerator; it melted rock, brought the roof down, nearly took the lid off the whole place! They took a lot of dead out of there over the next week or so, since when it hasn’t been tried again.’
‘Now?’ Yuri had had to have the last word. He shrugged his massive shoulders. They run the turbines now and then, if only to keep ’em in trim; but as my father says, the weapon’s been quiet. No more testing. Maybe they learned something from that first trial, and maybe it was something they’d rather not know. Myself, I reckon they know they can’t control it. I reckon they’re finished with it. Except that doesn’t explain why they’re still there, why they haven’t dismantled everything and cleared off.’