Luchov did as Harry ordered, the yellow veins pulsing rapidly under the scar-tissue skin of his seared skull. Harry looked at Luchov’s disfigurement, saw that the damage was fairly recent. ‘An accident?’
Tight-lipped, breathing just a fraction too quickly, Luchov said nothing. Both he and Harry jumped as the telephone came janglingly alive, ringing repeatedly. Then Harry scowled. They must have some clever people working here; it seemed they’d already located him; he wouldn’t have time to interrogate Luchov – not here, anyway. ‘Get up,’ he said, reaching out and jerking Luchov to his feet.
And still holding him, he conjured a door and dragged the other through it.
In a moment, for the moment, they were out on the ramp in the ravine, snow stinging their eyes and a cold wind rushing down the length of the canyon. Harry looked up at the bleak mountains showing their fangs through the snow. Luchov, seeing where he was – where according to all the laws of science he had no right to be – had barely sufficient time to voice some inarticulate query before –
– Harry dragged him squalling through another door, passed through the Mobius Continuum and exited-on a ledge high over the Perchorsk ravine. Luchov saw the sheer drop under his feet and almost fainted. He let out a wild shriek and pressed himself back into the face of the cliff behind him. And again Harry commanded: ‘Sit -before you fall.’
Luchov carefully sat down, hugged his dressing-gown to him, shivered partly from the cold and partly from the terror of this totally unbelievable and yet entirely inescapable experience. Harry went down on one knee before him and put his gun away. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘I should think that dressed as we are, we’ve about ten to fifteen minutes before we freeze to death. So you’d better talk fast. There are things I want to know – about the Perchorsk Projekt. And I have it on good authority that you’d be the one to tell me. So I’ll ask the questions and you’ll answer them.’
Luchov collected his whirling senses as best he could, recovered something of his dignity. ‘If … if I have only fifteen minutes left, then so do you. We both freeze.’
Harry grinned wolfishly. ‘You don’t catch on too quickly, do you? I don’t have to stay here. I can leave you right now. Like this -‘ And he was no longer there. Snow swirled in the space where he had kneeled. He returned, said: ‘So what’s it going to be? Do you talk to me or do I simply leave you here?’
‘You’re an enemy of my country!’ Luchov blurted, feeling the cold start to bite.
‘That place of yours,’ Harry nodded toward the grey sheen of lead far below, ‘appears to be an enemy of the world – potentially, anyway.’
‘If I tell you anything – anything – about the Projekt, then I’m a traitor!’ Luchov protested.
This wasn’t getting Harry anywhere, and now he was cold, too. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘You’ve seen what I can do -but you haven’t seen everything. I’m also a Necroscope: I can talk to the dead. So I can talk to you alive, or I can talk to you dead. If you were dead you’d be only too glad to talk to me, Viktor, for then I’d be your only real contact with the world.’
‘Talk to the dead?’ Luchov shrank even further down into himself. ‘You’re a madman!’
Harry shrugged. ‘Obviously you don’t know much about espers. I take it you and Khuv don’t get on too well?’
Luchov’s teeth had started to chatter. ‘ESP? Is this something to do with ESP?’
Harry had run out of time and patience. ‘OK,’ he said, straightening up, ‘I can see you need convincing. So I’m going to leave you now. I’m going somewhere else, somewhere warm. I’ll come back in about five minutes, or maybe ten. Meanwhile you can make up your mind: to talk to me or to attempt to climb down from here. Personally I don’t think you’d make it. I think you’d fall, and then that we would talk again when I found your body at the bottom of the ravine.’