. . . His resurgence was almost as big a shock as his entry: he passed through the skin of the sphere, then slid down its curve crashingly onto a jumble of stony debris between the sphere and the crater wall. For indeed he saw that the sphere was inside a crater, and directly overhead – a second sphere!
So that now Harry could see almost all of the picture. The jigsaw was very nearly complete. The Gate he had just traversed was the original. The one above, seated in the mouth of the crater, had appeared here simultaneous with the creation of its twin – its other ‘end’ – in Perchorsk. Perhaps the presence of the first had somehow influenced the location of the second, Harry couldn’t say. Maybe Mobius would know.
Except –
If that decapitated corpse in the cave had come through comparatively recently, and also the walkie-talkie . . . were the Wamphyri now using the original sphere as a dumping site? And why dump a radio? But one thing was certain: they had passed through. They had entered the sphere – this sphere – from this side. And if they had found their way down here, then he could make his way up. No sooner had the thought occurred than he saw the magmass wormholes running through the rock. They were everywhere, cutting smoothly through the solid rock at all angles.
Under his duffle-coat, Harry still had his torch clipped to his belt. He took the torch out, chose a horizontal shaft and wriggled in. In a little while the hole turned to the right, then bent sharply into a descent. Harry abandoned it, came out backwards. Other holes were no better. But then, at his fifth attempt . . .
… He found a hole which climbed gently, not so steeply as to cause him to slide back. In a little while it, too, bent to one side, the left, following which it rose marginally more steeply. Then it levelled out and swung right. But beyond the level bend it shot almost vertically upward. Harry stood up, switched off his torch. After the claustrophobia of the hole this was a little better; for now it was as though he stood at the bottom of a shallow well. Up there, strange constellations of stars glittered brightly in a black, jewelled sky. He reached up a hand . . . the rim of the hole was at least twenty-four inches beyond his grasp.
He bent his knees, jumped. A hard thing to spring upright and make any height in the confined space of a hole two and a half feet across! Especially in a duffle-coat, carrying a heavy machine-gun, with a spare magazine and two hundred rounds in your pockets.
The gun!
Harry took the weapon from his shoulder, extended the sling to its full extent. Taking the gun by the barrel, he pushed its stock up the smooth bore of the wormhole, hooked its pistol-grip over the rim. Then, wedging himself against the wall, he used elbows and knees to gain enough height to get his foot into the loop of the dangling sling. And after that it was easy. Gradually straightening up, he dragged himself out of the wormhole and hauled the gun up after him.
Panting a little from his exertions, he scanned the terrain. And just as it had affected Zek Foener, Jazz Simmons and others before them, so it affected Harry. Starside at sundown was – weird!
But while Harry observed Starside, so too was he observed. Keen-eyed shapes moved in the shadows of boulders to the west, and a flitting thing high overhead squeaked a cry beyond the range of Harry’s ears to detect. Then the great bat, Desmodus, sped east, making for a distant stack, while on the ground a trog set off to lope westward, cupping horny hands to his Neanderthal face and sending a cry ringing ahead of him. The cry was heard, picked up, passed on. A straggled scattering of trogs spread out over many miles passed the eerie message down the line.
Almost at the same time the messages were received both in the stack and in the Dweller’s garden. But where Lord Shaithis of the Wamphyri must order a flyer readied and descend to the launching bays, the Dweller was not dependent upon that sort of conveyance; he simply inclined his head and listened for a moment, turned his eyes eastward and sighed. The newcomer’s identity could not be doubted; the Dweller would have known that mind anywhere, any time.