Khuv scowled at them. They looked ruffled, unshaven. He dressed them down, told them what had happened and what he wanted. They went into Roborov’s room. By now Savinkov had disappeared, probably sneaked off before Khuv could find more work for him.
But as Khuv and Luchov made to return to the upper levels, so the telepath came back. He was reeling, sobbing, seemed totally uncoordinated. ‘Major – help! I … I… oh, God!’
Khuv pounced on him, grated: ‘What now, Paul?’
‘It’s Leo!’ he gasped.
‘Leo Grenzel?’ The locator! ‘What is it with Leo?’
‘I wondered why he hadn’t picked up the presence of the intruder,’ Savinkov babbled, ‘and so I went to his room. The door was … it was open. I went in, and . . . and . . .’
Khuv and Luchov looked at each other. Their expressions were much the same: shock, disbelief, horror! Savinkov’s reasoning was faultless, of course: Grenzel, if he was awake and well, should have appeared on the scene long before now.
Leaving Savinkov leaning against the metal wall, sobbing, Khuv and Luchov set off down the corridor at a run.
Khuv called back: ‘No alarms, Paul! Only set them off one more time and the entire Projekt will take flight!’
In Grenzel’s room it was a repeat of the same story. His spine had been broken, looked bitten through to the marrow and spinal cord. His sharp features seemed even sharper in death, and his huge, bulging eyes an even deeper shade of grey.
What had those esper’s eyes of his seen before he died, Khuv wondered? And then he stilled the bobbing of his Adam’s apple and staggered out of the room, until he was no longer able to hear Luchov’s throwing up into Grenzel’s toilet …
The Dweller’s garden was a marvellous place.
It was a miniature valley, a gently hollowed ‘pocket’ at the rear of a saddle in the mid-western reach of the mountains. In extent the garden was something a little more than three acres in a row, with the length of its rear boundary against the final rise of the saddle, and its frontage where the saddle started to dip toward frowning cliffs. A low wall had been built there, to keep people from moving too close. In between there were small fields or allotments, greenhouses and a scattering of clearwater ponds. One of the ponds swarmed with rainbow trout, while some of the others bubbled with heat from thermal activity deep in the ground; hot springs, in fact.
Because of the abundance of water the place was lush with vegetation, but only a handful of species were unknown to Earth. The rest of the flowers, shrubs, trees in the garden would have been perfectly at home in any English garden. Harry Jnr’s mother tended them, when she felt up to it. But usually his Travellers looked after the garden, as they looked after almost everything here.
Harry Jnr’s bungalow house was centrally situated, built of white stone with a red tile roof, its front perched over the wide mouth of a well that occasionally gave off streamers of steam. He swam and bathed in the pool regularly. His Travellers (no longer true Travellers, in fact, for they were permanent dwellers here themselves now) inhabited similarly constructed stone houses at the sides of the saddle, where the level ground met rising cliffs. All such homes were centrally heated, with a system of plastic pipes carrying hot water from a deep, gurgling blowhole. They had glass windows, too, and other refinements utterly unheard of before Harry Jnr’s time.
The Dweller (as all of his tenants insisted on calling him) had built greenhouses in which to grow an abundance of vegetable produce. Heated and watered from the springs, his crops were amazing. Also, he had found ways round the long, cold, dark sundowns. Plant species which would adapt already had, but others which wouldn’t received artificial sunlight. The permanently running water drove his generators (small but incredibly powerful machines such as Harry Snr had never seen or even dreamed of before), which in turn powered ultraviolet lamps in the greenhouses – and electric lights in the houses!