‘That’s how the Perchorsk Projekt was born five years ago, and this is where it died three years later. Ayvaz died with it, and Luchov is still here gathering information, piecing it all together and seeing if there’s anything that can be salvaged. As to what happened exactly:
‘What was supposed to happen was this:
‘A beam was to be generated down below in the lower levels. That’s where most of the hardware used to be. Accelerated to the limits of tolerance and excited by atomic bombardment, it would be released up this shaft and emitted like an enormous laser into the ravine. Where the shaft emerged into the ravine, a nest of mirrors would divide the beam into a fan shape which would be waved across the sky and into space. It was to be a test, that’s all. The very first of a series.
‘Alas, there was a failure in the motors which governed the movement of the exterior mirrors. They jammed in the worst possible position at the worst possible moment.
Also, the scientists here had been under pressure; their work had been hurried and performed in conditions which weren’t the best; a full range of failsafe devices had not been incorporated. Do you know what happens, Michael, if you plug the barrel of a gun, load it and pull the trigger? But ridiculous to ask a question like that of a man who is an expert in firearms! Of course you know what happens.
‘Well, and that’s what happened here. There was a colossal blow-back. Energies sufficient to fill an arc of space covering from Afghanistan to Franz Josef Land were trapped and confined within the shaft and redirected back to their source. There was a collision of awesome forces, the instantaneous generation of incredible temperatures, and in the immediate vicinity of the beam matter itself underwent some radical changes. Now of course that is my non-technical layman’s explanation. You will need to talk to Luchov if you want more – but I guarantee you wouldn’t understand him. Not unless there’s a lot more to you than we’ve discovered, anyway.
‘So . . . that was the Perchorsk Incident, or “pi” as your people in the West have christened it. The shambles you see here is not one hundredth part of the devastation which occurred down below, where we’ll be going in a moment. And as for loss of life: we paid a terrible toll for our haste, Michael, a terrible toll. But not so terrible as the toll we may still have to pay . . .’
With those enigmatic words still echoing, Khuv abruptly stood up. ‘Let’s go deeper,’ his words were clipped, urgent, ‘right now! Two levels down, where perhaps you’ll be able to get the feel of what it was really like.’ Jazz got to his feet and followed on, and once again Vyotsky formed their tail along the perimeter a little way, then down wide, heavy-beamed wooden stairs into what could only be termed a region of sheer fantasy.
With one hand lightly on the rail, Jazz stared into the dim recesses of a great disorder, a weird chaos. The lighting was poor here, perhaps deliberately so, for certainly what little could be seen was – to say the least -disconcerting, even frightening. Down through a tangle of warped plastic, fused stone and blistered metal they passed, where on both sides amazingly consistent, smooth-bored tunnels some two or three feet in diameter wound and twisted like wormholes through old timbers, except they cut through solid rock and crumpled girders. And the thought came to the British agent that something, some vast force, had attempted to bring about a certain homogeneity here, had tried to make every different thing into one similar thing. Or had tried to deform everything beyond recognition. It was not so much that the various materials had been fused by heat and fire, rather that they seemed to have been folded-in, like the ingredients of dough, or different coloured plasticines in some monstrous child’s hands.
‘It gets worse,’ said Khuv quietly, leading the way lower still. Those strange tunnels there were not “cut” through the magmass – that’s what Viktor Luchov calls this jumble of matter, incidentally, a “magmass” – they were eaten into it by energy shearing off from the blow-back! We can only guess at the extent of the damage if the installation had been built on the surface.’