The Source by Brian Lumley

The stairs descended to a veritable bed of magmass, only levelling out when they reached a vertical wall of unbroken rock like the face of a cliff. Here the timbers underfoot formed a walkway which turned to the right through an angle of ninety degrees and ran parallel with the foot of the looming wall of rock. Under the boards the floor was chaotically humped and anomalous, where different materials had so flowed into each other as to become unrecognizable in their original forms. And through all the congealed mass of this earthly and yet unfamiliar material ran those irregular wormhole energy channels, very like the indiscriminate burrows of rock-boring crustaceans in the sea, but on a gigantic scale.

‘”Eaten,”‘ Jazz pondered over the word. ‘You said these holes were “eaten” into this stuff – but by what?’

‘Rather, shall we say, “converted”?’ Khuv glanced at him. ‘Perhaps that paints a truer picture, to say that the material was converted into energy. But if you’ll be patient I can show you a far better example. We are going to the place where the pile used to be. That, too, was eaten – or converted, if you prefer.’

‘Pile?’ For the moment Khuv’s meaning didn’t register in Jazz’s confused thoughts.

‘The atomic pile which was the Projekt’s main source of power,’ the Russian explained. ‘The backlash ate it -utterly. Yes, and then it seems it ate itself!’

Jazz might have questioned that statement, too, but now looming on the left of the walkway a huge, perfectly circular hole appeared in the face of the black wall of rock. Light issued from this tunnel where it angled steeply downward, and Jazz didn’t need telling that this was a continuation of the shaft seen in the upper level, which once – and only once – had carried a fearsome beam of energy to the outside world.

The walkway turned left into the mouth of the shaft, became a stairway once again. Blinding white light was painful after the comparative gloom of the two levels through which the party had descended. Ahead and below, the far end of the shaft was a white disk of glaring brilliance, with its lower rim blacked out by the walkway’s platform. Jazz shielded his eyes, saw a young Russian soldier in uniform leaning against the curved wall. The man at once came upright, snapped to attention, slapped the stock of his Kalashnikov rifle in salute. ‘At ease,’ said Khuv. ‘We need some glasses.’

The soldier leaned his rifle against the wall, groped in a satchel slung over his shoulder. He produced three pairs of tinted cellophane spectacles with cardboard rims, like the glasses Jazz had once been issued to view a 3-D film.

‘For the light,’ Khuv explained, though there was hardly any need. ‘It can be blinding until you’re used to it.’ He put on his glasses.

Jazz did the same, followed Khuv down the stairway built through the glass-smooth cylindrical shaft. From behind them came a clatter as the soldier’s rifle toppled over when he went to pick it up, then Karl Vyotsky’s husky, threatening voice hissing: ‘Idiot! Dolt! Would you like to do a month of nights?’

‘No, Sir!’ the young soldier gasped. ‘I’m sorry, sir. It slipped.’

‘You damn well should be sorry!’ Vyotsky rasped. ‘And not only for the rifle. What the hell are you here for anyway? To check passes for security, that’s what! Do you know that man in front, and me, and the man with us?’

‘Oh, yes, sir!’ the young soldier quavered. The man in front is Comrade Major Khuv, sir, and you too are an officer of the KGB. The other man is … is … a friend of yours, sir!’

‘Clown!’ Vyotsky hissed. ‘He is not my friend. Nor yours. Nor anyone’s in the whole damned place!’

‘Sir, I-‘

‘Now hold that rifle out in front of you,’ Vyotsky snapped. ‘Arm’s length, finger through the trigger-guard, finger under the backsight. What the hell . . .? Arm’s length, I said! Now hold it, and count to two hundred, slowly! Then get back to attention. And if I ever catch you slacking off again, I’ll feed you into that white hell down there dick-first, got it?’

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *