‘Yes, Sir!’
Following Khuv toward the white glare at the end of the shaft, Jazz murmured sourly: ‘A disciplinarian, our Karl.’
Khuv glanced back, shook his head. ‘Not really. Discipline isn’t his strong point. But sadism is. I hate to admit it, but it does have its uses . . .’
At the end of the shaft there was a railed landing where the stairs levelled out and turned to the left. Khuv paused on the landing with Jazz alongside. Waiting for Vyotsky, they gazed down on a fantastic scene.
It was like being in a cavern, but there was no way it could be mistaken for any ordinary sort of cave. Instead, Jazz saw that the rock had been hollowed out in the shape of a perfect sphere, a giant bubble in the base of the mountain – but a bubble at least one hundred and twenty feet in diameter! The curving, shiny-black wall all around was glass-smooth except for the wormholes which riddled it everywhere, even in the domed ceiling. The mouth of the shaft where Jazz and Khuv stood pointed downward at ninety degrees directly at the centre of the space, which also happened to be the source of the light. And that was the most fantastic thing of all.
For that central area was a ball of light some thirty feet across, and it was apparently suspended there, mid-way between the domed ceiling and the upward curving floor. A sphere of brilliance hanging motionless within a sphere of air, and the whole trick neatly buried under the foot of a mountain!
Narrowing his eyes against the glare, which was powerful even through the tinted lenses of his spectacles. Jazz slowly became aware that the spherical cavern contained other things. A spidery web of scaffolding had been built half-way up the wall and all around the central blaze. The scaffolding supported a platform of timbers which circled the weird light source, reminding Jazz vaguely of the ring system round Saturn. Leading inwards from the ring, a walkway proceeded right to the edge of the sphere of light.
Externally, backed up against the black, wormhole-riddled walls – evenly spaced around the perimeter and massively supported on a framework of stanchions – three twin-mounted Katushev cannons pointed their muzzles point-blank at the blinding centre. Crews were in position, their sights aligned on the sphere, their faces white and alien-looking with headset antennae and insect goggle-eyes trained on the dazzling target.
Between the guns and the sphere stood a ten-foot-high electrified fence, with a gate where the timber walkway spanned the gap between the Saturn’s rings and the centre. There was some motion down there, nervous and jumpy, but not much; the stench of fear was so thick in the supposedly conditioned air that Jazz could almost feel it like slime on his skin.
He gripped the wooden rail, let the entire scene print itself indelibly on his brain, said: ‘What in the name of all that’s . . .?’ He turned his head to stare at Khuv. ‘I saw the arrival of those guns that night you caught me. The electrified fence, too. I thought they were meant to defend Perchorsk against attack from the outside, which struck me as making no sense. But from the inside? Christ, that doesn’t make much sense either! I mean, what is that thing? And why are those men down there so desperately afraid of it?’
And suddenly, without any prompting, he knew the answer before it came. Not all of the answer but enough. Suddenly everything fitted: all he’d seen, and all Khuv had told him. And especially the flying monstrosity that the American fighters had burned to hell and sent crashing to earth in a ball of flame from high over the west coast of the Hudson Bay. And speaking of flames, wasn’t that a four-man flame-thrower squad down there on the Saturn’s-rings platform? Yes, it was.
Vyotsky had come up quietly behind Jazz and Khuv where they stood at the rail. He put a huge hand on Jazz’s shoulder, causing him to start. ‘As to what it is, British,’ he said, ‘it’s some sort of gate or door. And as such we’re not frightened of it.’ But Jazz noted how for once Vyotksy’s tone was muted, perhaps even a little awed.