Khuv ushered Jazz and Vyotsky into his living area. ‘Very well,’ he said, ‘what is it?’
‘That thing in the glass tank, your intruder from another world,’ Jazz wrinkled his nose in disgust. ‘You say it has a keeper? Someone who looks after it, feeds it, studies it? It’s just that I can’t imagine what kind of a man he would be. He must have nerves of steel!’
‘What?’ Vyotsky gave a snort that was half-way a laugh. ‘Do you think he volunteered? He’s a scientist, a small man with thick spectacles. A man dedicated to science -also to the bottle.’
Jazz raised an eyebrow. ‘An alcoholic?’
Khuv’s expression didn’t change. ‘Very soon,’ he said after a moment’s pause. ‘Yes, I’m afraid he will be . . .’
Three hours later, at about 7:30 p.m. – after Jazz had had delivered to him in his cell a cup of tepid, flavourless coffee and a cold meat sandwich, standard evening fare, and after he’d consumed both – he lay on his back on his metal army bed and yet again turned over in his mind all the facts Khuv had given him. The Russian had talked almost nonstop for an hour and a half, during which time the British agent had remained true to his word and had not once interrupted him. Once Khuv was underway Jazz hadn’t wanted to stop him anyway, partly because the Russian’s flow of words and images had been smooth and required no deep explanation, but mainly because his story had been completely fascinating.
And now, yet again, Jazz recapped:
The Perchorsk Incident or ‘pi’ had been the disastrous test run of Franz Ayvaz’s sub-atomic shield. After that mess, clearing up had almost been completed when ‘Pill’ happened, which Khuv referred to as Encounter One; but from what the KGB Major had told Jazz, it hadn’t been so much an encounter as a downright nightmare!
The – creature? – which had come through the sphere of light on that occasion had been . . . well, it had been the monstrosity Jazz had seen on the film shot by the AWACS reconnaissance aircraft over the Hudson Bay, which now he realized was like nothing so much as the Big Brother of the thing in the glass tank. But when Big Brother had squeezed its bulk into this world from its own. . .
Khuv’s description of Encounter One as he himself had heard it from people present at the time had been graphic:
‘You’ve seen it, Michael, on that film you told us about. You know what it was like. Ah, but that was only after it had escaped through the shaft into the ravine and got itself airborne! On the ground it had been far worse; oh, yes, and I’ll tell you about it from first-hand accounts! First, however, I’ll try to explain how the Gate works. Or I’ll describe what happens when it works. The “skin” of the sphere – its “surface” as we see it – is in itself a contradiction of physics as we understand that science. Viktor Luchov has likened it to an “event horizon”. We see things on it after, and even in advance of, any given event! In the former case as a sort of retinal after-image printed in the sphere, and in the latter as a gradual emergence until the – whatever – breaks through.
‘They actually saw that thing coming – but they didn’t know what they were seeing! Remember, it was the first. They saw it in the sphere: a gradual darkening of part of the surface up near the sphere’s dome. The dark patch became a shape, the shape a sort of misty three-dimensional picture, and the image – in a little while -reality. They saw the head and face of a bat four or five feet across: like a hologram but slowly, oh so slowly, changing. It was all in slow motion, a fascinating thing to witness. So they thought. The wrinkling of the convolute snout, which perhaps took half a minute; the leaning forward of the ears – a flicker of motion in real-time -lasting all of five seconds; the baring of the needle teeth, each one of them six inches long, which was accomplished with the speed of a yawn.