‘Now think of it: they had guns! There were actually a handful of soldiers down there with weapons – not for any specific purpose, but simply because soldiers sometimes have guns. But who would think to shoot at such a thing, eh? After the fact, maybe – but at the time? Listen to me: do we shoot off guns at pictures on a screen? That was what this was like, a 3-D film.
‘Also, Viktor Luchov was there. Do you think he would have let them shoot at it? Not a chance! He didn’t even know what the sphere was yet. But … it might well be his redemption! In Franz Ayvaz’s absence he had still to answer for the Perchorsk Incident, and now out of nowhere this . . . phenomenon!
‘Its clarity had been improving for about an hour. All the misty edges had firmed up until the image had the brilliance of a TV picture. People had run to fetch cameras and were actually filming it, like tourists filming ancient monuments or views of outstanding beauty! After all, they knew it couldn’t be real. What? A bat with a head as huge as an elephant’s?
‘Then – quite suddenly, without warning – the impossible happened. They realized that the snout had pushed through the “skin” of the sphere. The monster was no longer just an image on a screen. It sniffed, inhaled sharply several times – and in the next instant the nightmare was upon them!
The event horizon slows things down, Michael. But once the Gate is breached, then all reverts to normal. But “normal” for that obscenity was total hell for the people face to face with it! I say it sniffed – a huge bat sniffing its prey – and it scented them! And it changed! The face and head that came through the skin were those of a vast wolf. You saw the thing in the tank metamorphose? It was like that, the very same. The giant wolf’s head came through, and then its shoulders – but pushing them forward was a leathery bat’s body, and great bat wings unfurling as wide as the sphere itself!
‘Panic? There was such panic as men rarely experience in a lifetime. And to make it worse, the thing didn’t come into this world silently but screaming. Ah, and what a voice it had!
‘It came howling its rage at the bright lights, its hunger for the blood it had scented, its fear of an alien environment. And it slew. But while it was doing this, still it continued to emerge from the sphere. Now the rear end of the thing was like a vast centipede, stampeding through the Gate and threshing everywhere. It changed endlessly, became a dozen different hybrids in as many moments, and each and every one of them murderous!
‘It snapped cables in its blind blundering – blind, yes, for it couldn’t bear the lights. And a mercy it was blind, for if not the carnage would have been that much worse. But as it damaged the power supply many of the lights failed and its vision improved accordingly. Now it picked its victims with more deliberation, and devoured them whole with a deal more dexterity.
‘But now, too, the soldiers were shooting at it – those with the nerve for it, anyway. They couldn’t tell if their bullets hurt, but the massed gunfire certainly alarmed it. It headed for the darkest place it could find: the dimly lighted shaft, of course. By now it had changed into something very like the squirting squid-thing your AWACS air-crew filmed. Vast – amazingly vast – it squeezed and squirted its way through the magmass levels. Indeed, in the way its plastic body flowed it was not unlike the magmass; and as it went so it put out extrusions with mouths and with eyes and with … oh, appendages for which there is really no description. Imagine a leg sprouting from its side, and then the leg itself becoming a scuttling spider-thing, and you may have some idea of what I’m talking about.
‘But finally it was out into the ravine, and in its wake a trail of death and destruction filled with the screams of the dead and the dying, and the empty spaces which were all that remained of those who had vanished forever. For a second time the Perchorsk Projekt was a shambles, and somewhere in the world outside that monstrosity was on the loose and rampaging. And no one had the faintest idea what to do about it.