Grieve did, and Layard added, ‘I know he’s there, at the Château, but I read him like. . . well, like he’s dead.’
That hit Harry hard. That strange blue life-thread, dimming, crumbling, disintegrating. Alec Kyle!
There are things you’ll want to know, he told them, apparently in a hurry now. Things you have every right to know. First, Yulian Bodescu is dead.
Someone whistled his appreciation, and Layard cried, ‘Christ, that’s wonderful!’
It was Harry’s turn to avert his face. Guy Roberts is dead, too, he said.
For a moment there was silence, then someone asked, ‘Darcy Clarke?’
He’s fine, Harry answered, as far as I know. Listen, everything else will have to wait. I’ve got to go now. But I’ve a feeling I’ll be seeing all of you again.
He collapsed in upon himself to a single point of radiant blue light, and disappeared.
Harry knew the route to the Château Bronnitsy well enough, but the Möbius continuum fought him all the way,. It fought to retain him, to keep him to itself. The longer he remained unbodied, the worse it would become, until finally he’d be trapped in the endless night of an alien dimension. But not yet.
Alec Kyle was not dead and Harry knew it; if he had been then Harry could simply reach out his mind and talk to him, as he talked to all the dead. But though he tried —however tentatively at first, cringingly — mercifully there was no contact. This made him bolder; he tried harder, putting every effort into contacting Kyle’s mind, while yet hoping that he’d fail. But this time —
— Harry felt horror wash over him as indeed he picked up the faint, failing echo of the man h~ had known. An echo, yes: a de-pairing, fading cry tailing off into nothing.
But it was all the beacon Harry needed, and he homed in on it in a moment.
Then . . . it was as if he were caught in a maelstrom! It was Harry Jnr all over again, but ten times worse, and this time there was no resisting it. Harry did not have to fight free of the Möbius continuum but was ripped out of it intact. Torn from it and inserted —Elsewhere!
It hadn’t been easy but Zek Föener had eventually fallen asleep, only to toss and turn for hours in the throes of sheerest nightmare. Finally she’d started awake in the small hours of the morning and looked all about in the darkness of her spartan room. For the first time since coming to the Château Bronnitsy the place seemed alien to her; her job here was empty now; it offered neither reward nor satisfaction. Indeed it was evil. It was evil because the people she worked for were evil. Under Felix Krakovitch things had been different, but under Ivan Gerenko . . . his very name had become a bad taste in Zek’s mouth. Her life would be impossible if he took control here. And as for that squat, murderous toad Theo Dolgikh.
Zek had got up, splashed cold water in her face, made her way down to the cellars which housed the Château’s various experimental laboratories. On her way, on the stairs and in a corridor, she’d passed a night-duty technician and an esper: both had nodded their respect but she’d hardly noticed, merely brushed by them and continued on her way. She had her own respects to pay, to a man as good as dead.
Letting herself into the mind-lab, she’d taken a steel chair and sat beside Alec Kyle, touched his pale flesh. His pulse was erratic, the rise and fall of his chest weak and abnormal. He was almost totally brain-dead, and less than twenty-four hours from now . . . The authorities in West Berlin wouldn’t know who he was or what had killed him. Murder, pure and simple.
And she had been part of it. She had been duped, told that Kyle was a spy, an enemy whose secrets were of the utmost importance to the Soviet Union, while in reality they were only of the utmost importance to Ivan Gerenko. She had defended herself before that sick creature, made excuses when he said she’d been party to it — but there was no defence against her own conscience.