The Last Aerie (25 page)

Seeing the detector, Trask had just this moment pulled a wry face and given his head a shake, sending bubbles of shaving foam flying. “That’s not necessary,” he said. “I’d know it if something was other than it appears to be. It’s all as you see it: cheap and nasty but clean as can be. The same goes for our hosts, too: they’re squeaky clean—so far.”

Goodly raised an eyebrow. “You find no fault with their behaviour?”

Trask tidied up his short grey sideburns. “Not really. Do you? Ask yourself this: what welcome would we have given Tzonov if we’d known in advance that he was coming to London?”

Goodly shrugged. “Our best men would have been on the job from square one. With their science and sorcery, they’d be all over him!”

“Even if he was there to do us a favour?”

Goodly raised an eyebrow. “In which case we’d let him get it done, and
then
—”

“—We’d be all over him with our science and sorcery … yes, I agree. So maybe he’ll be more interested in us later.”

Goodly nodded and said, “I’m sure he will …” And after a moment, “You know he wasn’t sleeping in the chopper.”

“Tzonov?” Trask dried his face. “No, he’d simply chosen to withdraw. Turkur Tzonov has a talent, Ian, one which he’s used to using. But with us he can’t, and still expect our cooperation. So in the close confines of the jet-copter he opted out, backed off and chose to ‘sleep’ right through the flight. That way he wouldn’t be tempted to look at us—or look into us—face to face. It seems he genuinely needs our help and doesn’t want to scare us off. Well, and it isn’t without precedence. There was a time when the Opposition’s top man worked alongside ours on the Bodescu affair, too.”

“That was before Tzonov’s time,” Goodly pointed out. “
And
it was a disaster! Our Branches don’t work well together.”

Trask put on his shirt. “Is that what you foresee: a disaster?”

Goodly looked more gaunt and morose than ever. “Ben, you know as well as anyone that I’m frightened of my talent. Most precogs are. The future has an uncanny knack of doing what we expect but not how we expect it. I read it sparingly, and not too far ahead, because … well, like Turkur Tzonov’s motives, it’s not to be trusted. No, I don’t foresee a disaster—not yet anyway—but it won’t be a joyride either …”

Trask studied his grave face. “So, can we simply say that you’re … uneasy?”

Goodly nodded. “Uneasy, yes. Look at it this way: my knowledge of the future springs from the past and the present. With me it’s a sort of unconscious extrapolation, where I “remember” what’s still to come like youremember your dreams: with fuzzy edges and lacking in fine detail. But despite that a dream will rapidly fade; if it’s a good one it can set you up for the rest of the day, where by the same token a nightmare will only upset you and make you irritable. Well, that’s how I feel right now: itchy and irritable. Now keep that in mind and concentrate on what we know of Tzonov, his psychological profile.”

Trask said, musingly, “I know something about his
physical
profile: we should have known about this Siggi Dam! She wasn’t in his file and so has to be a recent conquest.”

Goodly shook his head and said, “Yes, but I’m not talking about her. I’m talking about Tzonov’s mind, the way he thinks. He’s proud, dedicated, and a bad loser. That’s the thread that connects his past, present, and future. It’s what steered him to where he is now: head of Russia’s E-Branch. And it’s what makes me itchy.”

Trask couldn’t see where this was leading. “Explain?”

“Proud,” Goodly pressed. “Of himself, of his abilities, and definitely of his country, despite its Humpty Dumpty act: that it fell so badly apart the rest of us have scarcely been able to put it together again. Proud and dedicated: to his talent, his job, and to the security of Mother Russia. Proud, dedicated, and a very poor loser, who knows the entire history of his organization from Gregor Borowitz, Dragosani and the Chateau Bronnitsy, right up to the present moment in every minute detail. Knows all of its triumphs and especially its tragedies …
and
knows who to blame for most of them!”

“Harry Keogh?”

Goodly shook his head, then changed his mind and nodded. “If not Harry, the ones he was working for,” he said. “Namely, us. E-Branch.”

“Revenge? He intends to use us, then punish us?”

Goodly shrugged. “He’s a true son of Mother Russia, this Turkur Tzonov. He can’t bear it that she’s the world’s sick old lady. He bears a grudge against everyone who had a hand in her decline, despite that the actual breakdown was no one’s fault but her own. And so in his own field, he’ll do whatever he can to even up the score.”

“But not until afterwards,” Trask said.

“Eh?”

“After he’s used us—and only then if he can get clean away with it. You’re right, of course. I notice it whenever he uses the word ‘glasnost’, meaning openness: the fact that it’s the one word that doesn’t ring true. But we know he’s looking for a position in the party’s Demokra-tik Politburo and so follows Premier Gustav Turchin’s line—but only because he has to, not because he’s a true believer in world unity. Oh, Turkur Tzonov’s no one-man resurgence of old-style hardline communism, no, but he is ambitious. And you’re probably right that his ambitions extend to the entire USSR. Or what used to be the USSR. He would like to see Russia out there in the race again, with himself in the driving seat, and he’d relish the opportunity to run over a few toes and settle some old scores on his way up the main drag. Which to put it another way is like saying he’s … what, a patriot?”

Goodly nodded. “From his point of view, anyway.”

“And from ours?”

“He’s dangerous —” Goodly answered, “— but not just yet. And that’s the other thing about his psychological profile: the fact that only a very thin wire separates his genius from downright instability. And just like a tightrope, that’s a wire we daren’t jerk about too much. So for the moment, while I admit I’m itchy, I’m not yet sweating.”

“And when you start to sweat?”

The precog nodded, promising: “You’ll be the first to know it.”

Looking at Goodly, Trask made no reply. He knew that the precog would be right, but he couldn’t help wishing he didn’t look so much like a mortician …

Later, Tzonov guided his guests through Perchorsk’s labyrinth of corridors and levels down towards its core, which the handful of men who knew of its existence had christened “the Gate”.

“You probably know the background to all of this as well as I do,” he said. “I was a mere youth at the time, an avid student of ESPionage at the Moscow academy. I knew nothing of all this; my forte was metaphysics, not physics. Anyway, when they tested their device it backfired, and the energy it released was unbelievable! In the immediate vicinity of the pile matter flowed like water, and radiating outwards from it … I’m told there were three kinds of ‘heat’. Nuclear radiation, though not as much as one might expect; then the physical heat of combustion; and finally an alien heat which warped, melted and fused things together, but without burning.”

Tzonov paused to open a door-sized hatch in a steel bulkhead, ushered Trask and Goodly through and followed on behind. “As for the radioactivity,” he continued on the other side, “it has been cleared up now. A very few hotspots remain. But don’t worry, we shall of course avoid them. There are several places we cannot avoid, however, which define various zones of contamination: the areas in which those common—and alien—heat energies which I mentioned expended themselves. This corridor is an example of ‘common’ heat, the sort that burns.”

Beyond the bulkhead door, the corridor reached out ahead, wound to the left and receded from sight. Strip lighting in the ceiling loaned everything a blue-tinged sheen and flicker, humming electrically where sections of old neon tube were starting to short out. Despite the absence of tracks, platform, benches, still Trask found the place strangely reminiscent of a certain neglected London tube station in the wee small hours, one which he must have used frequently fifteen years ago before they were all refitted, but couldn’t name or bring to mind now except as an echo of this place.

But there was one other big difference between some nameless underground station of the early Nineties and this place: evidence of that terrific physical heat which Tzonov had mentioned, sufficient to blacken and even partially
melt
the rough rock of the ceiling, until it had run down like lava to solidify on the cooler metal of wall panels and bulky steel stanchions. Underfoot, rubber floor tiles had burned through to naked steel plates which themselves were buckled right out of alignment; while in the walls, veins and drips and splashes of red, fused copper were all that remained of ancient wiring.

Leading the way, Tzonov nodded curtly to a group of lab-smocked scientists where they leaned against a pockmarked wall and compared notes. “They still study this place as avidly—should I perhaps say as morbidly?—as ever,” he wryly commented, when the scientists had been left behind. “They measure, examine, photograph and sample, without ever reaching any positive conclusion other than the one Viktor Luchov reached all those years ago: that when the blowback occurred the pile ate itself and mundane matter bent inwards and outwards, and even backwards, in space-time—until it warped through the ‘wall’ of this universe and created the Gate.”

Tzonov glanced at his guests and quickly added: “Oh, don’t worry, I’m not going to give too much away! What? Why, our best physicists have been working at it for twenty years and getting nowhere, so don’t take it as an insult if I doubt that you two will discover the secrets of the universe in a few short hours, days, or even weeks! Anyway, your agent Michael J. Simmons was here that time; and the Necroscope Harry Keogh too, before you chased him out of this world. Surely one or both of them have already filled in most of the blank spots for you.”

Trask shook his head. “Harry was never able to stay here too long,” he said, looking the Russian straight in the eye. “And even he had to admit that the math was too much for him. The Gate was an accident, when the universe suffered a power surge and its computer crashed. That was how he explained it, anyway. As for Jazz Simmons: he never returned to England and lives in the Greek islands still. In those days our Department of Dirty Tricks pulled a fast one on him. He’s never forgiven us, and I for one don’t blame him. The same must be said for Zek Föener, but in her case it was your people who gave her the runaround.”

Tzonov shrugged. Trask had given him the opportunity to read his mind, and he hadn’t wasted it. Every word the British esper had spoken had been the truth, as he saw it. “Well, times change,” the Russian said. And by way of changing the subject: “So actually, this is all quite new to you?”

“Most of it,” Trask told him. “The sight and feel of it, certainly. A picture is better than a hundred words. The physical reality is better than a blueprint.”

“Oh?” Tzonov raised a thin eyebrow as he came to a halt at the head of a flight of aluminium stairs, which from their bright sheen were a recent fitment. “It’s better to see something than to have an accurate description? Well, I take your meaning, of course, and normally would agree with you. Except there are things here which were better sight unseen. They lie in an area that suffered the other sort of heat, which may only be experienced in the melting pot of space-time. If it were my choice I would not show such things to you, but since they lie between us and the Gate …” He shrugged again and led the way down the stairs. “I’m told that Viktor Luchov called these the magmass levels.”

“Magmass?” Ian Goodly was trembling slightly where he followed on after the others on uncertain legs, descending into a dimly lit region between levels proper. Trask sensed the tremor in his colleague’s voice and guessed it was his talent working. Well, Tzonov had tried to warn them. And:

“Yes,” the Russian answered, but very quietly now, as he came to a halt. And quite unnecessarily, he pointed. “Magmass. Now you can have the ‘sight’ and ‘feel’ of it, and perhaps you will even feel something of what it must have been like, when Perchorsk was gutted like a soft-bellied fish.”

Trask and Goodly looked, and knew that they had entered a region of sheerest fantasy. They stared into the dim recesses of a weird chaos, a vastly
disordered
cavern or vault, where the lighting was deliberately subdued so as to hide the most monstrous effects. For certainly what little could be seen was frightening, or disconcerting to say the least. It was as if the stairs had carried them out of this universe into a place where human laws no longer applied, where geometry and substance and science itself had failed … and the magmass had taken over.

Tzonov was on the move again, and drawn in his footsteps the British espers followed, silent where they gazed on these creations of drugged hallucination and madness. Down through a tangle of warped plastic, fused stone and blistered metal they passed, where on both sides amazingly consistent (in so much inconsistency) smooth-bored tunnels some two or three feet in diameter wound and twisted like the wormholes of ocean parasites in rotting coral, except they drove through solid rock, crumpled girders, and other, far less recognizable debris or residua.

And Trask thought:
It’s like an alien alchemy! Some titan force tried to make everything one here, or change it all to a new unreality.

Looking at him, Tzonov nodded. “Yes,” he said. “To change it, or deform it beyond all recognition. It’s not so much that the various materials have been fused by heat and fire, rather that they’ve been
folded in
like a mass of dough, or Plasticine in the hands of a vast mad child. But this is only a small part of it, and I certainly won’t show you the worst. No, for metal and plastic and rock were not the only materials which suffered this awful magmass change, but at least they are not… what? Biodegradable? I am sure you take my meaning.”

Goodly shuddered. “What a horror!” he said.

Tzonov agreed. “The more accessible areas were cleansed with hard acids, while other places were simply sealed off. A good many of the magmass moulds simply don’t bear scrutiny.”