The Last Aerie (26 page)

The stairs had descended to a bed of magmass, leveling into a catwalk along a vertical wall of unbroken rock like the face of a cliff. Seen over the aluminium handrails and through the metal lattice of the walkway, the floor was chaotically humped and anomalous, where different materials were so mixed as to have no individual identity whatsoever. And looping the loop—twisting and twining through all the warped, congealed mass of this earthly yet hideously immundane material—there ran those weird wormhole energy channels which had carried the flux of a nightmarish nuclear cancer through the heart of Perchorsk, reducing it to this.

Looking at it (and Trask found that he
must
look at it, that his eyes were drawn to it as in some morbid fascination), he began to feel nauseous and was sure that Goodly must feel the same. Until suddenly, looming on the left of the walkway and bringing a sense of renewed reality, a perfectly circular opening appeared in the face of the wall of warped rock. Here the catwalk turned left into the mouth of the shaft, widened out to become a rubber-coated stairway, then continued its descent towards a region of eerie illumination down below.

“The core,” Tzonov informed his guests tonelessly as a group of armed, uniformed soldiers came clattering up through the shaft, heading in the opposite direction. “The hole or cavern which was eaten out of the solid rock when the atomic pile imploded and formed the Gate: a
most
unnatural cavern, as you will see. The guard has just now been changed and these soldiers released from duty. Ah, but see how eager they are! The core is not a pleasant place. And even though the Gate is now secure, made safe to the very best of our ability, still we guard it. One can never tell…”

At the lower end of the shaft there was a railed landing, this time of steel and supported on steel stanchions. Flanked by Trask and Goodly, Tzonov went to the rail and leaned on it, staring grimly at the scene below. He had called this place a “cavern” of sorts, but a most unnatural one. Now the British espers could see why.

It was
like
being in a cavern, but there was no way one might mistake it for any ordinary sort of cave. The solid rock had been hollowed out in the shape of a perfect sphere, a giant bubble in the very roots of the Ural Mountains—but a bubble well over a hundred and twenty feet in diameter! The curving, shiny-black wall all around was glass-smooth except for the worm-holes which riddled it everywhere, even in the domed ceiling. Where the three men were standing, the mouth of the shaft pointed downwards at forty-five degrees directly at the center of the space—the core itself—which was occupied by what looked like a huge steel ball supported on a tripod of massive hydraulic rams. The ball would have to be a little more than thirty feet in diameter.

“Inside it, the Gate,” Tzonov explained. “We cased it in carbon steel a foot thick, welded together in three sections. The rams support the sections and can apply massive pressure to
keep
them welded together, if it were ever necessary. But within the shell … the Gate supports itself, floating there dead center, right where it was born on the night of the accident, when the test was aborted.”

Trask looked at him in the painful blue-white glare of faulty strip lighting. “And that’s where you’ve trapped your visitor? In there? Inside the Gate?”

“Obviously. No way we can let him through, until we know what we’re dealing with.”

“I think it’s time we saw him,” Trask said. “How long has he been here?”

“Four days,” Tzonov told him. “After Premier Turchin himself was informed, I was the first to know of his arrival. Ordered here from Moscow, I saw, assessed, contacted you. You know the rest. You’ll understand, of course, that the complex isn’t my ordinary place of  work. Until now my interest in Perchorsk has been purely academic.” (He had made a simple mistake! Trask saw the lie immediately, but knew that it wouldn’t be to his advantage to point it out. He said nothing, letting Tzonov continue:) “When one considers the esoteric aspect of this latest incident … obviously I was the right man for the job.”

Goodly seemed puzzled. “But four days, in there? He must be starving!”

Tzonov looked at him reprovingly. “Do you think we’re all barbarians, then? He has been fed, of course. Indeed, it was an opportunity we really couldn’t afford to miss: to find out what he eats. Oh yes, for other creatures have come through the Gate before this one, Ian, whose appetites were … well, suspect to say the least!” Without another word he led the way down steel steps to a perimeter walkway, and out over a wide gantry catwalk to the enigmatic, shining ball of carbon steel…

II

The Visitor, and a Visit

Around the steel sphere, encircling it like an inner ring of Saturn, but so close as to almost touch the ball itself, the railed catwalk was maybe ten feet wide; it was equipped with consoles, computers, viewscreens. A handful of scientists and technicians were seated at a master console; others moved around the core’s catwalk carefully measuring and examining, concentrating on their various instruments and tasks.

Crossing the gantry, Trask had absorbed all he could of the so-called “cavern”. There were no soldiers in attendance at the core itself, but a trio of emplacements on the perimeter under the inward curving walls were manned and equipped with high velocity cannons, and the battery directly opposite the master console was further equipped with a small tracked vehicle bearing a dull metal container and the obscene, squat-nozzled hoses of what could only be a flamethrower unit. Well read in what few documents were available concerning the Perchorsk Gate, Trask knew enough to appreciate the significance of all of these “precautions”.

Likewise he understood the meaning of a trio of scaffolding towers which reached up from the curving floor higher than the gantry, consoles and central sphere itself, to where a triangular framework suspended from the ceiling joined them up and strengthened the structure. Central in this metal web, a nest of carboys was connected to a sprinkler system whose outlets were aimed down onto the inner walkway and gantry. Should the system be activated, a hard acid rain would drench this entire area. So much for scientists, consoles, and catwalk! Draconian but effective, the system left no room for speculation about the inimical nature of what these people might be called upon to deal with down here.

And everywhere Trask looked, the claustrophobic wall of the bubble cavern formed a shiny-black backdrop, glass-smooth except for the wormholes riddling it through all its quarters, in the upward curving floor, encircling walls, and domed ceiling alike; that dull black glitter of all-enclosing, seemingly endless surface, alive with its myriad firefly reflections of the inadequate lighting system: like standing in the heart of some strange dark crystal. As for what Turkur Tzonov had said—that the core was not a “pleasant” place—well, that had to be the understatement of the century! Trask knew that if he were a Russian soldier, he’d consider Perchorsk a punishment posting!

As the three men approached the master console, so one of the seated scientists turned, saw them, and gave a small, involuntary start. He reached out and flipped a switch. View-screens dissolved at once into white static and dazzling oscillations, quiet conversations tailed into silence, all heads turned and cold stares greeted the newcomers. Tzonov, smiling thinly, told Trask and Goodly: “As you see, they don’t even trust me yet, let alone you two! They consider me ‘muscle’—like the KGB—and here in the United Soviet States we don’t yet have your own degree of cooperation between mind and muscle. Also, they are scientists, while we are mere metaphysicians, fakirs in whom they have no great faith. Fortunately we know that we are more truly mind than they could ever give us credit for. And in any case, no one here may gainsay me.”

His smile went out like a light turned off as he snapped some order in Russian at the console controller. The man sat there staring at him for a moment, but Tzonov’s authority—and his eyes—had already won the battle of wills. The scientist’s lips twitched a little in the left-hand corner as he switched the screens on again. And:

“Our visitor,” said Tzonov.

It was sudden, but the British espers had been expecting something like it and were able to cover their astonishment. At first the white dazzle—a backdrop of pure white, a veritable snowfield—got in the way, but as their eyes adjusted to the blaze and focused on the man on the screens, they saw that he was Harry Keogh—or Alec Kyle—or both of them. He
was
the Necroscope, or a twenty-year-old version of him, anyway!

Harry Junior!
Trask and Goodly could scarcely be blamed for thinking the selfsame thought, which they kept to themselves
as
best they could. As it happened they were right in one sense, and totally wrong in another; but out of the corner of his eye Trask saw Turkur Tzonov’s satisfied nod, and wondered if the telepath had zoomed in on them. Tzonov didn’t keep him in suspense.

“I think so, too,” he said, an indicator that Trask could stop trying to conceal his suspicions and give his full attention to the scene in the scanners. He did so.

Goodly, on the other hand, chose to hide his thoughts and feelings behind a screen of questions. “Closed circuit TV? You have cameras on the inside?”

“How observant!” Tzonov let his sarcasm drip; he’d seen through the precog’s ploy at once. “Yes, of course. Miniature cameras, trained on the area immediately behind the steel section. The metal is ten inches thick, armoured on the inside; what you see on the screen there is no more than four or five feet from where you’re standing; if you hammered on the panel you could give him a headache.”

Despite that Goodly knew he’d been rumbled, he clung to his pretext. “How do you feed him?”

Tzonov pointed. “You see that groove in the metal? Not merely a groove but a hatch, a door, hermetically sealed and magnetically locked. Down at the bottom there, that circular mark is an even smaller door, through which we pass food. Of course, we don’t do it while he’s awake but when he’s sleeping. And now that he’s satisfied to eat what we give him, we could just as easily poison him. Or we might pump lethal gas in there, or squirt acid at him. We
might
do so even now, if we can’t satisfy ourselves that he’s just a man …”

During which conversation, Trask had taken the opportunity to satisfy
him
self (albeit erroneously) that first impressions must be correct: this was Harry Keogh Junior, the son of the Necroscope, who as an infant had spirited his ailing mother away into an alien dimension. He looked maybe ten years younger than he should, but there again he’d come to manhood in a different world. Still, the discrepancy was such as to cause Trask to frown. He felt that he wasn’t seeing the whole picture. As for what he
was
seeing:

The man in the viewscreen was seated cross-legged on what was barely discernible as a white floor. It seemed no different to the rest of his surroundings, except his thighs and backside flattened out when pressed against it. And the rest of his surroundings … were white. There was little more to say of that tunnel between worlds: it was a glaring white expanse joining up our universe to some other. It was the Gate.

Trask examined the visitor, and discovered another anomaly, however small. Alec Kyle’s (or Harry Keogh’s?) hair had been brown and plentiful, naturally wavy. This one’s hair was blond and shining, like damp straw, with grey streaks to both sides which gave him a look of intelligence or erudition well in advance of his years. And his hair was long, falling to his shoulders, giving him something of the appearance of a Viking. Moreover his eyes were of a sapphire blue, where Kyle/ Keogh’s had been as brown as his hair. Trask was certain that genetically this was Alec Kyle’s son, but at the same time he seemed to have inherited his—what, spiritual?—father’s colours! As for the rest of his features: there could be no denying that this was the son of the Necroscope.

As if the visitor had suddenly heard or sensed something, he thrust himself upright until his sandalled feet flattened to the white “floor”, and looked directly into the eye of a scanner; all of which was performed in a dreary slow-motion which must be an effect of the Gate. A technician adjusted the picture until the whole man was revealed, his eyes narrowed and brow furrowed where he stood with his gaze slightly elevated into the camera.

Trask couldn’t gauge his height but suspected he’d be a six-footer. He had an athlete’s body: broad shoulders, narrow waist, powerful arms and legs. His eyes might be very slightly slanted, or it could simply be a result of his currently suspicious, frowning expression. His nose was straight and seemed small under a broad forehead flanked by high cheekbones. Over a square chin which jutted a little (though not aggressively, Trask thought), his mouth was full and tended to slant downwards a fraction to the left. In others this might suggest a certain cynicism, but not in him. Rather the opposite: there was an air of patience, inevitability, even of vulnerability about him beyond that of a creature trapped in an unknown, unknowable environment.