Below in the woods a great wolf howled piteously — Zek's Wolf, who knew that his mistress was now removed from him and gone far away. He lifted his head and howled again, the cry rippling from his taut throat. Then he sniffed the air and looked north and a little west, across the mountains. She was there, yes. That was the way he must go.
Grey as the night, Wolf began to climb through the trees. Two figures passed him going down. He curled his upper lip back, writhing from his carnivore teeth. But he made no sound. They passed out of sight into the misty woods. Wolf let them go and continued on his way.
The siren call of his mistress was strong in his mind…
It was noon at Perchorsk, but in the metal and plastic bowels of that place it could be midnight and nothing would be changed. One change at least was occurring, however, and Direktor Luchov and Chingiz Khuv were watching as a team of workmen fitted pipes high in the wall of the perimeter corridor. The pipes were maybe seventy millimeters in diameter, made of black plastic, and might in other circumstances be conduits for heavy-duty electrical cable. But that was not their purpose.
'A failsafe?' Khuv said. He looked flustered. 'But I know nothing about this. Perhaps you'd explain?'
Luchov looked at him, tilted his head on one side a little. 'You work here,' he shrugged, 'and I have no reason to keep it from you. I proposed this mechanism some time ago. It is simplicity in itself, and quite foolproof. What's more, it's cheap and very quick and easy to install — as you can see. If you follow these pipes you'll see that they go straight back to the loading bays inside the main doors. There you'll find a fifteen-thousand-litre container on the back of a truck. The truck is locked in position with its brakes on, rotor arm removed. That, too, is a failsafe. The pipes connect directly to the truck and they're being laid throughout the Projekt.'
Khuv's frown grew deeper. 'I've seen the truck,' he said. 'It's a military supply vehicle, carrying chemical fuel for flamethrowers. Are you telling me that these pipes will carry that stuff? But it's highly corrosive! Man, it would eat through this plastic in a matter of minutes!'
Luchov shrugged. 'By which time it wouldn't matter anyway,' he said. 'A failsafe only has to work once, Major, and that's the beauty of this one. Gravity fed, fifteen thousand litres of highly combustible fuel will rush downward through these pipes and circulate right through the Projekt in less than three minutes. As it courses along its way there are sprinklers. They will spray the fuel under pressure into every corner. Its fumes are heavy but they'll spread very rapidly. The Projekt has laboratories, boiler rooms, electrical fires, workshops, a thousand naked flames of one sort or another.' He shrugged again. 'But I'm sure you can see what I'm getting at. We can sum it up in one very descriptive word: inferno!'
A short distance away, Vasily Agursky had paused to listen. Khuv had noticed him and now he deliberately stared at him. Still looking at Agursky, Khuv said: 'I take it this information is not sensitive? If it is, you should know we are being eavesdropped.'
'Sensitive?' Luchov glanced along the corridor, saw Agursky. 'Ah, but it is sensitive, yes! Everyone who works here in the Projekt will soon be aware exactly how sensitive it is. It would be criminally irresponsible for anyone to try to keep it a secret. There will be notices posted everywhere explaining the system in great detail. This is not a matter for the KGB, Major, but for humanity. It is not your sort of "security" but mine — and my superiors'. And your superiors'!'
Agursky came closer, joined Khuv and Luchov. 'If this system is ever used,' he said, in a strange, emotionless voice, 'the Projekt would be destroyed utterly.'
'Correct, Vasily,' Luchov turned to him. That is its purpose. But it will only be used if another horror like Encounter One should ever escape from the Gate!'
Agursky nodded. 'Of course, for fire destroys them. It's the only way we can be sure that nothing like that ever gets out into the world again.'
'More than that,' said Luchov. 'It's the only way we can be certain that this place never becomes the focal point of World War III!'
'What?' Khuv snapped.
Luchov rounded on him. 'Oh? And do you think the Americans will sit still for a second of those nightmares launched from here into their airspace? Man, you know as well as I do that they think we're manufacturing them!'
Khuv drew air in a gasp, became suspicious in a moment. 'Who have you been talking to, Viktor? That sounded very much like something the British spy Michael Simmons once said to me. I hope you haven't been interfering in things which don't concern you. I accept that this failsafe of yours is probably necessary, but I will not accept anyone meddling in my work!'
'Are you accusing me of something?' Luchov kept his anger under control.
'Maybe I am,' Khuv's tone was icy. 'We still don't know where you disappeared to for three hours when that damned esper ran amok in here. Is that it? Has Alec Kyle been talking to you?'
Luchov scowled, the veins in his seared skull pulsing. 'I've told you, I don't know what happened to me that night. I suppose I was unconscious. Maybe it was an attempt to kidnap me — bungled, as it turns out. As for this — Alec Kyle? — I've not only never met him, I've never even heard of him!' Which was true enough, for the man he'd spoken to was called Harry Keogh.
Agursky had turned away, leaving them to their argument. Khuv watched him go, staring hard after his departing, white-smocked figure. Was there something wrong with the peculiar little scientist? Or… not wrong but different? Something… different about him?
'Aren't you interested how it's triggered?' Luchov asked, still glaring.
'Eh? Oh, yes, very interested. I'd also like to know if there's a failsafe for your failsafe!' Khuv's attention was back on the Projekt Direktor. 'This place houses some hundred and eighty scientists, technicians, soldiers at any given time of the day and night, and it contains many millions of roubles' worth of equipment. If there was an accident — '
'Oh, there'll be no accident,' Luchov shook his head. 'If it's ever used it will be a very deliberate act, I assure you. Let me tell you how it works.
'There's empty accommodation close to mine. That becomes the failsafe control centre, with access only to the officer on duty and round the clock access to myself. Oh, and yourself, too, I suppose, since you'll probably insist upon it. However, I shall expect you to make your name available for the duty roster, as mine will be.'
'Control centre?' said Khuv. 'And what will this control centre contain?'
'A closed circuit TV monitor panel with three screens. One will watch the Gate and the others the stairwell through the shaft and the exit from it into the Projekt proper. There will be evacuation alert klaxons, too, though I admit a man will have to be pretty nimble to get out once they start sounding. As for the failsafe mechanism: two buttons and a heavy electrical switch. Button one will sound the evacuation alert in the upper levels the very moment that the Duty Officer sees anything come through the Gate. Button two will only be used if the creature is of that sort, and if the electrical fence, flamethrowers and Katushevs don't stop it. The button will control subordinate machinery: the alarms will sound more urgently, and steel doors will close in the ventilator shafts. If and when the creature passes from the core area, through the magmass levels and into the complex itself… then the switch is thrown. This cannot be done accidentally, or until the two buttons have been pressed. The switch, of course, opens the stopcocks on the tanker.'
'Huh.r Khuv grunted. 'I note that your quarters — and the control centre — are not far removed from the loading bays and the main entrance.'
'Your own quarters are similarly situated, albeit on a different bearing,' Luchov pointed out. 'We would have equal chances. So would anyone in that area, including your KGB men and parapsychologists.'
Khuv grudgingly conceded that. 'And you think it's a wise move to tell everyone just exactly how this failsafe operates? You don't think it will scare them witless?'
'I think it probably will,' Luchov answered, 'but I see no alternative. In the event of… a disaster, as many as possible should have the chance to live. And where the military is concerned: well, they are the only ones who can't run when the alarms start sounding. The Katushev crews and the flamethrower squads. And here I'm afraid I begin to sound too much like you for my own liking — but at least they now have the ultimate incentive to stop any emergence from the sphere!'
Khuv pursed his lips, made no reply.
'And now that I have satisfied your curiosity,' Luchov continued, 'perhaps you'd be so good as to tell me how your — experiments? — are proceeding? Have you had any message from those poor bastards you hurled through the Gate? Or have you simply written them off? And what about your investigations into this intruder affair? Do you know how he got in? What have you discovered about him?'
Khuv scowled, turned on his heel and strode away. Over his shoulder he called back: 'At this moment in time I have no information for you, Direktor. But when I have all the answers, and when they make sense, then rest assured that you will be among the first to know of it.' He paused in his striding and looked back. 'But you are not the only one who has been busy, Comrade, and I have made certain recommendations of my own. So far you have only considered an invasion from the other side, but my imagination is more wide-ranging. In a few days you will more fully comprehend my meaning, with the arrival of a platoon of crack assault troops — under my command!'
Before Luchov could enquire further, Khuv had passed through a bulkhead door and so out of sight…
In his private quarters, Vasily Agursky stared at himself in a mirror on his toilet wall. He stared, and had difficulty believing what he saw. As yet no one else appeared to have noticed, but then no one took a great deal of interest in him. But Agursky knew himself very well indeed, and he also knew that what he saw in the mirror was more than the sum total of his parts. Of his parts.
His first reaction, when he'd noticed the early changes, had been to distrust the mirror, a distrust which had quickly turned to a strong dislike. Ridiculous for a man to dislike a mirror, but it was true, he did. He disliked all mirrors, probably because they reminded him of certain undeniable alterations, which he'd be only too happy to forget about.
The changes were… weird! He wouldn't have believed them possible.
He had positioned this mirror on the wall himself, so that his face would be exactly centered in the glass. But now he had to bend his knees a little to get the same effect. He had gained two or more full inches in height. That fact should have delighted him, who had always considered himself as being little more than a dwarf, but instead it terrified him. For he could actually feel the ability of his body to be tall! And if the vampiric growth continued — then someone would notice.
His hair, too, was undergoing something of a metamorphosis. Its dirty-grey down was darkening, showing signs of a long-delayed virility, and the halo was contracting toward the centre of his head's dome, filling itself in. No one had noticed that, either, but he supposed they must when finally the growth was complete. Why, already he looked — and felt — years younger. Felt ready now for… almost anything. And yet for a little while longer he must continue to play the part of the old Vasily. The old, despised, neglected and contemptuously treated Vasily…
Still gazing at himself, Agursky was surprised to feel a growl rising unbidden in his throat. It came up soft, purring from his chest, then thickened to a snarl. His lips curled back from his teeth — from his strong, white, animal teeth, whose canines had grown so as to interlock with each other more surely than they ever had in all his previous life — and he snarled like a beast! But he cut it off right there, took a grip on himself. For a moment there'd been a power in him like none he'd ever known before; and knowing where it came from, he knew too that he must control it. As long as he could.
For at the Perchorsk Projekt, they had this habit of burning things like Vasily Agursky.
Finally he took off his thick-lensed spectacles. The old curved lenses were gone now, removed from their frames and disposed of. In their place, flat discs of common glass which he'd cut in the workshop: 'eyepieces for my instruments,' as he'd explained it. No need now for aids to eyesight which had improved to an entirely incredible degree. Why, he could even see in the dark!
But in connection with his eyes, there was something else which might soon begin to show, though what he could do about that was quite beyond him to imagine. Contact lenses? By the time he could order and receive them it might well be too late. In a way that frightened him, too, but in another way… it was fascinating.
Slowly he reached out a hand to the cord of the light-switch, gave it a single sharp tug. Click! — and the light went out.
But in the mirror two lesser lights had taken its place. Agursky couldn't suppress the strange smile, the wolfish grin, which spread over his darkly-mirrored features then. A smile in which the pupils of his eyes burned like tiny censers, filled with hell's own sulphur…
Harry had slept the clock round, and toward the end he dreamed. Not knowing he dreamed, it seemed to him that he had always existed in this timeless, lightless limbo, and that now someone called to him from far, far away.
Harry! Harry! You're asleep, Harry Keogh — but the dead are awake! They've begged a boon of me — of me! — whom hitherto they shunned utterly. And I have agreed to talk to you; but when I sought you out, I discovered only a sleeping mind. Jumbled memories and dreams and intricate mind-puzzles. Pictures of an existence beyond existence! A strange thing, your sleeping mind, Harry, and not one with which I may readily converse. So stir yourself! Faethor Ferenczy offers his services…
Faethor? Harry snapped awake, sat bolt upright in his bed. Cold sweat drenched his brow, slimed his trembling limbs. A nightmare, yes: he'd dreamed that Faethor Ferenczy called to him in his sleep. A man shouldn't dream about creatures like Faethor, not even when they were dead and no longer capable of mischief. A dream like that was the worst possible omen. But -