The Last Aerie (29 page)

Trask nodded, his voice hushed as he answered: “According to the Russians, anyway. But it could only have been Harry who gave the orders. He was dying on Starside—he even gathered us all together to watch him die, that time at E-Branch HQ in London—but his deadspeak voice bridged the gap from another world to this place, and called up the dead just one more time in an attempt to close the Gate.
That
sort of dead, yes …” He looked again at the magmass moulds, then quickly looked away. “Mercifully, our scientists were wrong. Whatever the Gate is—whatever it’s made of—it was too tough for the Soviet nukes. It seemed to eat them up: no repercussions whatsoever. We can’t even be sure that-they went off. There was no blow-back, nothing. Perhaps they should have anticipated that; after all, the Gate is a one-way ticket.”

Goodly took his arm, turned this way and that, said, “We must have missed a turning. Somewhere back there … is something you ought to see. And anyway, I don’t think we’ll find Tzonov and his visitor along here.”

As they began to retrace their steps, Trask asked: “So why did you want to go over all of that again?”

“To get it straight in my head,” the other answered. “I’m pretty good with the future, but the past sometimes eludes me. And anyway, you skipped the most interesting part. I’m talking about when Chingiz Khuv was in charge here, and sent Jazz Simmons through into Star-side.”

The magmass was behind them now. The tunnel ahead looked more than ever like some old London underground, with several confusing, branching passageways. Finally they drew level with a recess on the left, containing a bulkhead door marked with a radiation hazard sign. “Ah!” Goodly nodded. “This is it.”

Trask glanced at the warning, looked again and shook his head. “A barefaced lie to keep out the incurably curious, such as you and me,” he said. “But radiation? It would suffice for most people, certainly!” And as Goodly spun the wheel to free the hatch, and pushed it back on squealing hinges: “What about when Jazz went through?”

Goodly stepped into darkness, turned on the lights. Trask followed him into … a storeroom? The place was like a warehouse, with other rooms leading off and stacked steel shelving on every hand. Then Trask saw what the shelves contained, and Goodly said:

“E-Branch didn’t get much out of Jazz Simmons when Harry Junior brought him back. Can’t say I blame him, not after what Intelligence and the Branch had done to him. We had to send a man out to Zante just to speak to him! But he did say that —”

Trask cut him off: “—That Chingiz Khuv had been planning an invasion of Starside?” He looked again at the shelves. “Yes, he did say that. And now?”

Goodly shrugged and joined him in examining the armaments stacked on the shelves, a stockpile of small and not so small-arms: flamethrowers, grenades, automatic rifles, hand guns and ammunition. And: “What do you think?” he said.

“If you can’t destroy the Gate,” Trask answered, “first secure and defend it, and then prepare to invade it! Who knows what you might find on the other side? Something to swing the balance in your favour? A means of achieving your ambition: to even the score and grow Big in the world again? But is this the Russian Premier’s philosophy … or is it just Tzonov’s? Is he trying to work this trick on his own, do you think? I know he was lying when he said that up until Nathan’s arrival his interest in this place was purely academic.”

“Whichever,” Goodly said, “I think this visitor from Starside has come through at just the right time. If he hadn’t, we wouldn’t have seen all of this …”

“Which might seem to beg a further question,” Trask added. “Who was it who
really
wanted us in on this? Turkur Tzonov, or Premier Gustav Turchin? Were we invited merely on the whim of the one, or on the command of The Boss himself so that we’d be in on it and just as much to blame if it went wrong?”

“Probably the latter,” Goodly answered, “and Tzonov has to make the best of it. It would explain the lack of security: we were
supposed
to see everything, and Tzonov daren’t hide that fact. So from the technicians” and scientists” point of view, we appear as free agents. But in reality Tzonov’s keeping us on a leash, only letting us see what he wants us to see.”

“Until now,” Trask growled. “Let’s get out of here. I don’t want to be found in this place, and I don’t want Turkur Tzonov to know we’ve seen it…”

* * *

They left the storeroom with no time to spare; a technician, yawning, bespectacled, barely awake, came into view around the curve of the corridor. He must be going on night shift down in the core. As they drew level Trask stepped in front of him and said, “Er, Turkur Tzonov?”

“Uh?” The other looked at them, blinked sleep out of his eyes. “You looking for Tzonov?” He nodded. “But not here. Back there, er, fifty steps? Passage on right. Is there. But could be dangerous. The intruder.”

“Thanks,” Trask smiled. “This is a big place. We got lost.”

The other shrugged and blinked again. “Is no problem.”

They went their own ways, but as soon as they were out of earshot Goodly whispered: “See what I mean? There don’t appear to be any guards in the place, and very little of suspicion in respect of our being here. Earlier, down at the core, the scientists were more opposed to Tzonov’s presence than to ours. I think they see him as the intruder! They don’t want the military or people of Tzonov’s dubious, cloak-and-dagger character down here at all! They’d like to study the visitor their way, as scientists. Not his way, whatever that will prove to be.” It was the way he said it that caused Trask to glance at him.

“You said you were picked up at the core,” Trask said. “Did you see anything down there?”

“Enough,” Goodly answered, but darkly.

“Enough?”

“Enough to make me suspect that our man isn’t going to have an easy time of it. I saw them bring him through. His food must have been drugged, too. When they opened the door his arm flopped out. He was unconscious. They dragged him through and put him in a cage.”

“What? A cage?”

“Like a big birdcage, yes.”

The two turned down the indicated passage on the right, followed it for fifteen or so paces, then turned right again and found themselves outside another steel door. But this time it was guarded. A young soldier leaned against the wall with a rifle over his shoulder. When the espers came into view he stood up and adopted a sloppy position of attention, but as Trask approached the door he stepped in his way. “No go,” he said.

“We were invited,” Trask told him, face to face. “We have to see Turkur Tzonov.”

The soldier frowned, scratched his chin, and said, “No,” but without malice. Goodly had stepped to one side of the uniformed man and now made to pass around him. But as the soldier moved to intercept him, so the door opened. Tzonov stepped into view, and the orbits of his eyes were that much deeper, darker. No need to inquire what he had been doing, or trying to do. He saw them at once, but his face showed little or no evidence of surprise.

“Ah! Ben, Ian,” he said. “I was going to send for you, but it seems you’ve beaten me to it.”

“I hope you have some answers, Turkur,” Trask told him, coldly, as the Russian stepped aside and ushered them past him into the laboratory beyond the steel door. “And I hope they’re good ones. Because if they’re not …” His voice tailed off as he gazed all about, until his eyes found what he was looking for.

In one corner of the large, well-lit room, a tiled, sunken area like a small swimming pool had been cut from the living rock. Beyond it the walls of the man-made cave rose sheer out of the basin to a high, roughly hewn ceiling. The cage Goodly had mentioned stood central in the tiled depression itself, and there were steps leading down to it. Set in the walls of the sunken area, nozzles pointed inwards towards the cage. As soon as Trask had absorbed this last detail, he recognized its function. This was not and had never been intended as a swimming pool. This was an acid bath.

There were two scientists in the room, both of them young, inexperienced, definitely cowed—by Tzonov’s presence, Trask correctly assumed. They sat on chairs at the rim of the sunken area with millboards, notepaper, and pens. As yet they didn’t seem to be doing too much writing, which Trask understood readily enough. Tzonov himself had pinpointed the difficulty here: these people were scientists and he was a metaphysician. They didn’t even believe what he had been trying to do. They were a token force of the small scientific community here, representatives of their fraternity against the parapsychological or “supernatural” nature of Tzonov’s.

Crossing the floor to the sunken area, Trask told Tzonov, “What you did to us constitutes a serious assault. You’ve introduced harmful foreign agencies, drugs, into our bodies. Your lot have always been good at that sort of thing, ever since the Bulgarians showed you how. It was a mistake, however, for we’ll bring charges.”

The Russian tut-tutted. “Come, now! Harmful? On the contrary: they were totally harm
less
! Do you feel any ill effects? Of course not. Moreover, by now your bodies are already voiding the drug, and so you could never prove it. Here and now, face to face,
I
accept what you say, of course. For there’s no way I can lie to you. But how would that stand up in an international court of law? Ordinary people don’t believe in our talents, Ben! So your threat is meaningless. And in any case, it was done for your own safety.”

The three paused at the rim of the sunken area, where the two Englishmen looked their host scornfully in the face, especially Trask. The sharp edge of his talent was never keener. He looked, saw, knew that Tzonov had told a half-truth. Something of it had been for his and Goodly’s safety, but mainly it had been to keep them out of the way. Tzonov wasn’t lying, but he wasn’t telling the whole truth either.

“We don’t have to prove it to take action on it,” Goodly spoke up, his face and voice animated for once. “If courts of law are out, there are always other ways. You aren’t the only one with a powerful organization behind you. There are things which we, too, can do that could never be handled by a court of law. If you doubt me, better go and do a little homework on British E-Branch.”

There had been a half-smile on Tzonov’s face. Now it fell away. “I’ll do what I have to do,” he said, “to protect myself and my country from any threat. Whether it comes from an alien world or an alien ideology. And I won’t let anyone stand in my way. But on this occasion, I had you two put out of the way in order to protect you. This thing,” he jerked his head to indicate the cage, “is the unknown! In the past, other things which seemed harmless have come through into Perchorsk, and brought death and madness with them. Not only a threat to my country but to yours, too. Indeed, a threat to the entire world.”

“We’re not complaining about your patriotism, Turkur,” Trask told him. “Only about your zeal.” He started down the steps into the sunken area. “And what would Premier Turchin say, I wonder, if he knew you were up to stuff like that? As for what you said about alien ideologies: tsk-tsk! Is democracy so alien to you, then? And would Turchin fall into line with your thoughts on that, too, I wonder?”

Goodly and Tzonov followed him down, the latter cautioning: “Be careful! I know you believe he’s just a man—Harry Keogh’s son, but without his father’s powers—and it seems I have to agree with you. But we still can’t be sure. If he’s Wamphyri… that could well be the very last thing you discover about him!” There was malice in his voice, almost a wish, perhaps a death wish: for Trask and Goodly. In mentioning Premier Turchin, advocate general of Russia’s New Democracy, Trask had obviously touched a raw nerve.

A chair stood opposite the cage, with its backrest facing the steel bars. Tzonov’s chair, but Trask sat down and crossed his arms on the backrest, and rested his chin on his arms. And sighing, he peered at the man from the other side of the Gate. Trask was no telepath; there was no way he could know for sure what the other was thinking, but he guessed anyway. Something of it, at least. It was written in the visitor’s slumped posture: the way he sat cross-legged dead center of the cage, arms by his sides, hands curled beside his feet, head down in utter dejection.

Tzonov came and stood on Trask’s right, looking sideways and down on him. Trask avoided his glance, but in any case his hypnotic guard was up and Tzonov couldn’t read him. As long as Trask was careful, he could think what he liked and know that his thoughts were inviolate. Until Siggi Dam came back on the scene, anyway. Then … she and Tzonov might conceivably work something out between them. As for right now: Trask could hazard a guess at the reason for her absence. Tzonov didn’t want her mind-smog interfering with what he’d been doing here.

“So,” Trask said, “you’ve had him … how long? An hour and a half? And after you woke him up, what then? Did you sit here looking at him, trying to get inside his head, talking to him? In how many languages, and with what result? What, nothing? And is that why you decided to send for us?”

Tzonov said, “We’ve X-rayed him, and taken blood, urine, tissue, and other samples. A comprehensive range of tests. So far he’s come through all of them. He looks normal, human. But I repeat, this is
not
conclusive proof. He came from the world beyond the Gate and could be anything but human. Now, the fact is you know far more about that other world than we do. Your beloved Harry told you all about it; well, a great deal about it. That is one of the reasons why you are here: because you might see and recognize something in him that we would miss.

“As for my telepathy: useless, on this one. Eye to eye, I meet a whirl, a swirl, a vortex which spins so rapidly that it shines! His mind is impenetrable. I had thought it might be an effect of his being on the other side of the event horizon, but I was wrong. Now that he’s on our side, it’s just the same. It seems he’s one of those rare individuals who can’t be read.”

“Not so rare among Sunside’s Travellers,” Trask answered. “Many of them are skilled in physical and mental camouflage. Hunted by vampires, it’s been a matter of survival, evolution, for them. In our world the Eskimos have an extra layer of fat, to combat the cold. So the Travellers are resistant to telepathic probes, to combat the Wamphyri.” He didn’t mention that Harry was the same in the end, after he’d become a vampire.