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Authors: Brian Lumley

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The “clutter” consisted of books and magazines dropped any and everywhere, more off the bookshelves than on them. Spy-thrillers (not unnaturally, Harry supposed) lay alongside piles of foreign language publications, most of the latter being Russian. There was also, beside Jazz's bed, a dusty, foot-thick stack of
Pravdas
—topped by a copy of the latest
Playboy.
Harry had had to smile: hardly the most compatible meeting of ideologies!
Also in the bedroom were dust-free framed photographs of Jazz's father and mother; on the wall a life-size Marilyn Monroe poster; a cabinet standing close to the window, containing cups won in various ski events; and again affixed to the wall a battered pair of bright yellow skis and sticks which must be of some special significance. A recessed cupboard in a narrow passageway had showered Harry with an accumulation of skiing requisites, and beside Jazz's video cassette recorder were haphazardly stacked films of all the main winter athletics for the last five years. While Jazz hadn't been available to participate, still he hadn't been willing to miss out entirely.
There were photographs of girls, too, quite a pile of them, in one corner of a bedroom drawer; a scrap-book
continued a photographic record of Jazz's military term; perhaps significantly, a second album carefully wrapped in an old pullover consisted of faded letters to Jazz from his father.
Harry had let the feel of all of these things sink in. He'd slept in Jazz's bed, used his kitchen and bathroom, even his dressing gown. He discovered several phone numbers of old girlfriends, called them and asked about Jazz, discovered them to be a mixed bunch with little in common except their obvious intelligence, and the fact that one and all they thought Jazz was “a very nice guy.” Harry was starting to think so, too; and where before Michael J. Simmons had been merely a means to an end—hopefully to the discovery of Harry's family—now he had become something of an issue in his own right. In short, the horizon of Harry's obsession was expanding beyond purely personal interests.
At this stage, too, Harry had felt that he now must get a little closer to Simmons himself. Or if not the real man, then at least his metaphysical echo. Simmons no longer existed in this universe, but he had once existed in the past …
In Harry's incorporeal days he had been able to travel into the past and “immaterialize” there: he'd been able to manifest a ghostly semblance of himself on the bygone event screen. Now, embodied and fully corporeal once more, this was no longer possible; it would create unthinkable paradoxes, perhaps even damage the structure of time itself. He could still travel in time, but while doing so he must never attempt to leave the metaphysical Mobius Continuum for the real world.
Not that this was a necessity; to achieve his aim on this occasion, time-
travel
itself should suffice. And so he entered the Möbius Continuum, found a past-time door and journeyed back a little way, less than two years into the past. In doing so Harry had altered his position in time but not in space; he still “occupied” Jazz Simmons's flat. And so, when as he judged it he
had journeyed far enough and reversed his direction to head once more for “the future,” he knew beyond a reasonable doubt that the strong blue life-thread which travelled parallel to his own must be that of Simmons. For after all, he'd picked it up in Simmons's flat. And following that life-thread into the future, he also knew that he was now about to prove one way or the other any similarity between Simmons's—transference?—and those of his wife and son.
The proof wasn't long in coming, and temporaneously it agreed exactly with the time Darcy Clarke had specified in defining Simmons's exit point. Although he expected it, still Harry didn't see it coming, just an eyeball-searing blaze of white light; following which … he journeyed on alone. Jazz Simmons had gone—elsewhere! The same elsewhere, presumably, as Harry Jr. and Brenda before him.
Harry didn't need to go back and play it all over again; he'd seen the same thing plenty of times before, and it was always the same. There was nothing new here, the only difference being that Simmons had gone in a single white instantaneous blaze, while the departure of Harry Jr. and his mother had been accompanied by twin bomb-bursts. As for what those terminal flares signified, Harry was at a complete loss. He only knew that before the white dazzle blue life-threads raced for the future, and that after it those life-threads no longer existed. Not in this universe anyway.
Which led to his next line of inquiry: Möbius himself.
August Ferdinand Möbius (1790–1868), a German mathematician and astronomer, lay in his grave in a Leipzig cemetery. His dust was there, anyway, which to Harry Keogh, Necroscope, was one and the same thing. Harry had been to see Möbius before, to discover the secret of the Möbius Continuum. In life Möbius had invented it (though he personally had denied that, telling Harry that in fact he'd merely “noticed” it) and in death he'd gone on to develop his theories into precise
sciences, albeit sciences no living person would ever comprehend. None, that is, except Harry Keogh himself. And Harry's son, of course.
The last time Harry was here he'd come by rather more conventional means: by air to Berlin, then through Check-Point Charlie to the east—as a tourist! But mundane as his arrival had been, his exit from Leipzig had been along an entirely different route—through a Möbius door. That had been Harry's first experience of the Möbius Continuum, since when he'd become an expert in his own right.
But there had been far more than that to Harry's visit, and even now he might not have discovered the correct mental formulae but for the spur he'd received at that time. Harry had been on the “wanted” list of the Soviet E-Branch. The emerging vampire Boris Dragosani, a member of that branch, had wanted to take Harry—alive if possible—and draw from him the secret of his weird talents. Dragosani was a necromancer who ripped the private thoughts of the dead out of their ravaged bodies, who read their secrets in brain fluids and torn ligaments, in ruptured organs and eviscerated guts. It would be so much easier if he could simply talk to the dead, like Harry. They might not respect him as they did Harry, but the threat of defilement should suffice to open them up. If not … well, there was always the other way.
Dragosani had issued a detention warrant, ordering the East German Grenzpolizei to pick Harry up on trumped-up charges. They had tried, and out of necessity Harry had solved the final equation of Möbius's metaphysical space-time dimension, with which he could summon “doors” on the entire space-time universe. Barely in time, Harry had used one of these doors. Ironically, perhaps, it had floated into view (but only Harry's view) across the face of Möbius's headstone!
From then on Harry's invasion of the Soviet E-Branch and the destruction of Dragosani had been an inexorable
process, in the course of which his own body had been destroyed and abandoned as once more he escaped to the Möbius Continuum. There, as an incorporeal being, a bodiless mind and soul, eventually he had discovered and entered into the drained shell of Alec Kyle. This had been an almost involuntary even—Kyle's body, a living vacuum, had seemed to reach out and suck Harry in—but it had given him a place among men again and ended what was otherwise an interminable existence in the matterless Möbius Continuum.
And now Harry was back in Leipzig, standing by Möbius's grave as before. Almost nine years had passed since last he was here, but he hadn't forgotten those events which terminated his first visit. And so on this occasion he'd come by night.
A moon hung low over the city's skyline, and the stars were very bright between streamers of fast-fleeing cloud. The night wind, moaning through the headstones, sent wrinkled leaves scurrying like mice, and Harry felt a chill in his bones which was born partly of the natural cold of a November night, and partly of his feeling of alienation here in this place. But the cemetery gates were closed for the night, the lights in the city subdued, and apart from the scrape of leaves all was silence.
He sought Möbius out and found him, and as before the great mathematician was busy with his formulae and his calculations. Tables of planetary mass and motion, the “weights” of the sun and her satellite worlds in their careening round, were balanced against orbital velocities and gravitic forces; formulae so complex that even Harry's intuitive grasp found their purpose elusive, together with simultaneous equations whose answers filled themselves in even as he watched; all of these figures and configurations beat on Harry's awareness like the ever-changing results of an on-going process on the screen of some vast computer. And Harry saw that the problem was so complex and so close to
completion that he let it go on undisturbed by his presence to the end. At which time the screen went blank and Möbius sighed. It was a strange thing, even now, to hear the “sigh” of a dead man.
“Sir?” said Harry. “Are you available now?”
“Eh?” said Mobius, in that moment before he recognized Harry's thoughts. Then: “Is that you, Harry?” he continued eagerly. “I
thought
there was someone here. You very nearly put me off just then, and I was working on something which is
very
important!”
“I know,” Harry nodded. “I saw it, but I didn't want to disturb you. Those are very wonderful discoveries!”
“Oh?” Möbius seemed surprised. “You could understand my working, then? Very well, and what have I discovered?”
Harry drew back a little, hesitating. He was in the presence of genius and he knew it. Möbius had been a great mathematician all his life, and after that life he had continued his work unabated. Where Harry's mathematical skills were intuitive, Möbius had worked hard to achieve his results. No quantum leaps for him but dogged trial and error and an unwavering, all-consuming passion for his subject. It seemed somehow improper for Harry to have come here at this time, spying on the man in his triumph.
“Not at all,” Möbius tut-tutted him. “What?—a man who can impose his physical being on the metaphysical universe, and use it at will? Spying on me? I consider you a colleague, Harry, an equal! And truth be told, you couldn't have come visiting at a more opportune time. Now come on, tell me what I've been doing. What is it that I've proved with my numbers, eh?”
Harry shrugged. “Very well,” he said. “You've shown that instead of the nine planets we believed to exist in the solar system, there are in fact eleven. Both of the new worlds are small, but true planets for all that. One occupies a position exactly behind Jupiter,
with the same rotation period, so that it's always occluded, and the other's a non-reflector and lies about as far out again as Pluto from the sun.”
“Good!” Möbius applauded him. “And their moons?”
“Eh?” Harry was taken by surprise. “I read only the problem you'd set yourself and the answers to the problem as you arrived at them! There were slight deviations—percentages of error, I suppose—but …” He paused.
“But? But?” Harry could almost picture Möbius raising his eyebrows. “All the clues were there in the equations, Harry. No? Very well. I'll tell you:
“The inner world has no moon, but the ‘percentage of error,' as you call it, for the outer world was just too big to be ignored. I have checked it and it indicates an almost spherical nickel-iron moon three kilometres in diameter orbiting the parent at a distance of twenty-four thousand planetary circumferences. Now that is what we call a calculation! Of course, I shall prove it by going there and seeing it for myself.”
Harry shook his head in defeat, offered a wry grimace. “You're too good for me,” he said. “You always will be.” And after a moment: “Do you want me to let this ‘leak out,' as it were? I could do that easily enough, with just sufficient information to set the entire astronomical fraternity jumping! It could be done anonymously, by an ‘amateur,' you understand, on the solemn promise that when the calculations are shown to be correct, then that one of the two worlds should be named Möbius!”
Möbius was stunned. “Could you really
do
that, Harry?”
“I'm sure I could find a way.”
“My boy …
God!”
Möbius was overjoyed at the prospect. “Harry, how I
wish
I could shake your hand!”
“You can do rather more than that.” Harry told him, growing serious in a moment. “You remember the last
time I came to see you I had a problem? Well, now I have an even bigger one.”
“Let's have it, then,” said the other at once, and Harry told him of his quest for his wife and son. He finished by explaining:
“And so you see, it's no longer simply a question of my family, but I also have the British agent Michael Simmons to consider.”
Möbius seemed nonplussed. “And you've come to me for help? Well, obviously you have—but for the life of me I can't see what I can do! I mean, if they're not
here
, these three people—if they have physically ceased to exist in this universe—then how can I or anyone else suggest where or how to find them? The universe is The Universe, Harry. Its very name defines it. It is THE All. If they're not in it, then they're not anywhere.”

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