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Authors: Brian Lumley

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Several of the settlers were of Romanian stock with strong family ties in the Old Country. Their political views were not in accord with Mother Russia's. Nor would they ever be—not until all oppression was removed and people could work and worship in their own way, and restrictions lifted so that they might emigrate at will. They were Jews and they were Ukranians who thought of themselves as Romanians, and given freedom of choice they might also have been Russians. But mainly they were people of the world and belonged to no one but themselves. Their children were brought up with the same beliefs and aspirations.
In short, while many of the resettled families were simple peasants of no distinct political persuasion, there were a good many in the new villages and camps who
were anti-Communist and budding, even active fifth-columnists. They clung to their Romanian links and contacts, and similar groups in Romania had well-established links with the West.
Mikhail Simonov—fully documented as a city-bred hothead and troublemaker, who'd been given the choice of becoming a pioneering Komsomol, or else—had gone to just such a family, the Kirescus of Yelizinka village, for employment as a lumberjack. Only old man Kazimir Kirescu himself, and his oldest son, Yuri, knew Jazz's real purpose there at the foot of the Urals, and they covered for him to give him as much free time as possible. He was “prospecting” or “hunting” or “fishing”—but Kazimir and Yuri had known that in actual fact he was spying. And they'd also known what he was after, his mission: to discover the secret of the experimental military base down in the heart of the Perchorsk ravine.
“You're not only risking your neck, you're wasting your time,” the old man had told Jazz gruffly one night shortly after he took up lodgings with the Kirescus. Jazz remembered that night well; Anna Kirescu and her daughter Tassi had gone off to a women's meeting in the village, and Yuri's younger brother Kaspar was in bed asleep. It had been a good time for their first important talk.
“You don't have to go there to know what's going on in that place,” Kazimir had continued. “Yuri and I can tell you that, all right, as could most of the people in these parts if they'd a mind to.”
“A weapon!” his great, lumbering, giant-hearted son, Yuri, had put in, winking and nodding his massive shaggy head. “A weapon like no one ever saw before, or ever could imagine, to make the Soviets strong over all other people. They built it down there in the ravine, and they tested it—and it went wrong!”
Old Kazimir had grunted his agreement, spitting in the fire for good measure and for emphasis. “Just a
little over two years ago—” he said, gazing into the heart of the flames where they roared up the sprawling cabin's stone chimney, “—but we'd known something was in the offing for weeks before that. We'd heard the machinery running, do you see? The big engines that power the thing.”
“That's right,” Yuri had taken up the story again. “The big turbines under the dam. I remember them being installed more than four years ago, before they put that lead roof on the thing. Even then they'd restricted all hunting and fishing in the area of the old pass, but I used to go there anyway. When they built that dam—why, the fish
swarmed
in that artificial lake! It was worth a clout and a telling-off if you got caught there. But about the turbines:
hah!
I was stupid enough then to think maybe they were going to give us the electricity. We still don't have it … but what did they need all that power for, eh?” And he'd tapped the side of his nose.
“Anyway,” his father continued, “it's so still on certain nights in these parts that a shout or the bark of a dog will carry for miles. So did the sound of those turbines when they first started to use them. Despite the fact that they were down in the ravine, you could hear their whining and droning right here in the village. As for the power they produced, that's easy: they used it for all of their mining and tunnelling, for their electric drills and rock-cutting tools, their lights and their blasting devices. Oh, and for their heating and their comfort, too, no doubt, while here in Yelizinka we burned logs. But they must have taken thousands of tons of rock out of that ravine, so that God only knows—you'll forgive me—what sort of warrens they've burrowed under the mountain!”
Then it had been Yuri's turn again: “And that's where they built the weapon—under the mountain! Then came the time when they tested it. My father and me, we'd been setting a few traps and were late getting
home that night. I remember it clearly: it was a night much like tonight, bright and clear. Where it was darkest in the woods, we could look through the treetops and see
aurora borealis
shimmering like a strange pale curtain in the northern sky …
“The humming of the turbines was the loudest it had ever been, so that the air seemed to throb with it. But it was a distant throbbing, you understand, for of course the Projekt is about ten kilometres from here. My father and me, we were somewhere in the middle, maybe four or five kilometres from the source. Anyway, that should give you some sort of idea of the raw power they were drawing from the river.”
“At the top of Grigor's Crest,” Kazimir took up the thread, “we stopped and looked back. A wash of light, like the aurora, was playing all along the rim of the Perchorsk ravine. Now, I was one of the first men to settle this place—one of the first victims of Khruschev's scheme, you might say—and in all those years I'd seen nothing like this. It wasn't nature, no, it was the machine, the weapon! Then—” he shook his head, momentarily lost for words, “—what happened next was awesome!”
At this point Yuri had grown excited and once again took over. “The turbines had wound themselves up to a high pitch of whining,” he said. “Suddenly … it seemed there was a great gasp or sigh! A beam of light—no, a
tube
of light, like a great brilliant cylinder—shot up from the ravine, lit up the peaks bright as day, went bounding into the sky. But fast?—lightning is slow by comparison! That's how it seemed, anyway. It was a
pulse
of light; you didn't actually see it, just its after-image burning on your eyeballs. And in the next moment it was gone, fired like a rocket into space. Lightning in reverse. A laser? A giant searchlight? No, nothing like that—it had been more nearly solid.”
At that Jazz had smiled, but not old Kazimir. “Yuri is right!” he'd declared. “It was a clear night when this
happened, but within the hour clouds boiled up out of nowhere and it rained warm rain. Then there blew a hot wind, like the breath of some beast, outwards from the mountains. And in the morning birds came down out of the peaks and high passes to die. Thousands of them! Animals, too! No beam of simple light, no matter how powerful, can do all that. And that's not all, for right after they'd tested it—after the bar of light shot up into the sky—then there came that smell of burning. Of electrical burning, you know? Ozone, maybe? And after that we heard their sirens.”
“Sirens?” Jazz had been especially interested. “From the Projekt?”
“Of course, where else?” Kazimir had answered. “Their alert sirens, their alarms! There'd been an accident, a big one. Oh, we heard rumours. And during the next two or three weeks … helicopters flying in and out, ambulances on the new road, men in radiation suits decontaminating the walls of the ravine. And the word was this: blow-back! The weapon had discharged itself into the sky, all right—but it had also backfired into the cavern that housed it. It was like an incinerator; it melted rock, brought the roof down, nearly took the lid off the whole place! They took a lot of dead out of there over the next week or so. Since then it hasn't been tried again.”
“Now?” Yuri had had to have the last word. He shrugged his massive shoulders. “They run the turbines now and then, if only to keep 'em in trim; but as my father says, the weapon's been quiet. No more testing. Maybe they learned something from that first trial, and maybe it was something they'd rather not know. Myself, I reckon they know they can't control it. I reckon they're finished with it. Except that doesn't explain why they're still there, why they haven't dismantled everything and cleared off.”
At which Jazz had nodded, saying: “Well, that's one of the things I'm here to find out. See, a lot of very
important, very intelligent men in the West are worried about the Perchorsk Projekt. And the more I learn about it, the more I believe they have good reason to be …”
 
One night when they gave Jazz his pills, he didn't take them. He pretended to, stuck them in a corner of his mouth, drank his water without washing them down. It was partly an act of rebellion—against what amounted to physical, even mental imprisonment, however well-intended—and partly something else. He needed time to think. That was the one thing he never seemed to have enough of: time to think. He was always either asleep or taking pills to
put
him to sleep, in pain or dopey from the needle that killed the pain and helped him talk to the Debriefing Officer, but never left alone to just lie there and think.
Maybe they didn't want him to think. Which made him wonder:
why
didn't they want him to think? His body might be a bit banged-up, but there didn't seem a deal wrong with his brain.
When he was alone (after he'd heard them go out of his room and close the door) he turned his head a little on one side and spat the pills out. They left a bad taste, but nothing he couldn't live with. If the pain came he could always ring his bell; the button was right there beside his free right hand, requiring only a touch from his index finger.
But the pain didn't come, and neither did sleep, and at last Jazz was able to just lie there and think. Better still, in a little while his thinking grew far less fuzzy; indeed, in comparison to the mental slurry he'd recently been accustomed to, it became like crystal. And he began to ask himself all over again those questions he
had
been asking, but which he'd never found the time to answer. Like:
Where the hell were his friends?
He'd been out of Russia … what, two weeks now? And the only people he'd seen (or rather, the only ones
who'd seen him) were a doctor, a DO, and a nurse who grunted a little but never spoke. But he did have
friends
in the Service. Surely they would know he was back. Why hadn't they been to see him? Was he
that
banged-up? Did he look
that
bad?
“I don't feel that bad,” Jazz whispered to himself.
He moved his right arm, clenched his right fist. The hole through his wrist had healed and new skin had knitted over the punctures front and back. It was pure luck that the point of the ice axe had slipped between the bones and managed to miss the arteries. The hand was a little stiff and out of practice, that was all. There was some pain, but nothing he couldn't survive. Come to think of it, there wasn't much of pain in anything right now. But of course he couldn't move everything—could he? Jazz decided he'd better not try.
What about sight? Would his room be in light or darkness? The “snow” of his bandages was thick and dark. They said they'd saved his sight. From what? Had his eyes been hanging out or something? “Saved his sight” could mean anything. That he'd be able to see for instance—but how well?”
Suddenly, for the first time since he'd been here, he knew real panic. They might have kept something back until he'd been fully debriefed, so as not to discourage or distract him: where there's life there's hope, sort of thing. How about that? What if they hadn't told him everything?
Jazz got a grip on himself, gave a derisive snort.
Huh!
Told him everything? Christ, they hadn't told
him
anything! He was the one who'd been doing all the—
Talking …
His new clarity of mind was leading him in a frightening new direction, and it was all downhill going; the more he considered the possibilities, the faster he went and the more frightening it got; bits of a puzzle he hadn't known existed until now were starting to fall into place. And the picture they made was one of a clown, a
puppet, with his name on it. Michael J. Simmons dupe!
He bent his right elbow, lifted his hand to his band aged head, began picking at the bandages where they covered his eyes. But carefully; he only needed a peep hole, nothing more than that. A narrow gap between strips of bandage. He wanted to see without being seen.
In a little while he believed he'd succeeded. It was hard to tell with any degree of certainty. The snow was still there, but if he narrowed his eyes to slits the light (there wasn't a lot of it) became more nearly natural. in was like when he was a child: he'd used to lie in bed with his eyes slitted, simulating the slow, regular breathing of sleep. His mother would come in and put the light on, stand there looking at him, and she was never quite sure if he was asleep or awake. But now, with these bandages swathing his face, it should be so much easier.
He straightened his arm again, found his button and pressed it. Now his nurse would know he was still awake, but the principle would be the same: when she came in he'd be able to look at her and she wouldn't know it. He hoped!
In a little while soft, unhurried footsteps sounded. Jazz pressed his head back into his pillows, waited in the near-darkness of his room. Around him the air-conditioning hummed faintly; the air had a mildly antiseptic smell; his sheets felt somehow coarse to those parts of his body which were exposed. And he thought:

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