Necroscope

the DO explained. 'He is not listed, this Keogh, and so far he has done nothing wrong.'

'The charge is ... murder,' said Dragosani. 'He murdered one of our agents, a sleeper, in England. Anyway, he will be taken. If that proves difficult, the orders are to shoot him! I ordered that, too, last night.'

The DO felt that he, personally, was being accused. He felt he had to make excuses: 'But these are Germans, Comrade,' he said. 'Some of them like to believe that they still govern themselves, if you see what I mean.'

'No,' said Dragosani, 'I don't. Use the telephone next door. Get me the headquarters of the Grenzpolizei in Berlin. I'll speak to them.'

The DO stood gaping at him.

'Now!' Dragosani snapped. And as the man scurried out he called after him: 'And send in that dolt from outside.'

When Borowitz's secretary entered Dragosani said, 'Sit. And listen. Until the Comrade General returns I'll be in charge. What do you know about the working of this place?'

'Almost everything, Comrade Dragosani,' answered the other, still pale and frightened and holding his face. 'The Comrade General left many things to me.'

'Manpower?'

'What about it, Comrade Drag-'

'Cut that out!' Dragosani snapped. 'No more "Comrade", it wastes time. Simply call me Dragosani.'

'Yes, Dragosani.'

'Manpower,' Dragosani said again. 'What do we have here right now?'

'Here at the Chateau? Right now? A skeleton staff of ESPers, and maybe a dozen security men.'

'Call-in system?'

'Oh, yes, Dragosani.'

'Good! I'll want at least enough men to make our

numbers up to thirty. And I'll want them by 5:00 p.m. - at the very latest. I want our best telepaths and forecasters, including Igor Vlady, to be among them. Can that be done? Can we muster these men by 5:00 p.m.?'

The other immediately nodded. 'In more than three hours? Oh, yes, Dragosani. Definitely.'

'Then get on with it.'

When he was alone Dragosani settled back in his chair and put his feet up on the desk. He thought about what he was doing. If the East Germans took Keogh, especially if they killed him (in which case Dragosani must make sure that he, personally, got hold of the body) that must surely cancel out the possibility of Keogh's being part of tonight's disturbance. Mustn't it? In any case it was difficult to see how Keogh could possibly make it here, from Leipzig, in just a few hours. So perhaps Dragosani should be concentrating on some other eventuality - but what? Sabotage? Was the cold ESP war finally starting to heat up? Had his murdering Sir Keenan Gormley lit some sort of slow fuse, laid perhaps a long time ago? But what could possibly harm the Chateau? The place was impregnable as a castle. Fifty Keoghs wouldn't even make it over the outer wall!

Angry with himself, with the gradual build-up of tension inside him, Dragosani forced Keogh out of his mind. No, the threat must come from somewhere else. He gave a little more thought to the Chateau's fortifications.

Dragosani had never fully understood the need to fortify the Chateau, but now he was glad indeed for its defences. Of course, old Borowitz had been a soldier long before he had started E-Branch; he was an expert strategist, and doubtless he'd had his reasons for insisting on this degree of security. But here, right next door to Moscow itself? What had he feared? Insurgency? Trouble from the KGB, perhaps? Or was it just one of the old man's hangups from his political or military feuding days?

Not that this was the only fortified place in the USSR, far from it. The space centres, nuclear and plasma research stations, and the chemical and biological warfare labs at Berezov were all security hotspots, tight as proverbial drums.

Dragosani scowled. How he wished he had Borowitz here now, downstairs in his operating theatre, stretched out on a steel table with his guts hanging open and all the secrets of his soul laid bare. Ah, well, and that too would come to pass - when they finally found the old bastard's body!

'Comrade Dragosani!' the DO's voice calling from next door shattered his thoughts to shards. 'I have GREPO HQ in Berlin for you. I'm putting them through now.'

'Good,' he called back. 'And while I'm speaking to them there's something else you can do. I want the Chateau searched top to bottom. Especially the cellars. To my knowledge there are rooms down there no one ever went into. I want the place turned inside out. Look for bombs, incendiary devices, for anything at all that looks suspicious. I want as many men on it as possible -particularly the ESPers. Understood?'

'Yes, Comrade, of course.'

'Very well, now let me speak to these damned Germans.'

It was 3:15 p.m. and Arctic cold in the city cemetery in Leipzig.

Harry Keogh, his overcoat turned up around his ears and a flask of coffee (long empty) in his lap, sat frozen at the foot of August Ferdinand Mobius' grave and despaired. He had sought to apply his ESPer's mind -his 'metaphysical' talent - to the equally conjectural properties of altered space-time and four-dimensioned topology and failed. Intuition told him it was possible, that he could in fact take a Mobius trip sideways in time,

but the mechanics of the thing were mountain-sized stumbling blocks that he just couldn't climb. His instinctive or intuitive grasp of maths and non-Euclidean geometry was not enough. He felt like a man given the equation E = me² and then asked to prove it by producing an atomic explosion - but with his mind alone! How do you go about turning unbodied numbers, pure maths into physical facts? It's not enough to know that there are ten thousand bricks in a house; you can't build the house of numbers, you need the bricks! It was one thing for Mobius to send his unbodied mind out beyond the farthest stars, but Harry Keogh was a physical three-dimensional man of living flesh and blood. And just suppose he succeeded and actually discovered how to teleport himself from 'A' to some hypothetical 'B' without physically covering the space between. What then? Where would he teleport himself to - and how would he know when he was there? It could prove as dangerous as stepping off a cliff to prove the law of gravity!

For days now he'd occupied his mind with the problem to the exclusion of almost everything else. He had taken food and drink and sleep, yes, attending to all of Nature's needs, but to nothing else. And still the problem remained unsolved, space-time refused to warp for him, the equations remained dark unfathomed squiggles on the now grubby, well-thumbed pages of his mind. A wonderful ambition, certainly - to impose himself physically within a metaphysical frame - but how to go about it?

'You need a spur, Harry,' said Mobius, wearily breaking in on his thoughts for what must be the fiftieth time in the last day or so. 'Personally, I think that's all that remains. After all, necessity is the mother of invention, you know. So far you know what you want to do - and I for one believe you have the knack, the intuitive ability, even though you haven't found it yet - but you haven't a good enough reason for doing it! That's all you need

now, the right spur. The prod that will make you take the final step.'

Harry gave a mental nod of acknowledgement. 'You're probably right,' he said. 'I know I will do it; it's just that I ... haven't tried yet? It's something like giving up smoking: you can but can't. You probably will when it's too late, when you're dying of cancer. Except I don't want to wait that long! I mean, I have all the maths, all the theory - I have all the ego, really, the intuition - but I haven't the need, not yet. Or the spur, if you like. Let me tell you what it feels like:

'I'm sitting in a well-lighted room with a window and a door. I look out the window and it's dark out there. It always will be. Not night but a stronger darkness that will last for ever. It's the darkness of the spaces between the spaces. I know there are other rooms out there somewhere. My problem is that I don't have any directions. If I go out that door I'll be part of the darkness, surrounded by it. I might not be able to come in again, here or anywhere else. It's not so much that I can't go out but more that I don't want to think about what it's like out there. Actually, to know it's there is to know I can go out into it. I feel that the going will just be an extension of the other things I can do, but an untried extension. I'm a chicken in a shell, and I won't break out until I have to!'