Jazz nodded. 'But do you really think I'd be stupid enough to make a run for it? Where to, for God's sake!?'
'As I explained before,' Khuv reminded him while Vyotsky unfastened the restraining straps on his strait-jacket, 'we aren't too concerned that you'll try to escape. That would be sheer suicide, and you no longer have reasons to wish to die — if you ever did. What we are concerned about is the damage you might do, maybe even large-scale sabotage. And that could have very grave consequences indeed. Not only for everyone here, but for the entire world!'
For once Jazz's expression changed. He slanted his mouth into a humourless smile, laughed gratingly. 'A bit melodramatic, aren't we, Comrade? I think maybe you've been watching too many decadent James Bond films!'
'Do you?' said Khuv, his slightly slanted eyes narrowing a fraction and becoming that much brighter. 'Do you indeed?'
He took a key from his pocket, turned to the heavy metal door. It was equipped with a lock set centrally in a steel hand-wheel, like a locking device on a bank vault. As Khuv went to insert his key, so the wheel turned through quarter of a circle and the edges of the door cracked open. Khuv stepped back. Someone was coming through from the other side.
The door opened fully toward the three where they waited, and a handful of technicians and two men dressed in smart civilian clothes came through. One of the two was fat, beaming, joviaclass="underline" a VIP visitor from Moscow. The other, grave-faced, was small and thin; his face was badly scarred and the hair was absent from the left half of his face and yellow-veined skull. Jazz had seen him before; he was Viktor Luchov, Direktor of the Perchorsk Projekt — a survivor of Perchorsk Incidents One and Two.
Brief greetings were exchanged between Khuv and these two men, and then the larger party went on its way. Then Jazz and his escorts passed through the door and Khuv locked it behind them.
Beyond the door the complex took on an entirely different aspect. By comparison, the damage on the approach to this area had been superficial. Jazz stared and tried to make sense of the chaos he saw there. The evidence of terrific heat was apparent everywhere: stanchions were blackened and in places eaten half-way through; the floor-plates were missing entirely, had been replaced with timbers; the face of the exterior rock wall — literally the mountain itself — was black, dull and lumpy, like lava frozen in its course. A metal chair or desk — difficult to tell which — and a steel cabinet projected in twisted ruin half out of a massive nodule of lava which was in turn welded to the wall; and above this anomalous nodule a cylindrical shaft maybe twelve feet in diameter had been drilled through the rock upwards at an angle of forty-five degrees, from the lip of which the lava could be seen in large part to have issued.
Jazz looked again at the dark throat of the shaft, wondered how it could have been cut and where it went. He reached up a hand to touch the side of the rim where the shaft opened into the corridor; the rock was smooth as glass, not lumpy like the volcanic flow from the shaft's lip… Aware that Khuv was watching him, Jazz shot him an inquisitive glance.
Tm told that used to have a square cross-section, whose sides were something less than two metres,' Khuv informed. 'Also that it was lined with a perfect mirror of a very high density glass on impervious ceramic, giving almost 100 per cent reflectivity. After what you have termed the Perchorsk Incident, this is what remained of the shaft. I suppose you might say that this is what comes of trying to pass a round peg through a square hole, eh?' And before Jazz could answer: 'Of course, I wasn't here when this happened. You see, I have my own job, Michael — you'll forgive my familiarity? — with a branch of the Service whose work you would find entirely unbelievable. It is that E-Branch of which we've already spoken.'
Jazz said nothing, continued to glance all about, tried to take in all he was seeing and hearing. What good that would do him he couldn't say, but it was all part of his training. 'E-Branch, yes, Michael,1 Khuv went on. 'You English have an E-Branch, too, you know — which is why we were so interested to know if you were a member of that organization. If you had been — ' he shrugged — 'then we would have been obliged to dispose of you from the outset.'
Jazz raised his customary eyebrow.
'Oh, yes,' said Khuv, casually, 'for we couldn't allow you to transmit — neither telepathically nor any other way — knowledge of this place to the outside world. That, too, could be very dangerous; so much so that it might even conceivably bring about World War III!'
'More melodramatics,' Jazz murmured.
Khuv sighed deeply. 'You will understand — eventually,' he said. 'But first find yourself a place to sit for a while, and I'll tell you everything you were sent here to discover.
You see, I actually want you to understand everything. You'll know why later.'
Khuv perched himself on a knob of black rock while Jazz found a seat on the side of the steel cabinet where it leaned out of the lava nodule. Vyotsky remained standing, saying nothing, merely watching. The Projekt's air-conditioning whispered faintly, distantly, and apart from this and Khuv's voice, all was silent. Khuv spoke very softly and the effect was eerie: like a whisper echoing in some deeply buried alien vault.
'You must blame all you see here primarily on the USA's SDI or Star Wars scenario,' he began. 'Of course, those terms hadn't been thought of as early as that, but the idea was there sure enough. We knew that much from standard intelligence sources. As for the Perchorsk Projekt: it was little more than a clever theory until America started dreaming up its space defence initiative. But after that it was the same old story: we had to have an even better defence system. As with bigger and better bombs, so with defence systems. If Star Wars could mean the loss of 95 per cent of our nuclear capability, then we had to have something which cancelled out the West's strike capability utterly.
'Perchorsk was to have been the first step, the proving ground. If it had worked, then similar installations would have been constructed all around Russia's borders. The satellite countries might perhaps have to fend for themselves in any future holocaust, but the Soviet heartland would be defended — completely! Do you follow me so far?'
Jazz cocked his head on one side. 'You're telling me that this,' he glanced here and there, all about, 'wasn't intended as a weapon, right?'
'Exactly,' Khuv nodded. 'It was to have been the opposite of a weapon: a shield. An impenetrable umbrella over the head of the central Soviet Union. Ah! But now I see how interested you are; finally we have a little animation! Well, and should I proceed?'
'By all means,' said Jazz at once. 'Do go on.'
Khuv settled into his story:
'Don't ask me about the mechanics of the thing; I'm a — well, a "policeman", not a physicist! Franz Ayvaz was the brains and driving force behind Perchorsk, and Viktor Luchov was his second-in-command. Ayvaz, as you may already know, was our top man in Particle Beam Acceleration and various associated fields of research; in his younger days he'd been a leading pioneer of laser technology; his credentials were impeccable, and his theory — on paper at least — seemed to be exactly what the defence staff was looking for. A dual-purpose force-field to shut out incoming missiles and render their nuclear capacity entirely harmless.
'That's how the Perchorsk Projekt was born five years ago, and this is where it died three years later. Ayvaz died with it, and Luchov is still here gathering information, piecing it all together and seeing if there's anything that can be salvaged. As to what happened exactly:
'What was supposed to happen was this:
'A beam was to be generated down below in the lower levels. That's where most of the hardware used to be. Accelerated to the limits of tolerance and excited by atomic bombardment, it would be released up this shaft and emitted like an enormous laser into the ravine. Where the shaft emerged into the ravine, a nest of mirrors would divide the beam into a fan shape which would be waved across the sky and into space. It was to be a test, that's all. The very first of a series.