'Alas, there was a failure in the motors which governed the movement of the exterior mirrors. They jammed in the worst possible position at the worst possible moment.
Also, the scientists here had been under pressure; their work had been hurried and performed in conditions which weren't the best; a full range of failsafe devices had not been incorporated. Do you know what happens, Michael, if you plug the barrel of a gun, load it and pull the trigger? But ridiculous to ask a question like that of a man who is an expert in firearms! Of course you know what happens.
'Well, and that's what happened here. There was a colossal blow-back. Energies sufficient to fill an arc of space covering from Afghanistan to Franz Josef Land were trapped and confined within the shaft and redirected back to their source. There was a collision of awesome forces, the instantaneous generation of incredible temperatures, and in the immediate vicinity of the beam matter itself underwent some radical changes. Now of course that is my non-technical layman's explanation. You will need to talk to Luchov if you want more — but I guarantee you wouldn't understand him. Not unless there's a lot more to you than we've discovered, anyway.
'So… that was the Perchorsk Incident, or "pi" as your people in the West have christened it. The shambles you see here is not one hundredth part of the devastation which occurred down below, where we'll be going in a moment. And as for loss of life: we paid a terrible toll for our haste, Michael, a terrible toll. But not so terrible as the toll we may still have to pay…'
With those enigmatic words still echoing, Khuv abruptly stood up. 'Let's go deeper,' his words were clipped, urgent, 'right now! Two levels down, where perhaps you'll be able to get the feel of what it was really like.' Jazz got to his feet and followed on, and once again Vyotsky formed their tail along the perimeter a little way, then down wide, heavy-beamed wooden stairs into what could only be termed a region of sheer fantasy.
With one hand lightly on the rail, Jazz stared into the dim recesses of a great disorder, a weird chaos. The lighting was poor here, perhaps deliberately so, for certainly what little could be seen was — to say the least — disconcerting, even frightening. Down through a tangle of warped plastic, fused stone and blistered metal they passed, where on both sides amazingly consistent, smooth-bored tunnels some two or three feet in diameter wound and twisted like wormholes through old timbers, except they cut through solid rock and crumpled girders. And the thought came to the British agent that something, some vast force, had attempted to bring about a certain homogeneity here, had tried to make every different thing into one similar thing. Or had tried to deform everything beyond recognition. It was not so much that the various materials had been fused by heat and fire, rather that they seemed to have been folded-in, like the ingredients of dough, or different coloured plasticines in some monstrous child's hands.
'It gets worse,' said Khuv quietly, leading the way lower still. Those strange tunnels there were not "cut" through the magmass — that's what Viktor Luchov calls this jumble of matter, incidentally, a "magmass" — they were eaten into it by energy shearing off from the blow-back! We can only guess at the extent of the damage if the installation had been built on the surface.'
The stairs descended to a veritable bed of magmass, only levelling out when they reached a vertical wall of unbroken rock like the face of a cliff. Here the timbers underfoot formed a walkway which turned to the right through an angle of ninety degrees and ran parallel with the foot of the looming wall of rock. Under the boards the floor was chaotically humped and anomalous, where different materials had so flowed into each other as to become unrecognizable in their original forms. And through all the congealed mass of this earthly and yet unfamiliar material ran those irregular wormhole energy channels, very like the indiscriminate burrows of rock-boring crustaceans in the sea, but on a gigantic scale.
'"Eaten,"' Jazz pondered over the word. 'You said these holes were "eaten" into this stuff — but by what?'
'Rather, shall we say, "converted"?' Khuv glanced at him. 'Perhaps that paints a truer picture, to say that the material was converted into energy. But if you'll be patient I can show you a far better example. We are going to the place where the pile used to be. That, too, was eaten — or converted, if you prefer.'
'Pile?' For the moment Khuv's meaning didn't register in Jazz's confused thoughts.
'The atomic pile which was the Projekt's main source of power,' the Russian explained. 'The backlash ate it — utterly. Yes, and then it seems it ate itself!'
Jazz might have questioned that statement, too, but now looming on the left of the walkway a huge, perfectly circular hole appeared in the face of the black wall of rock. Light issued from this tunnel where it angled steeply downward, and Jazz didn't need telling that this was a continuation of the shaft seen in the upper level, which once — and only once — had carried a fearsome beam of energy to the outside world.
The walkway turned left into the mouth of the shaft, became a stairway once again. Blinding white light was painful after the comparative gloom of the two levels through which the party had descended. Ahead and below, the far end of the shaft was a white disk of glaring brilliance, with its lower rim blacked out by the walkway's platform. Jazz shielded his eyes, saw a young Russian soldier in uniform leaning against the curved wall. The man at once came upright, snapped to attention, slapped the stock of his Kalashnikov rifle in salute. 'At ease,' said Khuv. 'We need some glasses.'
The soldier leaned his rifle against the wall, groped in a satchel slung over his shoulder. He produced three pairs of tinted cellophane spectacles with cardboard rims, like the glasses Jazz had once been issued to view a 3-D film.
'For the light,' Khuv explained, though there was hardly any need. 'It can be blinding until you're used to it.' He put on his glasses.
Jazz did the same, followed Khuv down the stairway built through the glass-smooth cylindrical shaft. From behind them came a clatter as the soldier's rifle toppled over when he went to pick it up, then Karl Vyotsky's husky, threatening voice hissing: 'Idiot! Dolt! Would you like to do a month of nights?'
'No, Sir!' the young soldier gasped. 'I'm sorry, sir. It slipped.'
'You damn well should be sorry!' Vyotsky rasped. 'And not only for the rifle. What the hell are you here for anyway? To check passes for security, that's what! Do you know that man in front, and me, and the man with us?'
'Oh, yes, sir!' the young soldier quavered. The man in front is Comrade Major Khuv, sir, and you too are an officer of the KGB. The other man is… is… a friend of yours, sir!'
'Clown!' Vyotsky hissed. 'He is not my friend. Nor yours. Nor anyone's in the whole damned place!'
'Sir, I-'
'Now hold that rifle out in front of you,' Vyotsky snapped. 'Arm's length, finger through the trigger-guard, finger under the backsight. What the hell…? Arm's length, I said! Now hold it, and count to two hundred, slowly! Then get back to attention. And if I ever catch you slacking off again, I'll feed you into that white hell down there dick-first, got it?'
'Yes, Sir!'
Following Khuv toward the white glare at the end of the shaft, Jazz murmured sourly: 'A disciplinarian, our Karl.'
Khuv glanced back, shook his head. 'Not really. Discipline isn't his strong point. But sadism is. I hate to admit it, but it does have its uses…'
At the end of the shaft there was a railed landing where the stairs levelled out and turned to the left. Khuv paused on the landing with Jazz alongside. Waiting for Vyotsky, they gazed down on a fantastic scene.