There it was again! The big Russian's skin prickled, broke out in gooseflesh. Now what — ? A tiny voice? A tinny, metallic calling? A cry for help? He listened hard, and yet again he heard the sound. But it wasn't a whisper, just a tiny, distant voice. A human voice — and it came from one of the magmass wormholes!
That wasn't all — Vyotsky recognized the voice. Zek Foener's voice, breathless and yet full of desperate hope, eager to communicate with someone, with anyone human in this entirely alien world.
He flung himself face-down beside the wormhole, peered over its rim. The smooth shaft was perfectly circular, about three feet in diameter, curving sharply inward toward the buried base of the sphere and so out of sight. But just where the shaft disappeared from view… there lay a small radio like the one Vyotsky carried in his own pocket! Obviously it had been Simmons's, and he'd discarded it. Every time Foener's voice came, so a little red monitor light flickered on and off on the control panel. It warned of reception, that light; it advised its operator to turn up the volume.
'Hello?' Zek Foener's voice came again. 'Hello? Oh, please answer! Is anyone there? I heard you speaking but… I was asleep! I thought I was dreaming! Please, please — if there's anyone out there — please say again who you are? And where you are? Hello? Hello?'
'Zek Foener!' Vyotsky breathed, licking his lips as he pictured her. Ah, but a different woman now from the acid-tongued bitch who'd spurned his advances at Perchorsk! This world had seen to that. It had changed her. Now she craved companionship. Any sort!
Vyotsky took out his own radio, switched it on and yanked up the aerial. There were only two channels. He systematically transmitted on both of them, and this was his message:
'Zek Foener, this is Karl Vyotsky. I'm sure you'll remember me. We've discovered a way to neutralize the one-way drag effect of the Gate. I've been sent to seek out any survivors of through-Gate experiments and bring them back. Find me, Zek, and you find your way out of here. Do you hear me?'
As he finished speaking, so the red light on his set began to flicker and blink. She was answering, but he couldn't hear her. He turned up the volume and got broken, crackling static. He shook the set, glared at it. Its plastic casing was cracked, and the miniature control panel in the top was badly dented. It must have got damaged when he was flung from the bike. Also, its proximity to Simmons's discarded radio was jamming reception on that set, too.
'Shit!' he hissed from between clenched teeth.
He set the broken radio aside and lowered his head, one arm and shoulder into the wormhole. He gripped its rim with his free hand and hooked one foot round a knob of rock. And he stretched himself down and around, inching his fingers toward Simmons's radio. Its antenna was fully extended, formed a slender, flexible half-hoop of telescoping metal sections where it had somehow jammed against the sides of the shaft to halt the radio's descent. Vyotsky's straining fingers touched the antenna — dislodged it!
Damn!
The set went clattering out of sight into unknown depths below.
Vyotsky snatched himself viciously up and out of the hole and jumped to his feet. Of all the bloody luck! He picked up his own set again, said: 'Zek, I can't hear you. I know you're out there and you can probably hear me, but I can't hear you. If you get my message you'll most likely want to start looking for me. Right now I'm at the sphere but I won't be staying here. Anyway, I'll be keeping my eyes peeled for you, Zek. It looks like I'm your one hope. How's that for a novel situation?'
The red light on his set started flickering again, a brief, unintelligible morse message that wasn't intended to be understood. He couldn't tell if she was pleading with him or screaming her defiance. But sooner or later she would have to search him out. He'd been lying when he said he was her one chance, but of course she couldn't know that. She might suspect it, but still she couldn't afford to ignore him.
Vyotsky grinned, however nervously. At least there was one thing in this damned world he could appreciate. And would appreciate. Still grinning, he switched his radio off…,
10. Zek
Two hours after setting out from the sphere — two lonely, shadowy hours, with only the grunts and groans of his own exertions for company — Jazz Simmons paused for his first real break and found a seat on a tall, flat-topped boulder which gave him good vantage over the terrain all around. He took hard biscuits from his pack and two cubes of dense black chocolate designed for sucking, not biting. Wash these down with a sip of water, and then he'd be on his way again. But now, while he sat here easing his deceptively gangly but powerful frame and catching a breather, there was time to look around a little and consider his position.
'His position'. That was a laugh! It certainly wasn't an enviable position: alone in a strange land, with hardtack food sufficient to last a week, enough weaponry to start World War III, and so far nothing to shoot at, blast or burn! Not that he was complaining about that. But again the thought occurred: where were they? Where in hell were this world's denizens? And when he did eventually find them, or they found him, what would they be like? Which was to assume, of course, that there were others here unlike those he already knew about. Which was to hope so, anyway.
It was as if his private thoughts were an invocation. Two things occurred simultaneously: first a rim of bright half-moon, rising in the west and turning the sky in that quarter a gold-tinged indigo, showed itself over the peaks on the opposite side of the gorge; and second… second there sounded a far, almost anguished howl, a reverberating, sustained note echoing up to the moon and down again, picked up by kindred throats and passed mournfully on up the pass into the beckoning distance.
There could be no mistaking cries like that — wolves! And Jazz remembered what he'd been told about Encounter Two. That one had been lame, blind, harmless. These weren't. Nothing that sounded like that could possibly be in anything other than extremely good health. Which didn't bode too well for his own!
Jazz finished eating, washed the gritty chocolate from the back of his throat, adjusted his pack and got down from his rock. Time he was on his way again. But — he paused, then froze in his tracks, stared directly ahead, and up, and up!
Before, the light from the blister-sun, however feeble, had kept the canyon walls in silhouette; they'd presented only a black, flanking frame to Jazz's eyes, with the main picture lying directly ahead. That picture had been the false horizon at the head of the saddle, the scree-littered way to it, and the thin arc of bright yellow light beyond; which, Jazz noted, had moved gradually from west to east, until now it was lying in the very corner of his picture.
When during the last two or three miles he'd turned his gaze away from the sun for a moment, turned his face to the flank and looked up, then, as they'd grown accustomed, his eyes had been able to spy the dark, forested heights, and above them the sharp silver gleam of snow. But in fact he'd had little time for sight-seeing; mainly his attention had been glued to the non-existent trail, picking a way through rocks and fallen jumble, always choosing the easiest way ahead. It had scarcely dawned on him that as he progressed, so indeed there had been something of a trail. In his own world he'd have expected one, and so in this world it had failed to make an impression. Until now.
But here the gorge was a great deal narrower. Where two hours earlier, at the mouth of the pass, the distance between walls had been something more than a mile, maybe even a mile and a half, here it had narrowed down to less than two hundred yards, almost a bottleneck at the foot of steep canyon walls. The crest of the saddle, as he judged it, was only a quarter-mile ahead now, when at last he'd be able to look down and spy something of the world on the sunlit side of the range.