The Source

Khuv nodded. He had more than enough with which to concern himself without worrying about Agursky's weird-ness. 'In there,' he nodded, indicating the door to Roborov's room. 'Two dead men.'

Agursky seemed hardly concerned. He opened the door, made to go in. Khuv caught his arm, felt the tension in him. Strange, because it hadn't shown in his movements or his mannerisms. 'I want you to tell me what killed them, if you can. Give me some sort of idea, anyway. Gustav, go in there with him.'

While they were inside the room, Khuv told Luchov all he knew. Impossible to work if the Projekt Direktor was going to be prying into everything. Better to put him firmly in the picture right now, from square one. By the time he was through, Litve and Agursky had come back out of the room. Litve was still very pale; Agursky seemed his usual self.

'Any ideas?' Khuv asked him.

The other shook his head, averted his eyes. 'Something terrifically strong. Immensely strong. A beast, certainly.'

'Beast?' Luchov blurted.

Agursky glanced at him. 'In a way of speaking, Direktor, yes. A human beast. A murderer. But as I said, a very large, very strong man.'

Khuv said: 'And the teeth marks in Roborov's skull?'

'No,' Agursky shook his head. 'His skull was smashed in with a hammer or something very similar. Yes, something like a small-pane hammer. But wielded with considerable force.'

Remembering that garbage Savinkov had spewed out, Khuv scowled. 'But I have an esper,' he said, 'Paul Savinkov, who says he "saw" the killer. And he says it was something nightmarish!'

Agursky had started to turn away, but now he slowly turned back. 'He saw this happen, you say?'

'In his mind, yes.'

'Ah!' Agursky nodded his understanding. Then he smiled, shrugged half-apologetically. 'Well, my science takes note of physical evidence only, Major. Metaphysics isn't my scene. Will you be requiring me any more? I have many things to do now, and — '

'Only one more thing,' said Khuv. 'Tell me, what did you do with the corpse of the dead creature from the tank?'

'Do with it? I photographed it, studied it to the point of stripping it down to cartilage and bone, finally destroyed, burned it.'

'Burned it?'

Agursky shrugged again. 'Of course. It was from the Gate, after all. There was nothing else to be learned from it. And… best not to take chances with things like that, don't you agree?'

Luchov patted him on the shoulder. 'Of course, Vasily, of course we do. Thank you very much.'

'If we do want you,' Khuv called after him, 'you'll be hearing from me. But with any luck we won't.' To Luchov he said, 'God, he gives me the creeps!'

"This whole place,' Luchov muttered, 'gives me the creeps!'

As Agursky went off, so Savinkov returned with Khuv's KGB operatives. They'd had civil police training, and since this now appeared to be a case of routine murder…

Khuv scowled at them. They looked ruffled, unshaven. He dressed them down, told them what had happened and what he wanted. They went into Roborov's room. By now Savinkov had disappeared, probably sneaked off before Khuv could find more work for him.

But as Khuv and Luchov made to return to the upper levels, so the telepath came back. He was reeling, sobbing, seemed totally uncoordinated. 'Major — help! I… I… oh, God!'

Khuv pounced on him, grated: 'What now, Paul?'

'It's Leo!' he gasped.

'Leo Grenzel?' The locator! 'What is it with Leo?'

'I wondered why he hadn't picked up the presence of the intruder,' Savinkov babbled, 'and so I went to his room. The door was… it was open. I went in, and… and…'

Khuv and Luchov looked at each other. Their expressions were much the same: shock, disbelief, horror! Savinkov's reasoning was faultless, of course: Grenzel, if he was awake and well, should have appeared on the scene long before now.

Leaving Savinkov leaning against the metal wall, sobbing, Khuv and Luchov set off down the corridor at a run.

Khuv called back: 'No alarms, Paul! Only set them off one more time and the entire Projekt will take flight!'

In Grenzel's room it was a repeat of the same story. His spine had been broken, looked bitten through to the marrow and spinal cord. His sharp features seemed even sharper in death, and his huge, bulging eyes an even deeper shade of grey.

What had those esper's eyes of his seen before he died, Khuv wondered? And then he stilled the bobbing of his Adam's apple and staggered out of the room, until he was no longer able to hear Luchov's throwing up into Grenzel's toilet…

The Dweller's garden was a marvellous place.

It was a miniature valley, a gently hollowed 'pocket' at the rear of a saddle in the mid-western reach of the mountains. In extent the garden was something a little more than three acres in a row, with the length of its rear boundary against the final rise of the saddle, and its frontage where the saddle started to dip toward frowning cliffs. A low wall had been built there, to keep people from moving too close. In between there were small fields or allotments, greenhouses and a scattering of clearwater ponds. One of the ponds swarmed with rainbow trout, while some of the others bubbled with heat from thermal activity deep in the ground; hot springs, in fact.

Because of the abundance of water the place was lush with vegetation, but only a handful of species were unknown to Earth. The rest of the flowers, shrubs, trees in the garden would have been perfectly at home in any English garden. Harry Jnr's mother tended them, when she felt up to it. But usually his Travellers looked after the garden, as they looked after almost everything here.

Harry Jnr's bungalow house was centrally situated, built of white stone with a red tile roof, its front perched over the wide mouth of a well that occasionally gave off streamers of steam. He swam and bathed in the pool regularly. His Travellers (no longer true Travellers, in fact, for they were permanent dwellers here themselves now) inhabited similarly constructed stone houses at the sides of the saddle, where the level ground met rising cliffs. All such homes were centrally heated, with a system of plastic pipes carrying hot water from a deep, gurgling blowhole. They had glass windows, too, and other refinements utterly unheard of before Harry Jnr's time.

The Dweller (as all of his tenants insisted on calling him) had built greenhouses in which to grow an abundance of vegetable produce. Heated and watered from the springs, his crops were amazing. Also, he had found ways round the long, cold, dark sundowns. Plant species which would adapt already had, but others which wouldn't received artificial sunlight. The permanently running water drove his generators (small but incredibly powerful machines such as Harry Snr had never seen or even dreamed of before), which in turn powered ultraviolet lamps in the greenhouses — and electric lights in the houses!

'You've done… so much!' Harry Keogh told his son, where he walked with him along the edge of a plot shady with sweet corn grown tall. 'All of this is nothing short of… astonishing!'

Harry Jnr had heard much the same thing from Zek Foener, Jazz Simmons, every Traveller who ever made it here; it was a common reaction to things he'd come to take for granted. 'Not really,' he answered. 'Not set against what I'm capable of doing. Chiefly I wanted a place to live, for myself and for my mother. So it had to be made liveable. And what is it really but a strip of fertile soil some two hundred or more yards long by eighty wide, eh? As for the running of the place, the Travellers do that for me.'

'But the buildings,' Harry said, as he'd said it so often during the course of the past sunup. 'Oh, I know they're only bungalows, but they're so, well, beautiful! They're simple but delightful. The great span of their arches, the delicate buttresses, the cut of the roof timbers. They're not Greek, not anything I can put a finger on, just so pleasing. And all built by these… well, by these cave-dwellers of yours!'