The Source

'You're not only risking your neck, you're wasting your time,' the old man had told Jazz gruffly one night shortly after he took up lodgings with the Kirescus. Jazz remembered that night well; A

'You don't have to go there to know what's going on in that place,' Kazimir had continued. 'Yuri and I can tell you that, all right, as could most of the people in these parts if they'd a mind to.'

'A weapon!' his great, lumbering, giant-hearted son, Yuri, had put in, winking and nodding his massive shaggy head. 'A weapon like no one ever saw before, or ever could imagine, to make the Soviets strong over all other people. They built it down there in the ravine, and they tested it - and it went wrong!'

Old Kazimir had grunted his agreement, spitting in the fire for good measure and for emphasis. 'Just a little over two years ago - ' he said, gazing into the heart of the flames where they roared up the sprawling cabin's stone chimney, ' - but we'd known something was in the offing for weeks before that. We'd heard the machinery ru

'That's right,' Yuri had taken up the story again. 'The big turbines under the dam. I remember them being installed more than four years ago, before they put that lead roof on the thing. Even then they'd restricted all hunting and fishing in the area of the old pass, but I used to go there anyway. When they built that dam - why, the fish swarmed in that artificial lake! It was worth a clout and a telling-off if you got caught there. But about the turbines: hah! I was stupid enough then to think maybe they were going to give us the electricity. We still don't have it ... but what did they need all that power for, eh?' And he'd tapped the side of his nose.

'Anyway,' his father continued, 'it's so still on certain nights in these parts that a shout or the bark of a dog will carry for miles. So did the sound of those turbines when they first started to use them. Despite the fact that they were down in the ravine, you could hear their whining and droning right here in the village. As for the power they produced, that's easy: they used it for all of their mining and tu

Then it had been Yuri's turn again: 'And that's where they built the weapon - under the mountain! Then came the time when they tested it. My father and me, we'd been setting a few traps and were late getting home that night. I remember it clearly: it was a night much like tonight, bright and clear. Where it was darkest in the woods, we could look through the treetops and see aurora borealis shimmering like a strange pale curtain in the northern sky...

The humming of the turbines was the loudest it had ever been, so that the air seemed to throb with it. But it was a distant throbbing, you understand, for of course the Projekt is about ten kilometres from here. My father and me, we were somewhere in the middle, maybe four or five kilometres from the source. Anyway, that should give you some sort of idea of the raw power they were drawing from the river.'

'At the top of Grigor's Crest,' Kazimir took up the thread, 'we stopped and looked back. A wash of light, like the aurora, was playing all along the rim of the Perchorsk ravine. Now, I was one of the first men to settle this place - one of the first victims of Khrushchev's scheme, you might say - and in all those years I'd seen nothing like this. It wasn't nature, no, it was the machine, the weapon! Then - ' he shook his head, momentarily lost for words, ' - what happened next was awesome!'

At this point Yuri had grown excited and once again took over. The turbines had wound themselves up to a high pitch of whining,' he said. 'Suddenly ... it seemed there was a great gasp or a sigh! A beam of light - no, a tube of light, like a great brilliant cylinder - shot up from the ravine, lit up the peaks bright as day, went bounding into the sky. But fast? - lightning is slow by comparison!

That's how it seemed, anyway. It was a pulse of light; you didn't actually see it, just its after-image burning on your eyeballs. And in the next moment it was gone, fired like a rocket into space. Lightning in reverse. A laser? A giant searchlight? No, nothing like that - it had been more nearly solid.'

At that Jazz had smiled, but not old Kazimir. 'Yuri is right!' he'd declared. 'It was a clear night when this happened, but within the hour clouds boiled up out of nowhere and it rained warm rain. Then there blew a hot wind, like the breath of some beast, outwards from the mountains. And in the morning birds came down out of the peaks and high passes to die. Thousands of them! Animals, too! No beam of simple light, no matter how powerful, can do all that. And that's not all, for right after they'd tested it - after the bar of light shot up into the sky - then there came that smell of burning. Of electrical burning, you know? Ozone, maybe? And after that we heard their sirens.'

'Sirens?' Jazz had been especially interested. 'From the Projekt?'

'Of course, where else?' Kazimir had answered. Their alert sirens, their alarms! There'd been an accident, a big one. Oh, we heard rumours. And during the next two or three weeks... helicopters flying in and out, ambulances on the new road, men in radiation suits decontaminating the walls of the ravine. And the word was this: blow-back! The weapon had discharged itself into the sky, all right - but it had also backfired into the cavern that housed it. It was like an incinerator; it melted rock, brought the roof down, nearly took the lid off the whole place! They took a lot of dead out of there over the next week or so, since when it hasn't been tried again.'

'Now?' Yuri had had to have the last word. He shrugged his massive shoulders. They run the turbines now and then, if only to keep 'em in trim; but as my father says, the weapon's been quiet. No more testing. Maybe they learned something from that first trial, and maybe it was something they'd rather not know. Myself, I reckon they know they can't control it. I reckon they're finished with it. Except that doesn't explain why they're still there, why they haven't dismantled everything and cleared off.'

At which Jazz had nodded, saying: 'Well, that's one of the things I'm here to find out. See, a lot of very important, very intelligent men in the West are worried about the Perchorsk Projekt. And the more I learn about it, the more I believe they have good reason to be...'

One night when they gave Jazz his pills, he didn't take them. He pretended to, stuck them in a corner of his mouth, drank his water without washing them down. It was partly an act of rebellion - against what amounted to physical, even mental imprisonment, however well-intended - and partly something else. He needed time to think. That was the one thing he never seemed to have enough of: time to think. He was always either asleep or taking pills to put him to sleep, in pain or dopey from the needle that killed the pain and helped him talk to the Debriefing Officer, but never left alone to just lie there and think.

Maybe they didn't want him to think. Which made him wonder: why didn't they want him to think? His body might be a bit banged-up, but there didn't seem a deal wrong with his brain.

When he was alone (after he'd heard them go out of his room and close the door) he turned his head a little on one side and spat the pills out. They left a bad taste, but nothing he couldn't live with. If the pain came he could always ring his bell; the button was right there beside his free right hand, requiring only a touch from his index finger.