The Source

'So, several sorts of people from the world beyond the Gate,' Harry mused. 'And none of you willing to help me, eh?' He adjusted his goggles, tightened the strap of his weapon across his shoulder. 'What, dead these thousands - or at least many hundreds - of years, you trogs and Travellers, and still the Wamphyri oppress you? I'd hoped to ask your advice.'

He looked up, gazed at the glaring white surface of the sphere. If he reached up a hand he could touch it.

Only ask it! Several Traveller voices spoke up. In our time we fought the Wamphyri. We staked them through their black hearts and burned them. But when they came to power, this is how they avenged themselves. Still, we have no regrets. So speak to us, Harry. We were not primitive, fearful trogs but men!

There was pride in their fading voices - then sudden panic as Harry stood on his toes, stretched a straining hand toward the surface of the glaring sphere where its huge globe bulged downward from the ceiling. HARRY -DON'T!

Too late - his hand had touched the sphere, broken the surface of its skin. He tried to snatch the hand back, which was about as much use as asking a hurled stone not to return to earth.

Harry heard the grim laughter of the Wamphyri, the groans of trogs and Travellers alike - felt himself grasped, drawn up, passed into the sphere. And in a moment the cave and gurgling river had disappeared from sight, and he floated up, up, weightless as a feather in a beam of white light, toward a different place -

- A different world!

21

The Dweller - The Problem at Perchorsk - In the Garden

Perhaps inspired by the reaction of the sphere-cave's ossified inhabitants, Harry's first reflex was to panic. Instinctively, he came close to conjuring - almost attempted to fashion - a Mobius door, and only just retreated from that action in time to avert a disaster. God alone knew where, or how, he would end up if he tried to use Mobius mathematics here, inside the grey hole!

And so he floated, drawn irresistibly upward - or passed - through the Gate; and almost before he knew it ...

... His resurgence was almost as big a shock as his entry: he passed through the skin of the sphere, then slid down its curve crashingly onto a jumble of stony debris between the sphere and the crater wall. For indeed he saw that the sphere was inside a crater, and directly overhead - a second sphere!

So that now Harry could see almost all of the picture. The jigsaw was very nearly complete. The Gate he had just traversed was the original. The one above, seated in the mouth of the crater, had appeared here simultaneous with the creation of its twin - its other 'end' - in Perchorsk. Perhaps the presence of the first had somehow influenced the location of the second, Harry couldn't say. Maybe Mobius would know.

Except -

If that decapitated corpse in the cave had come through comparatively recently, and also the walkie-talkie... were the Wamphyri now using the original sphere as a dumping site? And why dump a radio? But one thing was certain: they had passed through. They had entered the sphere - this sphere - from this side. And if they had found their way down here, then he could make his way up. No sooner had the thought occurred than he saw the magmass wormholes ru

Under his duffle-coat, Harry still had his torch clipped to his belt. He took the torch out, chose a horizontal shaft and wriggled in. In a little while the hole turned to the right, then bent sharply into a descent. Harry abandoned it, came out backwards. Other holes were no better. But then, at his fifth attempt...

... He found a hole which climbed gently, not so steeply as to cause him to slide back. In a little while it, too, bent to one side, the left, following which it rose marginally more steeply. Then it levelled out and swung right. But beyond the level bend it shot almost vertically upward. Harry stood up, switched off his torch. After the claustrophobia of the hole this was a little better; for now it was as though he stood at the bottom of a shallow well. Up there, strange constellations of stars glittered brightly in a black, jewelled sky. He reached up a hand... the rim of the hole was at least twenty-four inches beyond his grasp.

He bent his knees, jumped. A hard thing to spring upright and make any height in the confined space of a hole two and a half feet across! Especially in a duffle-coat, carrying a heavy machine-gun, with a spare magazine and two hundred rounds in your pockets.

The gun!

Harry took the weapon from his shoulder, extended the sling to its full extent. Taking the gun by the barrel, he pushed its stock up the smooth bore of the wormhole, hooked its pistol-grip over the rim. Then, wedging himself against the wall, he used elbows and knees to gain enough height to get his foot into the loop of the dangling sling. And after that it was easy. Gradually straightening up, he dragged himself out of the wormhole and hauled the gun up after him.

Panting a little from his exertions, he sca

But while Harry observed Starside, so too was he observed. Keen-eyed shapes moved in the shadows of boulders to the west, and a flitting thing high overhead squeaked a cry beyond the range of Harry's ears to detect. Then the great bat, Desmodus, sped east, making for a distant stack, while on the ground a trog set off to lope westward, cupping horny hands to his Neanderthal face and sending a cry ringing ahead of him. The cry was heard, picked up, passed on. A straggled scattering of trogs spread out over many miles passed the eerie message down the line.

Almost at the same time the messages were received both in the stack and in the Dweller's garden. But where Lord Shaithis of the Wamphyri must order a flyer readied and descend to the launching bays, the Dweller was not dependent upon that sort of conveyance; he simply inclined his head and listened for a moment, turned his eyes eastward and sighed. The newcomer's identity could not be doubted; the Dweller would have known that mind anywhere, any time.

So, after all these years, finally he had come. And at such a time. Well, nothing for it but to welcome him; and who could say but that shortly he might be sorely needed? And so the Dweller simply went to Harry, where for long minutes he had stood, close to the glaring sphere, gazing on the world of the Wamphyri...

Harry was staring at the distantly rearing stacks, wondering about them just as Zek, Jazz and others had wondered before him. Suddenly ... he was aware that someone watched him. He spun round and fell into a crouch, swung his gun up and cocked it. Some forty yards north of the sphere, out on the boulder plain, there stood a figure, motionless, watching. It was a slim figure, male from what Harry could see of it, and its face was golden, burning in the reflected glare of the sphere.

'Don't shoot!' the other called out in a young-old voice, holding up a hand. 'There's no danger. Not yet.'

There was something about the voice. Harry relaxed a very little, tilted his head on one side enquiringly. 'Not yet?'

'No,' said the other. 'But soon. Look!' And he pointed at the sky to the east. Harry looked.

Dark blots were growing large in the sky. Two of them, with others mere dots far behind. They came from the direction of the stacks. One was winged, shaped something like a manta. The other was ... a nightmare shape! Gigantic, it squirted through the sky like a squid. 'I should think that's Shaithis,' said the Dweller, pointing. 'And the other thing, that'll be one of his warriors. And see behind them? More flyers, carrying a couple of his lieutenants.'