wonder and awe of it. All was a chaos of millions — no, billions — of lines of pure blue light etched against an otherwise impenetrable background eternity of black velvet. It was like some incredible meteor shower, where all of the meteors raced away from him into unimaginable deeps of space, except their trails didn't dim but remained brilliantly printed on the sky — printed, in fact, on time! And the most awesome thing was this: that one of these twining, twisting streamers of blue light issued outwards from himself, extending or extruding from him and plummeting away into the future. Beside Clarke, Harry produced another blue thread. It ribboned out of him and shot away on its own neon course into tomorrow.
What are they? Clarke's question was a whisper in the metaphysical Mobius ether.
Harry was also moved by the sight. The life-threads of humanity, he answered. That's all of Mankind — of which these two here, yours and mine, make up the smallest possible fraction. This one of mine used to be Alec Kyle's, but at the end it had grown very dim, almost to the point of expiring. Right now, though -
It's one of the brightest! And suddenly Clarke found himself completely unafraid. Even when Harry said:
Only pass through this door, and you'd follow your life-thread to its conclusion. I can do it and return — indeed I have done it — but not to the very end. That's something I don't want to know about. I'd like to think there isn't an end, that Man goes on forever. He closed the door, opened another. And this time he didn't have to say anything.
It was the door to the past, to the very beginning of human life on Earth. The myriad blue life-threads were there as before; but this time, instead of expanding into the distance, they contracted and narrowed down, targeting on a far-away dazzling blue origin.
Before Harry could close that door, too, Clarke let the scene sear itself into his memory. If from this time forward he got nothing else out of life, this adventure in the Mobius Continuum was something he wanted to remember to his dying day.
But finally the door on the past was closed, there was sudden, swift motion, and -
We're home! said Harry…
8. Through the Gate
A fourth and final door was opened and Clarke felt himself urged through it. But the abrupt sensation of speed in motion had alarmed and shaken him, and as yet he hadn't recovered.
Harry? he said, the thought trembling like a leaf in the immaterial void of the Mobius Continuum. 'Harry?'
Except the second time it was his voice he heard, not just his thoughts. He stood with Harry Keogh in his office at E-Branch HQ, in London. Stood there for a moment, stumbled, and reeled!
The real, physical world — of gravity, light, all human sensation and especially sound, most definitely sound — impressed itself forcefully on Clarke's unprepared person. It was signing-off time for most of the staff; many had already left, but the Duty Officer and a handful of others were still here. And of course the security system was in operation as always. Sleepers had started to go off all over the top-floor complex as soon as Clarke and Keogh appeared, quietly at first but gradually increasing in pitch and frequency until they would soon become unbearable. A monitor screen in the wall close to Clarke's desk stuttered into life and printed up:
MR DARCY CLARKE IS NOT AVAILABLE AT PRESENT. THIS IS A SECURE AREA. PLEASE IDENTIFY YOURSELF IN YOUR NORMAL SPEAKING VOICE, OR LEAVE IMMEDIATELY. IF YOU FAIL TO -
But Clarke had already regained partial control of himself. 'Darcy Clarke,' he said. 'I'm back.' And in case the machine hadn't recognized his shaky voice — not waiting for it to print up its cold mechanical threats — he staggered to his desk keyboard and punched in the current security override.
The screen cleared, printed up: DO NOT FORGET TO RE-SET BEFORE YOU LEAVE, and switched itself and the alarms off.
Clarke flopped into his chair — in time to give a great start as the intercom began to buzz insistently. He pressed the receive button and a breathless Duty Officer's voice said. 'Either there's someone in there, or this is a malfunction…?' A second voice behind the first growled:
'You'd better believe there's somebody in there!' One of the espers, obviously.
Harry Keogh pulled a wry face and nodded. 'This place was no great loss,' he said. 'None at all!'
Clarke pressed the command button and held it down. 'Clarke here,' he said, talking to the entire HQ. 'I'm back — and I've brought Harry with me. Or he's brought me! But don't all rush; I'll see the Duty Officer, please, and that'll be all for now.' Then he looked at Harry. 'Sorry, but you can't just — well, arrive — in a place like this without people noticing.'
Harry smiled his understanding — but there was something of his strangeness in that smile, too. 'Before they gang up on us,' he said, 'tell me: how long did you say it was since Jazz Simmons disappeared? I mean, when did David Chung first notice his absence?'
'Three days ago in — ' Clarke glanced at his watch, ' — just six hours' time. Around midnight. Why do you ask?'
Harry shrugged. 'I have to have some place to start,' he said. 'And what was his address here in London?'
Clarke gave him the address, by which time the Duty Officer was knocking at the door. The door was locked and Clarke had the key. He got up, unsteadily crossed the room to let in a tall, gangling, nervous-looking man in a lightweight grey suit. The Duty Officer had a gun in his hand which he returned to its shoulder-holster as soon as he saw his boss standing there.
'Fred,' said Clarke, closing and locking the door against other curious faces where they peered along the corridor, 'I don't believe you've ever met Harry Keogh? Harry, this is Fred Madison. He — ' But here he noticed the look of astonishment on Madison's face. 'Fred?' he said; and then they both looked back into the room. Which apart from themselves was quite empty!
Clarke took out a handkerchief and dabbed at his brow. And in the next moment Madison was steadying him where he suddenly slumped against the wall. Clarke looked slightly unwell. 'I'm alright, it's OK,' he said, propping himself up. 'As for Harry — ' he glanced again all around the office, shook his head.
'Darcy?' said Madison.
'Well, maybe you'll get to meet him some other time. He… he never was desperately fond of this place…'
Something less than four days earlier, inside the Perchorsk Projekt:
Chingiz Khuv, Karl Vyotsky and the Project Director, Viktor Luchov, stood at the hospital bedside of Vasily Agursky. Agursky had been here for four days, during which time his doctors had recognized certain symptoms and had started to wean him off alcohol. More than that: already they believed they had succeeded. It had been remarkably easy, all considered; but from the moment Agursky had been freed from the responsibility of tending the thing in the tank, so his dependency on local vodka and cheap slivovitz had fallen off. He had asked for a drink only once, when he regained consciousness on the first day, since when he'd not mentioned alcohol and seemed hardly the worse for the lack of it.
'You're feeling better then, Vasily?' Luchov sat on the edge of Agursky's bed.
'As well as can be expected,' the patient replied. 'I had been on the verge of a breakdown for some time, I think. It was the work, of course.'
'Work?' Vyotsky seemed unconvinced. The thing about work — any kind of work — is that it produces results. On the strength of that, it's rather difficult to see how you could be exhausted, Comrade!' His bearded face scowled down on the man in the bed.
'Come now, Karl,' Khuv tut-tutted. 'You know well enough that there are different sorts of work exerting different pressures. Would you have liked to be the keeper of that thing? I hardly think so! And Comrade Agursky's
