by Brian Lumley
Vyotsky grabbed up his weapon, checked it was undamaged, aimed at his oncoming enemy. Why was the stupid bastard grinning like that? Because of the accident? He’d found it amusing? The bike must have blown a tyre or something, but Simmons, he must have blown his mind! He wasn’t even defending himself; he merely cradled his gun in his arms, came forward at a casual stroll.
“British, you’re dead!” said Vyotsky. He deliberately lowered his aim—to chew up the other’s thighs, groin and belly—and squeezed the trigger. The weapon was on automatic. It fired three stuttering shots before Vyotsky’s finger was jerked from the trigger, which happened when the gun slammed into his chest and sent him crashing backwards to sprawl on the floor. Vyotsky felt as if his chest had caved in, as if his ribs were broken; possibly one or two of them were.
Lying there hugging himself, gritting his teeth and murmuring, “Ah! Ah!” from the pain, he looked at Jazz. In the distance between them, three bullets were plainly visible lying on the floor. The SMG had “fired” them insofar as they’d escaped from its barrel, but only just. And that had resulted in three mighty mule-kicks coming in rapid succession, blows which even the huge Russian’s bulk hadn’t been fully able to absorb.
Vyotsky made an effort to reach the smoking gun where it lay, but that was in Jazz’s direction, which was the wrong way. He tried harder, and of course failed. The SMG was all of fifteen inches beyond his straining fingertips—hardly a great distance—but it might have been a mile, or not there at all. The motorcycle, too, lay in the wrong direction.
Jazz reached the bike, hauled it upright, stood astride the front wheel and wrenched the handlebars back into position from where they’d been knocked slightly askew. He ignored Vyotsky’s groaning. Then he wheeled the bike forward and picked up the Russian’s gun. And at last he spoke:
“Sound and light are the only things that seem to work in both directions here,” he said. “We can hear each other, talk to each other, and even though you’re ahead of me—toward the other end of the Gate, I mean—your words get back to me. Likewise your picture, for I can see you. But while we’re standing like this, nothing solid can ever come from you to me. Reverse our positions, and sure enough I’d be dead, except that isn’t the case. So there’s no way you could have harmed me, Ivan: no bullets, no sticks or stones, nothing. These three rounds—” he kicked the three projectiles aside, “—they fired the gun! If you weren’t so burned-up with hate, you’d have worked it out for yourself.”
It all sank in, and finally Vyotsky scowled and nodded. Then, still holding his chest, he sat up. “So get it over with,” he said. “What are you waiting for?”
Jazz looked at the other and grimaced. “God, what a wanker you are! Hasn’t it dawned on you yet that we may be the only human beings this side of Earth? You and me? Not that I’m much for male companionship but I can’t see myself killing off half the human population just for the fun of it. Last time that happened it was Cain and Abel!”
Vyotsky was finding it hard to follow Jazz’s logic. He wasn’t even sure it was logic. “What are you saying?” he said.
“I’m saying that, against my better judgement, I’m giving you your life,” Jazz told him. “See, I’m not the sort of murderous lunatic that you appear to be. Yesterday, in my cell—if I’d had you then in this position—things might be different. And your own fault because you worked me up to it. But I’m damned if I can kill you here and now.”
Vyotsky tried to sneer, managed only a wince. “Lily-livered chicken-shit son of a—” He jerked himself to his feet.
Jazz lowered his own SMG and put a single round between Vyotsky’s feet. It whupped where it ricochetted off the ground. “Sticks and stones,” he reminded, “can’t hurt my bones, but names can certainly do yours a hell of a lot of damage!” He got on his bike and kicked it into life.
“You’re leaving me here, without my gun?” Vyotsky was suddenly alarmed. “Then you might as well kill me after all!”
“You’ll find your gun waiting for you when you come through the Gate,” Jazz told him. “But remember this: if I ever catch you on my trail again, it’ll be a story with a different ending. I don’t know how big that world is up front, but from here at least it looks big enough for the two of us. It’s your decision. So that’s all from me, Comrade. Here’s hoping I won’t be seeing you.”
He put the bike in gear and rolled forward past Vyotsky, upped the gear and picked up a little speed, looked back once, briefly. The big Russian was watching him go. It was hard to say what sort of an expression he was wearing. Jazz sighed, climbed through the remaining gears and headed for the sunlit scene ahead. But in the back of his mind something kept telling him he’d made a bad mistake …
Another mistake was this: failing to recognize where the Gate ended and the strange world beyond it began!
Jazz had been riding only three or four minutes, had kept his speed even at maybe twenty, twenty-five miles per hour, when without warning he breached the sphere’s outer skin. For it was a sphere on this side, too, he realized as he tumbled in mid-air. The trouble was that on this side the sphere seemed parked in the throat of what looked like a crater, and the crater’s rim was three feet higher than the surrounding terrain.
The bike fell, Jazz too, managing somehow to kick himself free of the rotating machine, and both of them collided jarringly with hard earth and scattered rocks. Winded, Jazz lay there for a moment and let his senses stop reeling. Then he sat up and looked all about. And then he knew how lucky he’d been.
The dazzling white sphere was perhaps thirty feet across, and all around its perimeter, penetrating the earth and the crater walls alike to a radius of maybe seventy feet, magmass wormholes gaped everywhere. Jazz had landed between two such holes, and he knew it was only a matter of good fortune that he’d not been pitched headlong down the throat of either one of them. Their walls were glass smooth and very nearly perpendicular, and their depth entirely conjectural; once in, it would be a hell of a job to climb out again.
Jazz glanced at the sphere, turned his face away before the dazzle blinded him. A giant, illuminated golf ball plopped down in wet mortar and left to dry out. That’s what it looked like. “But who the hell drove it here?” Jazz muttered to himself. “And why didn’t he shout ‘fore’?”
He stood up and checked himself, finding only bumps and bruises. Then (and despite the fact that he felt almost compelled to stand still and simply gape at the weird world he’d entered) he went to the bike and examined it for damage. Its front forks were badly twisted and the wheel jammed immovably between them. If he had a spanner he could get the wheel off, then he might be able to straighten the forks one at a time using brute strength. But … he had no spanner.
So … what about tools in general?
He released catches on the bike’s seat and tilted it back … the tool compartment underneath was empty. Now the machine was doomed to lie here until it rusted. So much for transport …
Now Jazz gave a thought to Karl Vyotsky. The Russian was maybe one and a half to two miles behind him. Forty minutes at the outside, even weighed down with equipment. The last thing Jazz wanted was still to be here when Vyotsky arrived. But he must do one more thing before he moved off.
He had a small pocket radio, a walkie-talkie that Khuv had insisted he bring with him. Now he switched it on and spoke briefly into the mouthpiece: “Comrade bastard Major Khuv? This is Simmons. I’m through to the other side, and I’m not going to tell you a bloody thing about how I got here or what it’s like! How does that grab you?”
No answer, not even static. Or perhaps the very faintest, far-distant hiss and crackle. Nothing that remotely constituted an answer, anyway. Jazz hadn’t really expected anything; if the others hadn’t been able to get through, why should he be different? But:
“Hello, this is Simmons,” he tried again. “Anyone out there?” Still nothing. The radio, for all that it weighed only a pound, was now “dead” weight, useless to him. “Balls!”
he said into the mouthpiece, and pitched it into one of the magmass holes where it slid from view.
And now … now it was time to take a deep breath and really have a good look at where he’d landed.
Jazz was glad then that he’d dealt with things in their correct order of priority. For the fact was he could have just stood and gaped at the world on this side of the Perchorsk Gate for a very, very long time. It was in part familiar and fascinating, in part strange and frightening, but it was all fantastic. The eye was quite baffled by contrasts which might well be compared to a surreal landscape, except that they were all too real.
Jazz dealt first with the familiar things: these were the mountains, the trees, the pass that lay like the void of a missing tooth in stone fangs that reared up from scree bases and forested slopes, through the tree-line to gaunt, vertical buttresses of grey stone that seemed to go up forever. In awe of their grandeur, Jazz was drawn by the mountains away from the sphere maybe a hundred yards, and there he paused and put up a hand to his eyes to guard them from lingering sphere-glare; and he stared at the marching mountains again.
Even if he had not known he was in an alien world, he might have guessed that these were not Earth’s mountains. He had skied on the slopes of Earth’s mountains, and they had not been like these. Rather than born of some vast geological heaving, they seemed to have been weathered into being; and while this could scarcely be called a rare feature in Jazz’s own world, still he had never imagined it on a scale such as this. An incredible feat even for an alien Nature: to have sculpted a fortress range of planet-spanning mountains right out of the virgin rock! So high, jagged, sheer and dramatically awesome—why, only take away the trees under the timber-line, and these could well be the mountains of the moon!
The mighty range ran (Jazz glanced at his compass, which appeared to be working again) east to west, in both directions, as far as the eye could see. Its peaks marched away to far horizons and merged with them, passing into purple, indigo and velvet distances and disappearing at the very rim of the world. And apart from this pass, where in ages past the mountains had cracked open, their march seemed entirely unbroken.
Now, with the sphere behind him, Jazz stared at the “sun”—or what he could see of it. Those weak beams he had seen when he was passing through the Gate, which came from the right of the picture to give light to this land, had been filtered through the pass from the rim of the distant sun. But that was all it was, a rim.
There at the other side of the pass, a blister of red light was rising (or setting, perhaps, for there’d been no enlargement of it while Jazz had been here) and shooting its feeble rays through the wall of the mountains. But it was the sun, or a sun, however weakly it shone; its light felt good on Jazz’s face and hands where he shielded his wondering eyes. As for what lay beyond the mountains on that far, as yet unseen sunlit side: impossible to tell. But on this side …
To the west there was only the wooded flank of the mountain range, and at the foot of the range a plain stretching northwards, turning blue then dark blue into the apparently featureless distance. Directly to the north, to the far north beyond the dome of the sphere, all was darkness, where stars glittered in unknown constellations like diamonds in the vaulted jet of the skies. And under those stars, dimly reflective and reflecting too the far-flung beams of the blister-sun, the surface of what might be a sullen ocean, or more likely a sheet of glacial ice.
A chill wind was now blowing from the north, which was gradually eating its way through Jazz’s clothing to his bones. He shivered and knew that “north” was a very inhospitable place. And instinctively he began to pick his way across the plain of rocks and boulders toward the pass in the mountains.
But … this was strange. If the mountains ran east and west, and the—icelands?—were north, then the sun was due south. And still that blister of light and warmth hadn’t moved. A sun lying far to the south, apparently motionless there? Jazz shook his head in puzzlement.
And now, finally he paused to let his gaze turn eastward, which was where anything real or vaguely familiar came to an abrupt end and the unreal or at best surreal took over. For if Jazz had wondered at the seismic or corrosive forces of nature which had created the mountains, what was he to make of the spindly towers of mist-wreathed rock standing to the east: fantastically carven, mile-high aeries that soared like alien sky-scrapers up from the boulder plain in the shadow of the rearing mountains? All the time he’d been here, Jazz had been aware of these structures, and yet he’d managed to keep his eyes averted; another sign, perhaps, that his choice of direction—the pass, and through the pass—was a good one.
Possibly these columns or stacks had been fretted from the mountains, to be left standing there like weird, frozen sentinels as the mountains themselves melted from around them. Certainly they were a “natural” feature, for it was impossible to conceive of any creature aspiring or even requiring to build them. And yet at the same time there was that about them which hinted of more than nature’s handiwork. Especially in the towers and turrets and flying buttresses of their crowns, which looked for all the world like … castles?
But no, that could only be his imagination at work, his need to people this place with creatures like himself. It was a trick of the spectral light, a mirage of the twining mists which wreathed those great menhirs, a visual and mental distortion conjured of distance and dreams. Men had not built these megaliths. Or if they had, then they were not men as Michael J. Simmons understood them.
So … what sort of men? Wamphyri? Flight of fancy it might well be, but again, in his mind’s eye, Jazz saw the warrior burning on the walkway, and heard his voice raised in savage pride and defiance: “Wamphyri!”
Mile-high castles: the aeries of the Wamphyri! Jazz gave a snort of grim amusement at his own imaginings, but … the idea had taken hold of his mind and for the moment was fixed there.
Suddenly a mood was on him; he felt as lonely—more lonely—than he’d ever felt in his life. And the thought struck him anew that he was alone, and totally friendless in a world whose denizens …
… What denizens? Animals? Jazz hadn’t seen a one!
He looked at the sky. No birds flew there, not even a lone kite on the lookout for an evening meal. Was it evening? It felt like it. Indeed it felt like the evening not only of a place but of an entire world. A world where it was always evening? With the sun so low in the sky, that was possible. On this side of the mountains, anyway. And on the other side … morning? Always morning?
Reverie had taken hold, out of phase with Jazz’s character, from which he must forcibly free himself. He gave a sigh, shook himself, set out with more purpose toward the opening of the pass and the blister-sun beyond it. The pass didn’t lie level but climbed toward the crest of a saddle; and so Jazz, too, must climb. He found the extra effort strangely exhilarating; also, it kept him warm and was something he could concentrate on. Along the way grew coarse grasses and stunted shrubs, even the occasional pine, and above the scree the steep slopes were dense with tall trees. Just here the place was so like parts of the world he knew that … but it wasn’t the world he knew. It was alien, and he’d had proof enough that it housed creatures whose natures were lethal.
Twenty-five minutes or so later, pausing to lean against a great boulder, Jazz turned and looked back.
The sphere was now a little less than two miles behind and below him, and he had actually entered the mouth of the “V” where it lay like a slash through the mountain range. But back there on the rock-littered plain … the sphere was like a brilliant egg half-buried in its magmass nest. And a dark speck moved like a microbe against its glare. It could only be Vyotsky. A moment more—and Jazz nodded sourly. Oh, yes, that was Vyotsky all right!
The crack of a single ringing shot came echoing up to Jazz, bouncing itself from wall to wall of the pass. The Russian had found his gun where Jazz had left it for him; now he was telling this alien world that he was here. “So look out!” he was saying. “A
man is here, and one to be reckoned with! If you know what’s good for you, don’t try fooling around with Karl Vyotsky!” Like a superstitious peasant whistling in the dark. Or maybe he was just saying: “Simmons, it’s not over yet. This is just to warn you: keep looking back!”
And Jazz promised himself that he would …
Down beside the sphere, Vyotsky quit cursing, laid aside his gun and turned to the bike. He saw the seat laid back on its hinges and his face twisted into a grin. Tucked loosely into a pocket of one of his packs he had a small bag of tools. It was the last thing they’d given him on the other side, and he’d been in such a hurry that he hadn’t stored his tools away under the seat. Then the sneering grin slid from his face and he breathed a sigh of relief. He’d not once thought of those tools since Simmons took the bike off him. If he had, then for sure he’d have thrown them away somewhere in the last couple of miles.
Now he unhooked a small kidney-pack from his back harness, got the tools out and loosened the front wheel. He stood on one of the forks with his foot wedged under the wheel, bent his back and hauled on the other fork one-handed until he could feel it giving, then slid the wheel free. Now it was only a question of straightening the forks. He picked up the front end of the bike, half-dragged, half-wheeled it over to a pair of large boulders where they leaned together. If he could jam the twisted forks into the gap between the boulders, and apply the right amount of leverage in the right direction …
He upended the bike and got the forks in position, began to exert leverage—and froze! He stopped panting from his exertions, stopped breathing, too. What the hell was that? Vyotsky raced for his gun, grabbed it up and cocked it, looked wildly all about. No one. Nothing. But he’d heard something. He could have sworn he’d heard something. He went warily back to the bike, and—