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cardboard rims, like the glasses Jazz had once been issued to view a 3-D film.
'For the light,' Khuv explained, though there was hardly any need. 'It can be
blinding until you're used to it.' He put on his glasses.
Jazz did the same, followed Khuv down the stairway built through the
glass-smooth cylindrical shaft. From behind them came a clatter as the
soldier's rifle toppled over when he went to pick it up, then Karl Vyotsky's
husky, threatening voice hissing: 'Idiot! Dolt! Would you like to do a month
of nights?'
'No, Sir!' the young soldier gasped. 'I'm sorry, sir. It slipped.'
'You damn well should be sorry!' Vyotsky rasped. 'And not only for the rifle.
What the hell are you here for anyway? To check passes for security, that's
what! Do you
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know that man in front, and me, and the man with us?'
'Oh, yes, sir!' the young soldier quavered. The man in front is Comrade Major
Khuv, sir, and you too are an officer of the KGB. The other man is ... is ...
a friend of yours, sir!'
'Clown!' Vyotsky hissed. 'He is not my friend. Nor yours. Nor anyone's in the
whole damned place!'
'Sir, I-'
'Now hold that rifle out in front of you,' Vyotsky snapped. 'Arm's length,
finger through the trigger-guard, finger under the backsight.
What the hell . . .?
Arm's length, I
said! Now hold it, and count to two hundred, slowly! Then get back to
attention. And if I ever catch you slacking off again, I'll feed you into that
white hell down there dick-first, got it?'
'Yes, Sir!'
Following Khuv toward the white glare at the end of the shaft, Jazz murmured
sourly: 'A disciplinarian, our Karl.'
Khuv glanced back, shook his head. 'Not really. Discipline isn't his strong
point. But sadism is. I hate to admit it, but it does have its uses . . .'
At the end of the shaft there was a railed landing where the stairs levelled
out and turned to the left. Khuv paused on the landing with Jazz alongside.
Waiting for Vyotsky, they gazed down on a fantastic scene.
It was like being in a cavern, but there was no way it could be mistaken for
any ordinary sort of cave. Instead, Jazz saw that the rock had been hollowed
out in the shape of a perfect sphere, a giant bubble in the base of the
mountain - but a bubble at least one hundred and twenty feet in diameter! The
curving, shiny-black wall all around was glass-smooth except for the wormholes
which riddled it everywhere, even in the domed ceiling. The mouth of the shaft
where Jazz and Khuv stood pointed downward at ninety degrees directly at the
centre of the space, which also happened to be the source of the light. And
that was the most fantastic thing of all.
For that central area was a ball of light some thirty feet across, and it was
apparently suspended there, mid-way between the domed ceiling and the upward
curving floor.
A sphere of brilliance hanging motionless within a sphere of air, and the
whole trick neatly buried under the foot of a mountain!
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Narrowing his eyes against the glare, which was powerful even through the
tinted lenses of his spectacles. Jazz slowly became aware that the spherical
cavern contained other things. A spidery web of scaffolding had been built
half-way up the wall and all around the central blaze. The scaffolding
supported a platform of timbers which circled the weird light source,
reminding Jazz vaguely of the ring system round Saturn. Leading inwards from
the ring, a walkway proceeded right to the edge of the sphere of light.
Externally, backed up against the black, wormhole-riddled walls - evenly
spaced around the perimeter and massively supported on a framework of
stanchions - three twin-
mounted Katushev cannons pointed their muzzles point-blank at the blinding
centre. Crews were in position, their sights aligned on the sphere, their
faces white and alien-
looking with headset antennae and insect goggle-eyes trained on the dazzling
target.
Between the guns and the sphere stood a ten-foot-high electrified fence, with
a gate where the timber walkway spanned the gap between the Saturn's rings and
the centre.
There was some motion down there, nervous and jumpy, but not much; the stench
of fear was so thick in the supposedly conditioned air that Jazz could almost
feel it like slime on his skin.
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He gripped the wooden rail, let the entire scene print itself indelibly on his
brain, said: 'What in the name of all that's . . .?' He turned his head to
stare at Khuv. 'I saw the arrival of those guns that night you caught me. The
electrified fence, too. I thought they were meant to defend Perchorsk against
attack from the outside, which struck me as making no sense. But from the
inside?
Christ, that doesn't make much sense either! I mean, what that thing? And why
are those men down there so desperately afraid is of it?'
And suddenly, without any prompting, he knew the answer before it came. Not
all of the answer but enough. Suddenly everything fitted: all he'd seen, and
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