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eviscerated guts. It would be so much easier if he could simply talk to the
dead, like Harry. They might not respect him as they did Harry, but the threat
of defilement should suffice to open them up. If not . . . well, there was
always the other way.
Dragosani had issued a detention warrant, ordering the East German
Grenzpolizei to pick Harry up on trumped-up charges. They had tried, and out
of necessity Harry had solved the final equation of Mobius's metaphysical
space-time dimension, with which he could summon 'doors' on the entire
space-time universe. Barely in time, Harry had used one of these doors.
Ironically, perhaps, it had floated into view (but only Harry's view) across
the face of Mobius's headstone!
From then on Harry's invasion of the Soviet E-Branch and the destruction of
Dragosani had been an inexorable process, in the course of which his own body
had been destroyed and abandoned as once more he escaped to the Mobius
Continuum. There, as an incorporeal being, a bodiless mind and soul,
eventually he had discovered and entered into the drained shell of Alec Kyle.
This had been an almost involuntary event - Kyle's body, a living vacuum, had
seemed to reach out and suck Harry in - but it had given him a place among men
again and ended what was otherwise an interminable existence in the matterless
Mobius Continuum.
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And now Harry was back in Leipzig, standing by Mobius's grave as before.
Almost nine years had passed since last he was here, but he hadn't forgotten
those events which terminated his first visit. And so on this occasion he'd
come by night.
A moon hung low over the city's skyline, and the stars were very bright
between streamers of fast-fleeing cloud. The night wind, moaning through the
headstones, sent wrinkled leaves scurrying like mice, and Harry felt a chill
in his bones which was born partly of the natural cold of a November night,
and partly of his feeling of alienation here in this place. But the cemetery
gates were closed for the night, the lights in the city subdued, and apart
from the scrape of leaves all was silence.
He sought Mobius out and found him, and as before the great mathematician was
busy with his formulae and his calculations. Tables of planetary mass and
motion, the
'weights' of the sun and her satellite worlds in their careening round, were
balanced against orbital velocities and gravitic forces; formulae so complex
that even Harry's intuitive grasp found their purpose elusive, together with
simultaneous equations whose answers filled themselves in even as he watched;
all of these figures and configurations beat on Harry's awareness like the
ever-changing results of an on-going process on the screen of some vast
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computer. And Harry saw that the problem was so complex and so close to
completion that he let it go on undisturbed by his presence to the end. At
which time the screen went blank and Mobius sighed. It was a strange thing,
even now, to hear the 'sigh' of a dead man.
'Sir?' said Harry. 'Are you available now?'
'Eh?' said Mobius, in that moment before he recognized Harry's thoughts. Then:
'Is that you, Harry?' he continued eagerly. 'I
thought there was someone here. You very nearly put me off just then, and I
was working on something which is very important!'
'I know,' Harry nodded. 'I saw it, but I didn't want to disturb you. Those are
very wonderful discoveries!'
'Oh?' Mobius seemed surprised. 'You could understand my working, then? Very
well, and what have I discovered?'
Harry drew back a little, hesitating. He was in the presence of genius and he
knew it. Mobius had been a great mathematician all his life, and after that
life he had continued his work unabated. Where Harry's mathematical skills
were intuitive, Mobius had worked hard to achieve his results. No quantum
leaps for him but dogged trial and error and an unwavering, all-consuming
passion for his subject. It seemed somehow improper for Harry to have come
here at this time, spying on the man in his triumph.
'Not at all,' Mobius tut-tutted him. 'What? - a man who can impose his
physical being on the metaphysical universe, and use it at will? Spying on me?
I consider you a colleague, Harry, an equal! And truth be told, you couldn't
have come visiting at a more opportune time. Now come on, tell me what I've
been doing. What is it that I've proved with my numbers, eh?'
Harry shrugged. 'Very well,' he said. 'You've shown that instead of the nine
planets we believed to exist in the solar system, there are in fact eleven.
Both of the new worlds are small, but true planets for all that. One occupies
a position exactly behind Jupiter, with the same rotation period, so that it's
always occluded, and the other's a non-reflector and lies about as far out
again as Pluto from the sun.'
'Good!' Mobius applauded him. 'And their moons?'
'Eh?' Harry was taken by surprise. 'I read only the problem you'd set yourself
and the answers to the problem as you arrived at them! There were slight
deviations -
percentages of error, I suppose - but. . .' He paused. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]