it's obviously not new. In fact, it's got to be years old. As for this label on the cover, it's been thumbed to death! But these
pages, I mean the paper itself, is new, and the text has at least one glaring ambiguity/
'Oh?'He nodded. 'It talks about an underground exit in the Carpathian foothills - one underground exit, that is. But it also mentions Gustav Turchin, and how he flooded a Gate in Perchorsk in the Urals/ He frowned again and continued, Tunny, but when I was reading this stuff it seemed to make sense. I don't know, I seemed to understand. But now I only remember the text/'Like ... Eureka!' Liz said. 'That word on the tip of your tongue. That abrupt but transient flash of insight. It's there, and it's gone. Right?'Jake knew she was fishing - albeit for something he wasn't able to give her, not yet - and said, 'Weren't we talking about Gates?''There are two/ she answered. 'The one under the Carpatii Meridionali is the original; it occurred naturally and has been there for - well, no one knows how long. It's like a black hole, or perhaps a grey hole, and its other end comes out in Starside in a vampire world. A long time ago, warrior Lords would throw their conquered enemies into it. It's how vampires got here in the first place/Jake accepted that; it felt real, he knew it was so. 'And the other?''Is man-made/ Liz told him. And settling back, she said, 'This is how the story goes:'Thirty years ago the Americans put one over on the Soviets. A \>ig one, that is. And good for them - for us, the whole world - too, because since World War Two the Russians had been bluffing the West right out of its pants. Kennedy was the first US President to call that bluff, over Cuba. Later, Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher would have their say. They just said no. Thatcher was good at that/'Said no to what?' Jake was no historian.'To the Russian military build-up/ she answered. 'To trying to keep up with all of that expenditure on ships, aircraft, bombs, the space race. And so President Reagan or his advisors invented SDI, the Space Defense Initiative.''"Star Wars?'" He remembered that much, at least.'Right,' Liz said. 'A fantasy scenario if ever there was one. And the Soviets fell for it. Now the boot was on the other foot and eventually their expenditure went over the top. It was probably the beginning of the end for Russian Communism. But in the early '80s, while they were still financially stable, their top boffins and physicists were tasked to dream up an answer to the USA's SDI - a programme that didn't exist except on paper, and very thin paper at that.'Well, that's what Perchorsk was all about. They built a dam across a powerful watercourse in a ravine to give them the hydroelectric power they needed, also to give them some camouflage against the West's spy satellites - which was something else that didn't work - and carved out a subterranean complex from the bedrock. They put in an atomic pile to boost the project's energy requirements, and bingo, they were in business. But they very quickly went out of business.'The idea was ... I don't know, some kind of radar? A fan of energy raking the sky, covering all the north-western territories of the then Soviet Union. It was an experiment, but if it had worked they'd have built more complexes just like it as "defensive" measures against incoming missiles or bombers. Hitting that fan would be like running into a brick wall; nothing was going to be able to get through. In effect, a force-screen. Huh! Talk about an "Iron Curtain?" And what price SDI then, eh? Except of course, there was no SDI...
'... And no force-screen, either. During the first test it backfired, the pile imploded and a new kind of energy - or perhaps a different and extremely primal kind of energy, a different kind of heat - was discovered. And where the pile had been, right at the core of the Perchorsk Complex, there was this ... well, this hole. This hole that went right through the wall of our universe.
In Starside the new singularity appeared in close proximity to the original, the "natural" one. So -