The Source Read Free Page A

he’d got.
    The tiny camera attached to Simonov’s nite-lite clicked one last time and gave a warning whir, signalling that the sequence was complete. He unclipped the camera and put it away. Then he wedged his binoculars securely in the base of a boulder, carefully cocked his pistol, squirmed about face and got to his knees. Still concealed, he peered cautiously through the V formed where the tops of two rounded boulders leaned together. Nothing back there. Nothing he could see, anyway. Steep cliffs falling away for a thousand feet, with spurs extending here and there, and thinly drifted snow lying white and gleaming on all flat surfaces. And way down there, obscured by the night, the tree-line and gentling lower slopes. Everything motionless and monochrome in dim starshine and occasional moonlight, where only the thin wind scattered little flurries of snow from the spurs and high ledges. There were plenty of places where men could hide themselves, of course—no one knew that better than Simonov, himself an expert in concealment—but on the other hand, if he’d been followed, why would they want to come up here? Easier to wait for him below, surely? Yet still the feeling persisted that he was not alone, that feeling which had
grown in him increasingly over his last two or three visits to this place.
    This place, this spawning ground for utterly alien monsters …
    He got back down into his original position, recovered the nite-lites and brought them to his eyes. In the ravine, where the steep road hugged the face of the defile down to the towering twin walls of the dam and the curved lead surface between them, a cavernous opening in the cliff blazed with light. The last truck turned left off the road onto a level staging area, then passed in through huge, wheeled, steel-framed lead doors. A gang of yellow-clad traffic controllers flagged the truck rumbingly inside and out of sight, then followed it into the blaze of illumination under the cliff. Other men came hurrying down the road, gathering up flashing beacons. The great doors had clanged shut by the time they reached them, but a wicket-gate thick as the door of a vault had been left open, issuing a square beam of yellow light. It swallowed up the men with the traffic beacons, then was closed. The floodlights over the pass snapped out and left stark blackness in their wake. Only the dammed watercourse and the great lead shield were left to reflect the starshine.
    But all of that lead down there. And these poisoned heights, a little more than mildly radioactive. And that Thing filmed by the AWACS as it did battle with the USAF jet fighters. Simonov couldn’t suppress a small shudder, which this time wasn’t due to the intense cold. He folded his nite-lites into a flat, leather-cased shape which he slipped inside his anorak with the strap still round his neck. Then for a moment longer he just lay there, his eyes staring into the enigmatic gulf below, his mind superimposing on the darkness the sequence of events he’d witnessed in London, recorded on that flickering AWACS film …
    But even remembering it, he cringed away from it. Bad enough that he still occasionally saw it in his
dreams! But could that … that … whatever it had been, could it really have come from here? A monstrous mutation? A gigantic, hideous warrior clone conjured in some crazed geneticist’s incredible experiment? A “biological” weapon outside all of man’s previous experience and understanding? That was what he was here to find out. Or rather, it was what he was here to prove conclusively: that indeed this was where that Thing had been born—or made. That seething, pulsing, writhing—
    Snow crunched softly, compacted by a stealthy footfall!
    Simonov thrust himself to his feet, turning as he rose, and saw a head and staring eyes outlined briefly above the low jumble of rocks. His automatic was in his hand as he launched himself