I will, said the other. He smiled a wan smile and disappeared in a rapidly dispersing burst of foxfire.

For long moments there was a breathless silence. Then Kyle turned the light up and Krakovitch drew a massive breath of air. Finally he expelled it, and said: ‘And now —now I hope you'll agree that you owe me something of an explanation!'

Which was something Kyle could only go along with . .

Harry Keogh had done all he could. The rest of it lay in the hands of the physically alive, or at least with people who still had hands to accept it.

In the Möbius continuum Harry felt a mental tugging; even sleeping, his baby son's attraction was still enormous. Harry Jnr was tightening his grip, and Harry Snr was sure that he had been right about the infant: he was drawing on his mind, leeching his knowledge, absorbing the substance of his id. Soon Harry must make a permanent break. But how? To where? What would be left of him, he wondered, if he were completely absorbed? Would there be anything left at all?

Or would he simply cease to be except as the future esoteric talent of his own son?

Using the Möbius continuum, Harry could always plumb the future to find the answers to these questions. He preferred not to know all of the answers, however, for the future seemed somehow inviolable. It wasn't that he would feel a cheat but rather that he doubted the wisdom of knowing the future.

For like the past, the future was fixed; if Harry saw something he didn't like, would he try to avoid it? Of course he would, even knowing it was unavoidable. Which could only complicate his weird existence more yet!

The one single glimpse he would allow himself would be to discover if indeed he had any future at all. Which for Harry Keogh was the very simplest of exercises.

Still fighting his son's attraction, he found a future door and opened it, gazed out upon the ever expanding future. Against the subtly shifting darkness of the fourth dimension, Earth's myriad human life-lines of neon blue shot away into a sapphire haze, defining the length of lives that were and lives still to come. Harry's line sped out from his own incorporeal being — from his mind, he supposed —and wound away apparently interminably. But he saw that just beyond the Möbius door it took on a course lying parallel to a second thread, like the twin strips of a motorway with a central verge or barrier. And this second life-line, Harry supposed, must belong to Harry Jnr.

He launched himself from the door and traversed future time, following his own and the infant Harry's threads. Faster than the life-lines themselves, he propelled himself into the near future. He witnessed and was saddened by the termination of many blue threads, which simply dimmed and went out, for he knew that these were deaths; and he saw others burst brightly into existence like stars, then extend themselves into brilliant neon filaments, and knew that these were births, new lives. And so he forged a little way forward. Time was briefly furrowed in his wake like the sea behind a forging ship, before closing in and sealing itself once more.

Suddenly, despite the fact that Harry was without body, he felt an icy blast blowing on him from the side. It could hardly be a physical chill and must therefore be of the psyche. Sure enough, away out across the panorama of speeding life-lines, he spied one that was as different as a shark in a school of tuna. For this one was scarlet — the mark of a vampire!

And quite deliberately, it was angling in towards his and Harry Jnr's threads! Harry knew panic. The scarlet life-line drifted closer; at any moment it must converge with his and the infant's. Then —Harry Jnr's life-thread abruptly veered away from his father's, raced off at a tangent on its own amidst an ocean of weaving blue lines. And the thread of Harry Snr followed suit, avoiding the vampire thread's thrust and turning desperately away. The action had looked for all the world like the manoeuvring of drivers on some otherworldly race track. But the last move had been blind, almost instinctive, and Harry's life-thread seemed now to careen, out of control, across the skein of future time.

Then, in another moment, Harry witnessed and indeed was party to the impossible — a collision! Another blue life-thread, dimming, crumbling, disintegrating, converged with his out of nowhere. The two seemed to bend towards each other as by some mutual attraction, before slamming together in a neon blaze that was much brighter and speeding on as one thread. Briefly Harry felt the presence — or the faint, fading echo — of another mind superimposed on his own. Then it was gone, extinct, and his thread rushed on alone.

He had seen enough. The future must go its own way. (Which it surely would.) He cast about, found a door and side-stepped out of time into the Möbius continuum. At once the infant Harry's tractor id put a grapple on him and began to reel him in. Harry didn't fight it but merely let himself drift home. Home to his son's mind in Hartlepool, on a Sunday night early in the autumn of 1977.

He had intended to talk to certain new friends in Romania, but that would have to wait. As for his ‘collision' with the future of some other person: he hardly knew what to make of that. But in the brief moment before its expiry, he was sure that he had recognised that fading echo of a mind.

And that was the most puzzling thing of all...

Chapter Twelve

Genoa is a city of contrasts. From the low-level poverty in the cobbled alleys and sleazy bars of its waterfront areas, to its high-rise luxury apartments looking down on the streets from broad windows and spacious sun-balconies; from the immaculate swimming pools of the rich to the dirty, oil-blackened beaches; from the shadowy, claustrophobic labyrinthine alleys down in the guts of the city to the airy, hugely proportioned stradas and piazzas — contrast is everywhere evident. Gracious gardens give way to chasms of concrete, the comparative silence of select residential suburbs is torn cityward by blasts of traffic noise which lessen not at all through the night, and the sweet air of the higher levels gives way to dust and blue exhaust fumes in the congested, sunless slums. Built on a mountainside, Genoa's levels are many and dizzying.

British Intelligence's safe house there was an enormous top-floor flat in a towering block overlooking the Corso Aurelio Saffi. To the front, facing the ocean, the block rose five high-ceilinged storeys above the road; at the rear, because its foundations were sunk into the summit of a fang of rock, with the building perched on its rim, there was a second level three floors deeper. The aspect from the stubby, low-walled rear balconies was vertiginous, and especially so to Jason Cornwell, alias ‘Mr Brown'.

Genoa', Sunday, 9.00 P.M. — but in Romania Harry Keogh was still talking to the vampire-hunters in their suite of rooms in lonesti, and would soon set off to follow his life-thread into the near future and in Devon, Yulian Bodescu continued to worry about the men who were watching him and worked out a plan to discover who they were and what their interest was. But here in Genoa Jason Cornwell sat thin-lipped and stiffly erect in his chair and watched Theo Dolgikh using a kitchen knife to pick the rotten mortar out of the stonework of the balcony's already dangerous wall. And the sweat on Cornwell's upper lip and in his armpits had little or nothing to do with Genoa's sticky, sultry Indian summer atmosphere.

But it did have to do with the fact that Dolgikh had caught him out, trapped the British spider in his own web, right here in this safe house. Normally the flat would be occupied by a staff of two or three other secret service agents, but because Cornwell (or ‘Brown') was busy with stuff beyond the scope of ordinary espionage — a specialist job, as it were — the regular occupiers had been ‘called away' on other work, leaving the premises suitably empty and accessible to Brown alone.