Return To Kaldak rb-36 Read online

  That was more of an apology than Leighton ever gave anybody, and Blade decided to accept it, such as it was. «I understand,» he said. «Well, let’s get me and Cheeky fired off into Dimension X, and you and J can both relax.»

  Blade still didn’t breathe easy until two days later, when he and Cheeky showed up in Complex One ready for the trip into Dimension X. Complex One lay two hundred feet below the Tower of London, with a concealed entrance guarded by dark-suited Special Branch men. Once it held the whole Project, and it still held the master computer, the new booth, and everything else which might give away the secret of Dimension X.

  That wasn’t enough to fill the whole Complex. An entire corridor of offices and laboratories once alive with lights and voices and hard work was now dark and empty, the equipment having gone to the new Complex Two or else shrouded in dust covers. Blade had the feeling ghosts would be lurking in those empty rooms before long.

  As usual, Blade stepped into the changing booth to get ready. Once, had had to strip to a loincloth and smear himself with foul-smelling black grease to prevent electrical burns from the mass of electrodes which linked him to the computer. Now he pulled on net underwear, heavy socks, woolen trousers and shirt, and a light windbreaker. He slipped one knife into a wrist sheath and hung the other along with a canteen on his belt. A light rucksack held a poncho, a spare canteen, extra socks and underwear, soap and toothbrush, several days’ rations for himself and Cheeky, water purification tablets, snares, fishing line, and the disassembled crossbow.

  Meanwhile, Cheeky was pulling on a modified dog sweater and belting on his own miniature knife. He wasn’t quite intelligent enough to reason out for himself how to use unknown tools. He only had to be shown a couple of times, though.

  With Cheeky perched on his shoulder, Blade stood as the wire-mesh booth was lowered over him. Last trip it had been about the same size and shape as the glass booth which held the rubber-padded chair of the original computer, before the KALI capsule. For this trip it was six inches larger all around, to provide just enough room for Cheeky. Looking out through the mesh, Blade saw Leighton standing by the manual control panel.

  That was all right with Blade. For the first time he wouldn’t reach Dimension X alone. For the first time he was also taking someone else into its unknown dangers. He was glad to see that Leighton wasn’t adding to those dangers unnecessarily by using the untested new automatic sequencer.

  «All right, Richard?» said Leighton.

  Blade gave a thumbs-up gesture and Cheeky imitated him. Leighton’s hand pulled the red master switch in one swift motion to the bottom of the slot.

  From where J sat on a folding stool, the booth suddenly seemed filled with green light, with Blade and Cheeky clearly visible inside it. Then the light turned silvery, Blade and Cheeky blurred, and both they and the light vanished.

  Leighton stood with his hand on the switch until the lights on the consoles seemed to satisfy him. To J, they made less sense than so many Egyptian hieroglyphics. Finally the scientist turned to J.

  «Do you need a drink as badly as I do?»

  «Probably more so.»

  «I sincerely doubt if that would be possible,» said Leighton. He reached under the control panel and came out with a silver flask and a thermos jug.

  «Weak or strong?»

  Blade only saw the green light. Then the wire mesh and the room beyond it wavered. He seemed to be looking at them through the hot air rising from a fire. He felt a stab of some strong emotion in his mind from Cheeky, not quite fear but certainly discontent with the situation.

  Easy, Cheeky, thought Blade. I’ve been through this dozens of times. It’s not so bad after the first time. He hoped it was nothing more than facing the unknown which was bothering Cheeky.

  Then the green light and the wavering booth and room both vanished. Blade felt Cheeky ‘s weight lift from his shoulder and heard him yeeep. He sounded more angry than frightened, but suddenly his thoughts weren’t reaching Blade.

  Then Blade felt himself falling. He fell down through dreamlike cold and blackness for what seemed like forever. It was so cold that he felt the sweat on his skin starting to freeze, and so black that even the idea of light seemed impossible.

  His thoughts still came clearly. He’d just begun to wonder if something might have gone badly wrong, when suddenly the cold and the darkness vanished. There was blue sky overhead, damp grass under his hands, and a cool breeze puffing against his face.

  Blade sat up. He was sitting in foot-high grass on a slope which looked like the bank of a river. Between the water’s edge and the main channel lay a hundred yards of dead trees, patches of black mud, and clumps of reeds. The reeds were a sickly yellow-green, and looked vaguely familiar.

  Behind him the bank rose toward the crest of a hill. The grass gave way to scrubby bushes, and the bushes to gnarled trees. High above the treetops, a large bird made lazy circles with hardly the flicker of a wingtip, riding the updrafts.

  There was no sign of Cheeky.

  Blade controlled both his fear for Cheeky and his anger at Lord Leighton until he’d finished checking his clothes, his equipment, and the shape of his body. He was intact, and he had everything he’d taken into the booth-except for Cheeky. He waited a minute, for signs of either the feather-monkey or less-welcome company. Then he pulled out his canteen and walked down to the water’s edge.

  The water of the river was too scummy and dark with decayed vegetable matter for drinking, but a clear stream flowed down the bank a few yards away. Blade drank, filled both canteens and added water purification tablets, then hooked the canteens to his belt. At last he started searching for Cheeky in earnest, using not only his eyes and ears but his mind.

  Cheeky, where are you? Cheeky, answer me. Cheeky, are you hurt?

  Blade sent his thoughts out over and over again, keeping the message simple. For all the answer he got, he might as well have been trying to explain Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.

  He didn’t see or hear anything, either. He began to wonder if perhaps Cheeky had thought Blade was dead or hurt and gone off in search of help. He went back to where he’d awakened and looked at the grass. It was flattened, but not crushed as if he’d lain there for a long time. Also, if he’d been there long enough to make Cheeky think he was dead, he’d feel chilled and stiff.

  No, Cheeky was-lost. Blade would not use the word «gone,» let alone the word «dead,» even in his mind. Cheeky was lost. The main problem for now was to find him again.

  His anger at Lord Leighton slowly passed off. Cheeky had known what he was getting into, as well as his mind could grasp it. He was a volunteer. And certainly the failure of one of his most cherished and promising experiments would be its own punishment for Lord Leighton. He’d be miserably disappointed.

  So was Blade. He hadn’t realized until now how much he’d hoped that the problem of facing a new world alone was solved. He’d always been a loner, too much so for a safe, sane, twentieth-century existence. But a man can fight only so many singlehanded battles before he starts wanting someone to guard his back and share his campfire.

  More than his own peace of mind was also involved here. Why send two people into Dimension X if they didn’t arrive together? Blade was going to spend several days looking for Cheeky before he started exploring this Dimension. He’d have spent even more time looking for a human companion.

  It was frustrating, to put it mildly. Trying to solve several problems at once, they’d wound up solving none of them! They weren’t quite back to where they’d started, but they were close enough to make Blade angry.

  He let his anger out with a few heartfelt curses. The outburst frightened a rabbitlike creature out of the grass. It hopped away in such obvious panic that Blade had to laugh.

  He’d just stopped laughing when he heard a highpitched droning from the direction of the river. He hurried down the bank to where he could hide in the grass and still look out at the river.

  A hovercraft was
cruising slowly along the main channel. It looked remarkably like a Home Dimension machine, with propellers mounted on top to drive it and a flexible skirt containing the air cushion under it. It looked battered, and there was some sort of lettering on the side. Like the yellow-green reeds, the lettering looked vaguely familiar to Blade. He strained his eyes, wishing he’d been willing to risk bringing on this trip a pair of binoculars. Some were all plastic, but all were obviously products of a high technology, and might have aroused suspicion in some Dimensions.

  The hovercraft vanished behind a grove of trees before Blade could see more. When it reappeared, it was too far away for him to have any hope of making out the lettering.

  Blade gritted his teeth. His first day in this Dimension was beginning to look like one of those days when everything goes wrong. It was particularly unpleasant to think about what might have happened to Cheeky.

  At least he had one small consolation. The hovercraft showed that he was in a technologically advanced Dimension. It was a little less likely that Cheeky would be shot on sight as an evil spirit, or slaughtered, plucked, and popped into a cooking pot for some tribesman’s dinner.

  Another consolation for Blade was being able to reach into his rucksack and pull out some food. He decided to eat it cold, rather than risk a fire. Where there was one hovercraft there might be others, and their crews might be armed and trigger-happy.

  When he’d eaten, he curled up in his poncho, dry and almost warm. No hunting for a pile of dead leaves to put between his bare hide and the night winds this time!

  If Cheeky had just been snuggled up under the poncho with him, Blade would have fallen asleep quite happily.

  Chapter 3

  Blade woke before dawn, feeling better than usual after his first night in a new Dimension. At least he felt better until he thought of Cheeky. Then he had to tell himself all over again that he wouldn’t find Cheeky by worrying or blaming Lord Leighton.

  Without leaving cover, he ate a chocolate bar and watched dawn break over the river. Several small boats passed slowly down the main channel, trailing fishing nets and lines. The fishermen wore broad-brimmed hats, and both men and women were bare to the waist.

  From farther upriver a whistle sounded. Then a stern-wheel steamboat appeared, trailing a thick cloud of gray smoke. Her decks were crowded and she towed several heavily loaded barges. A boat the size of a large cabin cruiser followed in her wake, gliding along silently without noise or smoke. The fishermen waved as the two larger craft plowed past. The people aboard the steamer waved back.

  Blade knew it was time to start moving. He wasn’t going to find Cheeky or learn much about the Dimension by sitting here. The mix of technologies-steamboat, hovercraft, and rowboat-was odd but not unbelievable. He might be in some developing country or a land recovering from a nuclear war. Neither would be anything new.

  He emptied one canteen, then headed for the stream to ref-ill it. He was bending down when he heard the drone of propellers from high overhead. He looked up, and stopped with the empty canteen dangling from his hand to stare at what was approaching.

  You could call it a flying train, if you had to find a handy name for it. The locomotive was a squarish metal box with a wedge-shaped nose that was mostly tinted glass. It looked rather like the cabin section of a helicopter with the rotors and tail cut off. Two large propellers whirled on outriggers near the nose. Two more were mounted aft, blowing over large rudders.

  From between the rudders a long cable stretched astern, to the nose of a large sausage-shaped balloon. Three more balloons followed, tied nose to tail like railroad cars. A long gondola hung from each one. Blade saw shrouded piles of cargo, men moving among them, and guns at the bow and stern of each gondola.

  The whole train made a weird sort of sense, if you assumed the «locomotive» was held up by some sort of antigravity. Certainly the propellers could never have done the job alone, nor could the balloons, which were brightly colored, in checkerboard patterns of yellow and green or blue and white. Each of them had what looked like a number on its bulging flank, and there was lettering on each gondola. It looked like the same tantalizingly familiar lettering Blade had seen on the hovercraft. It was also out of sight before Blade could get a good look.

  On any previous trip, it would have been common sense for Blade to go where the balloon train was going. That way probably lay civilization-there, or along the river. On this trip, needing to think about Cheeky was changing all the rules.

  Blade wouldn’t even guess what the chances were that the feather-monkey was still alive. He’d made the transition into Home Dimension with Blade, but had he made it out the other side? And if he’d reached the same Dimension, had he landed anywhere close? Even if he’d landed only a few hundred yards away, he might have drowned in the marsh or the river.

  Nonetheless, Blade was going to search at least the immediate area, if only because he would find it hard to live with himself otherwise. In fact, he was ready to spend most of his time in this. Dimension hunting for Cheeky. The trip would be pretty much wasted if he didn’t find Cheeky!

  Even the immediate area along the riverbank was a pretty good-sized haystack, and he was looking for a needle with a mind of its own and the ability to move around. So the first thing to do was communicate with some friendly natives and get them to help him.

  Not just any natives, though. Blade alone or Cheeky alone probably wouldn’t appear suspicious. The two of them together could be. In a Dimension advanced enough to produce hovercraft and antigravity, the people would have many ways to discover the origin and identity of two such suspicious strangers. That meant danger to the Dimension X secret, and Blade’s most important duty was always to protect that secret. He had to be ready to kill anybody or let himself be killed, rather than let anyone seriously suspect the existence of inter-Dimensional travel.

  So he would have to find a community so isolated that even if they got suspicious, they might not be able to get word to the authorities or convince them if they did. It should also have so few people that he could kill them himself if necessary.

  Blade devoutly hoped it wouldn’t be necessary. He didn’t like killing anybody, and certainly never peasants who probably wouldn’t even know that they’d learned something dangerous. However, Blade was alive and sane after so many years as an agent and a traveler in far Dimensions because he could and would kill where necessary, as efficiently and ruthlessly as if he did enjoy it.

  The first people he’d try were the fishermen on the river. He wouldn’t signal them from the bank, though. Such signals might attract other people’s attention. Better to find a fishing village.

  Blade looked back toward the wooded hill. From the top of one of those trees, he could see a good deal of countryside. Once he’d found the nearest fishing settlement, he could spy it out at night, then approach the people tomorrow morning. Being that careful would take a lot of time, when every hour counted, but not being careful-Blade started to turn, then his instinct for danger suddenly flashed a warning: turn around slowly. He did so, keeping his hands well away from his sides and spreading out his fingers to show that he was unarmed.

  Five men in green coveralls were standing among the trees. Four wore a variety of hats, and one a steel helmet. If they were soldiers, they must have armed themselves from a museum. One carried a crossbow, very much like Blade’s except that the bow and winch were metal. Two carried what looked like turn-of-the-century army rifles with magazines and short thick bayonets. The man with the helmet carried a long-barreled pistol. The last man-Blade now saw it was a woman-carried something futuristic, made of what looked like black plastic.

  One of the riflemen took Blade’s stare as a hostile gesture. He raised his weapon and took aim. The helmeted man drew his pistol and knocked the barrel of the rifle up just in time. The bullet whistled over Blade’s head. Before the man could fire again his leader was cursing him-and Blade stopped as if he’d grown roots.

  He’d heard the lang
uage before. It was reaching his ears as English, thanks to the usual change in his brain as he passed into Dimension X. But he’d learned that if he concentrated and didn’t try to translate, he could hear the original words clearly enough to recognize them.

  The soldiers were speaking the language of Kaldak and Doimar, the rival cities of a war-scarred Dimension groping its way back to civilization. He’d been there two trips ago. Before he left, he’d temporarily ended the rivalry by teaching Kaldak to use the ancient weapons of the fallen civilization, overcoming centuries of superstitious fear. Doimar’s army was smashed, and at least a chance for recovery had been brought to the Dimension. It was one of his proudest accomplishments.

  Now he was back in the same Dimension. A Dimension where he could easily be a legend, and which might have scientists who could learn the Dimension X secret from his return!

  Chapter 4

  Since doing anything right now would probably get him shot, Blade decided to do nothing. Getting himself killed here seemed a somewhat drastic way of protecting the Dimension X secret.

  Blade slowly raised his hands and stood still. The crossbowman slung his weapon on his back and searched Blade. He took both knives and emptied the rucksack in search of more weapons. He didn’t seem to find anything in the sack suspicious. Finally he put everything back and laid it at Blade’s feet, with a gesture for Blade to put it back on.

  Blade did so, feeling relieved. It didn’t look like a case of «escape or die,» at least for now. He could safely stay in these people’s hands for a while. If they became friendly enough to talk to him—

  But if they got that friendly and talk started, where would it end? How could he be sure the conversation wouldn’t take a dangerous turn? He wouldn’t have to actually reveal his identity, either. It would be enough to do something to make them suspect that he’d been in Kaldak before. Then they’d ask him where and when and why, and if there were any flaws in his answer. .