The Torian Pearls rb-25 Page 2

  Once he'd been able to take a ruby ring with him, and another time a knife. This time he was taking nothing, since there was nothing on hand that might have a good chance of making the trip with him. Adding random bits and pieces of gear simply made still more complicated and dangerous a trip that was already complicated and dangerous enough.

  He retraced his route to the center of the computer room. A glass booth stood there, with a metal chair on a rubber mat inside it. The chair looked as if its purpose was executing condemned criminals instead of sending Richard Blade off into Dimension X.

  Blade sat down in the chair, leaned back against the cold rubber of the back, and stretched his legs. He began to breathe regularly and deeply, to saturate his system with oxygen and ease any tension as much as possible. J pulled the folding observer's seat down from the wall and sat on it.

  As J sat down, Leighton rose from his chair with a speed and grace surprising in someone of his age and physical condition. He carefully marked his place in the magazine, put it on the chair, set the teacup on top of it, and came over to Blade.

  Now Leighton seemed to explode into action, darting around and around the chair with the speed and agility of a whirling dervish. To every part of Blade's body he taped cobra-headed metal electrodes. Each electrode was attached to a wire running off into the computer. Leighton had once told Blade there were only a hundred and sixteen of the electrodes. Looking down on himself, Blade found it hard to believe there weren't several times that many.

  Eventually all the electrodes were in place. Leighton made a final inspection, untangling a purple wire from a yellow one, shifting one electrode a few inches down Blade's thigh, putting on an extra piece of tape to hold another one firmly where it was. Then he backed away, wiping his hands on his laboratory coat.

  He backed away until he stood by the main control panel, eyes scanning the flashing lights, hand within easy reach of the red master switch. He waited there until the familiar dance of the lights told him the main sequence was finished and the computer ready to do its work. Then the long-fingered hand on the end of the arm darted at the switch and drew it in a single smooth motion down to the bottom of its slot.

  The room, the computer, the two men watching, the booth itself all vanished from around Blade in the time it took him to blink his eyes. He blinked again, and a vast cliff of fissured and scarred blue-gray stone reared itself before him and towered above him. He was still sitting in the chair, but now it rested on yellow sand.

  Blade craned his neck upward, looking for the top of the cliff. He could not see it. So high above that he could not even guess how far, the blue-gray stone faded into a swirling gray sky. It was as if the cliff itself became the clouds, melting from solid blue-gray rock into gray mist.

  Blade stretched his legs and started to rise from the chair. As he did, the ground under him shuddered violently, swaying from side to side and then heaving up and down. The movement was sharp enough to send the sand swirling up in clouds around him. He closed his eyes, but he could feel the grittiness between his teeth as the sand found its way into his mouth.

  After a little while the movements of the ground ceased. Again Blade started to rise, and realized that somehow he could not. It was as if the joints of his arms and legs were locked, or his back and buttocks were firmly glued to the chair. It was an annoying sensation.

  Blade tried harder, and still harder, until the muscles stood out along his arms and thighs and neck in ridges and lumps. He put all of his enormous strength into trying to rise, until his chest was heaving and all his muscles began to ache.

  As he tried to relax and gather strength for another effort to rise from the chair, the ground shuddered again. This time the movements were even more violent and went on longer. The sand rose up around Blade in a swirling yellow cloud that blotted out everything more than a foot in front of his nose.

  The movements of the ground slowly faded away, and the cloud of sand subsided. As it did, a faint rumble sounded from high above. Blade looked upward, and his eyes opened wide.

  A vast section of the solid gray-blue rock was peeling off the face of the cliff and dropping directly down on top of him. As it fell it crumbled and cracked, splitting into three pieces. Each one of those pieces seemed as large as a house, more than large enough to smash Blade like a bug under a hammer when it landed.

  He was not in a real world, though, so nothing would happen to him even if the stone landed. Or was he? Was this weird world as real as Britain, and would his death here be as real and permanent? That chilling thought drove him to a still more desperate effort to rise from the chair and somehow get clear of the base of the cliff. He heaved himself upward as if he wanted to leap into the air. The chair quivered, but he did not rise.

  There was still one thing he could do. He threw himself violently to one side, and the chair rocked under him. He did it three more times, and each time the chair tilted farther and farther. At last he threw it down on its side. With a tremendous twisting of his thighs and torso he landed on hands and knees, the chair riding on his back like the shell of a crab.

  The chair now held his head down so that he could no longer look upward, but he knew he had no more than a few seconds. He heaved himself desperately forward, fingers and toes clawing at the sand.

  He'd covered perhaps ten feet when the light above him was suddenly blotted out. He had a tiny part of a second to realize that this was some sort of end, if not the end of everything. Then a slab of stone the size of a small office building landed on him.

  In that moment he knew pain that swept away all other sensations, all thoughts, all awareness even of his own body. Then the pain faded, and he knew that he was not dead-at least not except in this strange world he'd just left. He was aware of every separate molecule of his body, hurtling away on its own path into an immense chill dark emptiness. This awareness lasted long enough for relief to fill his mind, relief that he'd survived one more monstrous twisting of the laws of nature in the nightmare world between the Dimensions.

  Then both relief and awareness vanished, and everything was blackness and the terrible cold void where his molecules darted about like meteors.

  Chapter 3

  Slowly Blade realized that his molecules no longer darted about in the great dark void. He felt them slowly assembling themselves into the body and mind he knew so well. Then slowly that mind and body began to be aware of more than the void.

  His head throbbed as if it really had been crushed and then roughly put back together. Every throb seemed to send a wave of pain through the rest of his body, so that all his bones seemed to shake in rhythm with the pounding in his head.

  He lay still and let other sensations join the headache. Wetness was under him and all around him, except for his face. Some of it was a sticky, clinging wetness, like thick mud. Some of it felt more like warm muddy water.

  All of the wetness smelled strongly of decaying vegetation. The warm air that blew over Blade's face smelled even more strongly and far more unpleasantly of dead animals, the foul scum on stagnant ponds, methane oozing from the black depths of swamps, a faint hint of sulphur.

  Blade cautiously opened his eyes and sat up, ignoring the pain in his head. He sat motionless, bracing himself with his arms, until the pain in his head faded. Then he surveyed what lay around him.

  He sat near the top of a half-submerged slope of black mud and dead, yellowing grass. His legs were submerged. The mud under him sucked and squelched unpleasantly every time he moved. Slowly he got his legs under him and started to rise. For a moment he had the unpleasant feeling that the mud would grip him and hold him here, as he'd been held in the chair under the falling cliff. Then the grip of the mud broke and he stood up.

  All around him was a broad expanse of water, broken here and there by hillocks like the one he was on or by dead and dying trees. The surface of the water shimmered as if it had been polished. A closer look showed Blade that the water was dark with mud and spotted with floating b
its and pieces. Blade saw dead animals, patches of dead leaves, floating bits of wood too straight to be natural, but nothing alive. He began to feel that he was looking out over a land just emerging from the waters of a universal flood-or perhaps slowly vanishing under those waters. Everywhere he looked, Blade could see no land rising more than a foot or two above the gently lapping water.

  The western horizon was beginning to swallow the glowing ball of the setting sun. Blade noticed for the first time the incredible colors spreading across the sky. The sun itself was a raw red-orange with a faint tinge of gold and a stronger tinge of purple. Long streaks of crimson, purple, and salmon stretched along the horizon, layer on layer of color rising steadily upward. Everywhere Blade saw hints of other, less common colors-a rich mahogany tinged with red, an unmistakable shimmering green. The few clouds that hung in the western sky were tinged blue and pink-not a delicate blushing pink, but a raw, almost bloody color. Behind everything swirled a dozen shades and mixtures of gold and orange. The sky was so beautiful that it was almost frightening.

  Blade stared at the western sky until he found the display of colors growing hypnotic. With a painful effort he lowered his gaze to the line of the horizon itself. That line showed humps and waverings, black against the flaming sky. It did not look like much-perhaps only a line of hilltops not drowned quite so deeply as the rest of the land around here. But it was certainly more than Blade could see in any other direction. If dry land lay anywhere within sight, it lay off toward that impossible and monstrously beautiful sunset.

  Blade wasted no time in setting off. He had no idea how far he might have to go and he suspected that darkness would come fast when the sun vanished. He walked up over the crest and down the other side of his own hill. Before he'd gone a hundred yards the water was up to his knees. He picked up a floating branch and used it to feel his way along. Another two hundred yards and the water was up to his waist. A few yards more and the bottom became so oozy that he found it easier to start swimming.

  Blade set an easy stroke, one he knew he could keep up all night and most of the next day if he had to. Every few minutes he stopped briefly, treading water as he looked around him to take his bearings. The last thing he wanted to do was end up swimming in circles as darkness swallowed up the swamp. Each time he looked, the wavering line of dark humps was still there. At least it wasn't an optical illusion.

  Once when Blade stopped he raised his eyes to look again at the display of colors in the sky. They were slowly fading, some lingering longer than others. The whole display was still something to take a man's breath away, and Blade found himself wondering what might be the cause. He remembered that volcanic dust in the atmosphere often led to such unnaturally colorful sunsets.

  As he watched, he suddenly saw five lean winged shapes glide across the sky, black silhouettes against the blazing colors. They soared lightly and easily, sweeping upward from the horizon and losing themselves in the twilight that was spreading from the east. Blade watched them until they faded from sight, and did not much care for their looks. He had an impression of twenty-foot wings, long beaks, and spiked tails. Birds, bats, or giant reptiles of some sort? Certainly they looked like meat-eaters. Blade hoped they weren't hungry.

  He swam on. He'd covered about a mile when he felt his feet strike into sticky mud. A few more strokes and he was able to walk again. He strode forward, water and mud and trailing weeds dripping from him, until the water was no more than knee deep. He passed a clump of trees with wilted green leaves still hanging from their branches. A few birds twittered cheerfully to themselves in the branches as they settled down for the night. Their sound made Blade feel better. They were the first healthy living things he'd seen or heard in a Dimension that otherwise seemed to be almost nothing but water and mud and weirdly glowing sky.

  Blade walked through the knee-deep water across what once must have been level ground for nearly a mile, past several more clumps of trees. Far off to the left he saw what looked like the ruins of farm buildings. In the gathering twilight he could not be sure, and he had no time to spare for side trips.

  Another three hundred yards, and the water began to deepen again as the ground sloped away under him. Blade could clearly see his goal to the west now. It was unmistakably a hilly, wooded shoreline. It seemed no more than three or four miles away, although it was hard to judge distances in this land. A long swim in the darkness, but worth it-Blade wanted dry land under him before he stopped for the night.

  He covered another hundred yards, then the light was gone from the sky and the ground from under his feet. He started swimming again, looking up at the sky to see if there were any stars he could use to guide himself. There were none, and no moon either. Fortunately Blade's sense of direction was excellent. He focused his mind and body totally on swimming in a straight line and kept moving.

  How long he swam in that state of concentration and how much distance he covered, he never knew. He only knew that in time he saw the land begin to rise ahead of him, dark enough to stand out even against the dark water. He also knew something much less pleasant. He was no longer alone in the water. Something large was swimming purposefully along behind him. He could hear the ripple of water around it, an occasional splash, and the sound of slow heavy breathing.

  Blade fought down a moment's feeling that turning around would make the creature launch its attack, stopped, and looked behind him. He saw a broad head rising from the water and a bony crest rising above the head. Two eyes shone dimly on either side of a long snout. The snout lifted and Blade heard another puff of breath. He also saw the creature's jaws open to display two rows of teeth. He was relieved to see that the teeth were broad and blunt, not long and sharp. In spite of its size the creature was a plant eater. That meant it wouldn't be interested in him as a meal.

  It was interested in him, though, and it seemed to be a good forty feet long. Something that big could be dangerous out of curiosity or even playfulness. Blade turned and started swimming again. Behind him he heard the steady breathing and splashing as the creature did the same.

  The naked man and the scaled creature swam slowly and steadily toward the land. Blade took great care to swim smoothly and steadily, with no jerky movements the creature might misinterpret. The teeth in its jaws might be blunt, but those jaws were powerful enough to crush his bones if they ever closed on him.

  After too many long minutes, Blade again felt his feet strike oozy mud. He knew he could move faster if he kept swimming. He swam on, fighting the temptation to put on a last burst of speed and get out of the water. The creature might be amphibious, quite able to follow him into the shallows or even a short distance onto the land.

  At last the water grew too shallow for swimming. Blade stopped and turned, resting on hands and knees with only his head above water as he looked back at the creature. It was still on his trail, floating submerged up to the eyes, apparently stopped.

  Slowly Blade rose to his feet. Even more slowly he turned toward the land and started walking. He tried to walk without making a splash or even a ripple.

  Foot by foot Blade moved toward the land. The water crept down his thighs until it reached his knees. Now he could take longer strides without making any noise. A dozen more steps should have him out of the water entirely. One, two, three, four-

  On the fifth step Blade's right foot came down on a submerged root. Before he could react it broke under him, sending him lurching forward. He went to his knees with a splash.

  To Blade's strained hearing the splash seemed to roll across the water like an explosion. It was certainly loud enough to reach the creature behind him. Blade heard a hissing roar as massive lungs took in air. Then came the tremendous splashing of a huge body heaving itself forward through the water.

  Blade ran, charging through the last few yards of water in a few seconds, throwing up spray like a motorboat. His feet came down on drying mud and then on damp grass. Behind him the creature gave another hissing roar. Blade kept going. Even
if it couldn't follow him onto the land, that long neck could reach well up past the waterline.

  A bush loomed in his path, and this time he did jump. He landed on a moss-grown log which rolled out from under him, spilling him to the ground. A thick layer of dead leaves broke his fall.

  As he rose the creature drove itself hard into the mud with a tremendous squelching splash. A miniature tidal wave poured up onto the land, reaching halfway to where Blade stood. The creature roared in surprise at finding itself aground, roared even louder at finding itself stuck fast in the mud, and began thrashing around frantically. Its tail lashed the water into foam, and its head struck here, there, and everywhere along the shore, its jaws snapping furiously.

  Now that he could see it more clearly, Blade saw the creature had no legs, only flippers ending in long bony spurs. No doubt they would do a good job rooting up the water plants or striking at rivals or enemies, but they wouldn't take the creature a single inch on dry land.

  Blade turned his back on the stranded creature and walked off inland. He rather hoped it would get itself unstranded before too long. It hadn't really done anything to him, so he had no reason to wish it dead. He also didn't want the creature's struggles to get afloat to attract unwelcome visitors, either animal or human.

  Apparently it succeeded. At any rate the roars and splashes died away by the time Blade was out of sight of the water. Trees began to rise more and more thickly on either hand. Blade realized that he'd climbed out onto a fairly substantial stretch of dry land, more than the crests of a few hills.

  In that case it was time to stop for the night. He was tired, he was thirsty, and daylight was the time to explore what lay ahead.