Blade changed his clothes in the same cubicle. He put on the twist of linen that served as a loincloth. Heretofore the linen had disintegrated as he passed through the computer. He smiled. He had landed naked in Alb, and naked he had landed in the dimension of Cath. J, rather sharply, had observed that Blade was nothing less than the Adam myth relived.
As he left the cubicle Blade's smile turned grim. Until now he had found no Eden, no Paradise. Quite the contrary.
Lord Leighton wasted no time. Everything was ready. Blade went into the glass cage that stood on a pad in the guts of the monster computer. Leighton greased his body and attached the scores of electrodes. The tiny wires, with their shiny metal cobra heads, were all tagged and grouped and ran through portholes in the center of the vast machine.
The first trip out Blade had been a little afraid. It had all been strange to him then. On his second journey he had been nervous, normally so. This time he was neither afraid nor nervous. He found that he was looking forward to it He had been idle too long.
Lord Leighton finished with the electrodes. He smiled at Blade, who sat ready in the chair, so festooned with wires that he looked a bit like Gulliver bound.
Leighton said: 'Just remember, Richard, that you don't have to consciously observe and remember. It is better if you don't. Our work with the chronos computer has expanded your memory cells so that all observed data will file itself automatically. Just don't think about remembering and you will remember.'
Blade nodded.
Lord Leighton reached for a switch behind him. 'I can't be sure just when I'll bring you back. It's very tricky. I'm in the midst of some very complex calculations about that now, and it will take a few days. But you needn't worry, boy. I'll get you back!'
Something akin to affection gleamed in the hunch-back's yellow eyes. He who had never loved anything but a computer. 'Ready, Richard?'
'Get on with it.'
Lord Leighton closed the switch.
Chapter Two
Richard Blade opened his eyes and stared at the mountains that were cutting painfully into his flesh. Mountains? His vision cleared and his sense of perspective returned. Not mountains. Pebbles. He was lying with his face in pebbles. Gravel. His head was paining him furiously. The pain was routine by now, a customary thing that happened every time Lord Leighton put him into the computer-complex, but Blade still didn't like it.
This time the pain had a special flavor. It reminded him of the worst of his few hangovers: the night he and Reggie Drake had celebrated a particularly brilliant coup in Istanbul and had gotten hold of some bad raki. Reggie was dead now and he, Richard Blade, was on another journey into that extra-dimensional world that could be opened by Lord Leighton's monster computer.
Where was he this time? That was one of the troubles with the computer from Blade's point of view. You never knew where it would send you!
The pain in his head was receding now. He felt better. Still he did not move. Plenty of time. He kept his eyes closed and let his senses feed his brain. It was, after all, only a matter of technique. This was his third trip through the computer and he had learned that you moved into your new world, the new dimension, very, very slowly. You made fewer mistakes that way and the chances of survival were better.
For a moment then he felt the loneliness, the terrible sense of utter isolation and desolation, that he always felt at this time. Blade alone. Blade against whatever it was out there. It would pass.
Blade opened his eyes again. He stood up slowly and looked around him. He was in a declivity, some sort of small pit fringed by strange-looking bushes. He was lying on pebbles and flint that sloped down to a small pool of reddish colored water.
'Jargo! Over here, Jargo, you fool! Not there. Over here. Bring the sled over here!'
Instinctively Blade ducked down into the pit again. Quickness of mind had been his chief asset during twenty years in a dangerous profession. He knelt on the pebbles and flints, cocked an ear, and listened. His hearing was superb. After a moment the voice came again, this time with an approving note.
'That's right, Jargo. Right there so they can be picked up first thing tomorrow. That's a good beast.'
Blade remained kneeling. The voice was coming from some distance. 'All right, Jargo. That's all for this strip. These won't be ripe until tomorrow. Take your sled and your crew over to the far side and get the mani there. It's all right. I've got you down for twenty kronos.
Several things happened at once in the brain of Richard Blade. It was a fine brain and it handled the impinging stimuli with dexterity and speed, sorting and labeling them without effort, and leaving Blade in utter confusion and puzzlement.
The voice was like nothing he had ever heard before. It did not use words in the ordinary sense, but rather a series of clicks, whistles, buzzings, and trills. It was a language that Blade had never heard in his life.
Yet he understood it!
And now something else stirred in his brain, the caution of some primate that had sired him a million years ago. He was in danger! He decided to play things very cautiously. Blade was suddenly very thirsty. He crept quietly to the little pool and drank. The water was reddish and tasted strongly of minerals. It was quiet now, and after he had drunk his fill he gazed at the sky. There was no sun, no trace of daylight, moon, no clouds. Blade stared at it uneasily, baffled. It was like no sky he had ever seen. There was no color. The void over him, as far as he could see to the zenith and all the horizons, was milky opaque. There were no birds. No wind. Blade was warm, comfortable, even though he stood naked. Then an involuntary shiver did run through him. He understood, without knowing how he came by the knowledge, that this sky was always like this. Crepuscular. Eternal twilight.
He bent and picked up a large stone as a weapon, looked at his nakedness and shook his head. His grin reappeared, tense and tight and worried, but still a grin. He clutched his stone tightly and began to climb cautiously up the sides of the pit. He would see.
