dammed and held. Then the dam burst.
BURST!
Blade, still conscious, saw his body change into a rocket. His brain flared and exploded and there was a scream of power. He left the pad and was launched and flared high into black space. He felt his mind melting, drooling, running into shiny liquid puddles that formed and reformed and melted and remelted.
He soared. He was alone and the universe not yet made. He soared forever because there was no beginning and so could be no end.
Fear. The total potential of terror. Cold and heat and light and dark. Gone. Nothing - nothing - nothing -
Chapter Six
It was as it had been three times before - he lay naked and unarmed in a strange dimension, the molecular structure of his brain so altered by the computer, the neurons and nucleic acids and proteins so scrambled and rearranged, that his cerebral cortex was in effect brand new. He could perceive a new world, a new dimension that was denied to men with normal brains. The human brain was an unexplored abyss: Lord Leighton calculated that the permutations were unlimited; there were thousands upon thousands of new dimensions into which Blade might venture.
Which one now? Where was he? Could he survive?
Richard Blade was already a different person in many ways. He had the same brawn and good looks, the enormous musculature that stood him in such good stead, the rough black stubble that grew fast and would soon become a beard. He retained his memory of Home Dimension better now than he had at first, and His Lordship had succeeded in developing a 'memory bank' in Blade's unconscious. He would not have to consciously strain to remember in this new Dimension X - it would all be there for debriefing when, and always that terrible if, the computer found him again and snatched him safely back to HD.
But above all Blade was now a cunning human animal. Survive. There was sure to be danger. Isolate it, identify it, cope with it. Survive.
The slight pain in his head vanished. Blade lay on dirty brown sand. He could smell salt water and could hear the faint sound of waves. He was near the sea. Then a new sound - a feral clicking sound, a gnashing, menacing sound that was very close by.
Blade watched them closing in on him. A ring of crabs.
They had dull brown backs and yellow bellies and they were as big as wolf hounds. They clashed and skittered and watched him with nasty gleaming eyes. They formed a circle and gradually they crept inward.
Blade leaped to his feet. The giant crabs scuttled back in hasty sidewinder movement, clashing great pincers at him. Blade stood in the circle and watched them, at the same time casting about for a weapon. There were a dozen of the crabs and if they all attacked at once his stay in this new dimension would be brief.
The crabs stopped retreating. They watched him, weighing and considering, and he could read intelligence in the cruel eyes. These were no ordinary crabs, quite apart from size. These monsters could think!
There was a good sized rock buried in the sand at Blade's feet. He began to dig it out even as he made a rapid survey of the place. To his left a sea lapped in placidly. The water had a purple tinge to it. Patches of yellow fog drifted here and there. To his right he could see sere brown mountains in the distance.
Scattered up and down the beach, as far as he could see in either direction, were stout poles set into the. sand. From each pole hung a skeleton, some of them gleaming fresh and blue-white, some of them old and bleached. The crabs ate well.
They were hungry again. They began to tighten the circle about Blade. He picked up the rock, his big muscles straining, and raised it high over his head. The leader crab, a bit forward of his fellows, paused and the little eyes stared at Blade.
Blade measured the distance carefully. He took a step and heaved the rock. The crab scuttled back, but not in time. There was a nasty liquid sound, as though one had stepped on an enormous cockroach. The carapace shattered and a bloody ooze leaked out. A fetid smell filled the air. Blade felt sick. The remaining crabs fell on their dying leader like a pack of wolves.
Blade ran, vaulted the line of crabs and kept running. At full tilt down the long beach, naked and more than a little afraid, and under a sky as leaden as his spirits. It was a bad beginning in this new Dimension X.
He paused to examine one of the fresher skeletons lashed to the poles. The crabs had left nothing but gnawed bones.
Blade grimaced. What crime could the man have committed, to be so horribly punished?
It had been a small man, judging from the skeleton, and he had died as naked as Blade was now. No sign of cloth or metal or leather. Blade passed on to the next skeleton. Another small man.
He reached the end of the line of poles. The brown beach stretched away into mist. The purple sea, polka dotted with fog, made lonely sounds on the sand. Arid mountains looked inland. Lonely. Desolate. Only skeletons for company. Blade glanced behind him. The crabs were following him.
The cry came faint and forlorn from somewhere ahead of him. Blade stared down the beach. Nothing there. The crabs were getting closer.
Again the cry. A moaning sound filled with anguish and longing and fear. Blade shivered, though he was not cold. There was nothing out there. He moved on down the beach, keeping his distance from the pursuing crabs.
Once more the cry. Blade halted and stared. It was a human sound, what was left of it, and now it came from nearby. But where? He squinted through fog now rolling in from the purple sea.
'Help me! For the love of Bek, help me!'
Blade spotted it. A dark splotch on the sand. It could have been a melon or a ball, a mossy rock. It was a head. A head that moved feebly and a mouth that gaped and cried. 'Help me - for the love of Bek, help me!'
The big man glanced back. The crabs were closer now. He ran toward the dark blob on the sand.
The man was buried to his neck in the sand. When he opened his mouth to cry out sand fell into his
