Looters Of Tharn

Chapter 8

Blade kept the machine low and fast for a while, partly to be sure he was completely out of range, partly to test the machine's power. By the time he slowed down, even the miles-high cloud of smoke rising above the city had long since dropped below the horizon.

Blade slowed down to about two hundred miles an hour and climbed to a hundred feet. He could now see for miles across the plains and there was far less danger of the ground suddenly and disastrously rising to meet him. The machine looked indestructible but probably wasn't. Blade knew he certainly wasn't.

From the position of the sun Blade guessed he must be heading almost due west. An hour later he came to a stop and landed. By that time he knew he must be a good three hundred miles from the city. If anyone was going to chase him, they would almost certainly have done so long since. As far as he could tell, he was alone on the plain.

Blade did not bother deploying the legs, but simply brought the machine down on its metal belly. It rocked back and forth once or twice, then dug itself into the earth with its own weight. Blade unstrapped himself and began examining the machine more carefully.

The first thing he looked for was food and water. He was not particularly hungry. But he was as thirsty as if he had been marooned in a desert for three weeks. Fortunately the first thing to turn up was a water tap lurking under the control panel, complete with plasticlike cups. Blade emptied his cup seven or eight times before he stopped feeling thirsty.

After that Blade scrambled up into the turret and examined the controls for the ray-tube. They were as simply and carefully laid out as the main controls. After a few minutes Blade felt he could hit anything he aimed at with the purple ray. What the ray would do when it hit was still very much a mystery.

In lockers on either side of the hatch Blade found boxes and cans of concentrated food, as well as sets of clothing. The food was just edible, like emergency rations in every dimension. The clothing was obviously combat uniforms of some sort, camouflaged coveralls with heavy padding from throat to groin, and knee-length boots. The belts, packs, and helmets were made of something that looked like leather but weighed a good deal more. When it came to finding an outfit that he could get into comfortably, Blade had his usual struggle. There were times when he couldn't help wishing he was about three inches shorter and thirty pounds lighter.

There were no hand weapons, but there were a couple of businesslike knives on each belt. There was also a long sharp-pointed tool, rather like a short crowbar with a heavy needle on the end. Blade realized that this was probably the tool for opening the hatch from the outside. After pressing the button to release the hatch and climbing outside, a quick test confirmed his guess. Now he could climb in and out of the machine without having to let those grisly tentacles fumble over him.

He turned on the power, lifted the machine into the air, and headed west again.

The sun sank down toward the horizon, swelling and turning from yellow to orange and from orange to red as it did so. Blade began to think about landing for the night. He did not want to push on in the darkness and risk missing something important or suddenly running out of power.

Then on the plain two miles ahead he saw the horsemen.

There were at least twenty of them. Blade's machine was coming at them out of the twilight, so he saw them before they saw him. But when they did see him, they scattered in all directions, as fast as their horses would carry them.

Blade swooped down and examined the fleeing riders on the screens. All the horses were of the same kind-heavy-chested, heavy-rumped, short-legged, shaggy. They looked enormously tough. They also looked like the horses whose skeletons Blade had seen near the city.

The riders, on the other hand, were unmistakably of three different peoples, apparently the same three whose skeletons Blade had found along with the horses. Some were as stockily built as their mounts. Others were tall and graceful, and most of them were unmistakably women. Still others seemed to be combinations of the first two.

Then one tall rider's horse put a foot wrong and stumbled. The rider went sailing out of the saddle and sprawled on the grass as his horse bolted. In the fall the rider's leather cap came off, revealing a totally bald head. The man turned a grimy, deeply lined face up toward the approaching machine. Blade could see terror on the man's face, terror that fought with a grim determination not to show it to a hated and despised enemy.

Blade's hands danced over the controls, swinging the machine in a wide circle around the bald man. There was something familiar about the bald man-not as an individual, but as a type. Memory stirred in Blade, forming more precise images.

Blade could have sworn he was looking at a neuter of Tharn!

The man's garb was barbaric, his face was filthy and aged by strain and fear. But the bald head, the thin neck and limbs, the great intent eyes-if this wasn't a neuter of Tharn, what was it? And where was he?

Blade decided he'd been offered a perfect opportunity to find out where he was. A quick glance at the screens showed the horsemen still heading for the horizon as fast as their mounts could cover ground. They were already far out of bowshot. Soon they would be clear out of sight. The bald man below carried a short sword and a knife in his belt, but no bow. Nor did he look like a fighter, with his spindly limbs.

Blade's hands moved again. The machine spiraled down in a tighter and tighter circle, until it touched down on the grass less than fifty feet from the neuter. No-from the bald man. Blade told himself sharply not to let his hopes rise. The man might be the image of a neuter of Tharn, but it was long odds against his actually being one.

But the impossible had been known to happen, a small voice in the back of Blade's mind put in.

Blade unstrapped himself, rose, and stretched. Then he went to the locker and pulled out a helmet with knives and a hatch-key. He wouldn't need any other weapons or protection against this man.

He drank several cups of water, found a canteen, filled it, and added it to the gear hanging from his belt. He looked at the screen again. The bald man was standing knee-deep in the grass, motionless, his arms crossed on his chest. He looked like a man resigned to his fate, but still slightly bewildered by the suddenness of it all. Or was he bewildered by the absence of subsonics and the hypnotic light? He must have realized by now that there was something unusual about this machine's behavior.

Blade stepped to the hatch and jabbed the button in the center. The hatch swung open and the cool evening breezes flowed in and played pleasantly over his bare skin. He stepped out onto the rear platform, closed the hatch behind him, and turned to look at the man.

The man was staring wide-eyed at Blade. His hands had dropped to his sides and Blade could see them shaking slightly. The man's tongue was creeping back and forth over trembling lips. Whatever he had been expecting to crawl out of the machine, Blade was certainly not it!

Blade stepped down off the platform and strode through the grass toward the bald man. As he moved he spread his arms wide and kept his empty hands in clear sight, in an unmistakable gesture of peace. There was no danger for him in that. Blade suspected that he could break this man in two with his bare hands, if it became necessary. He hoped it wouldn't.

The bald man froze as Blade started toward him. When Blade was twenty feet away the other swallowed convulsively several times, then spoke.

«You-you are of the Looters?»

Blade stopped in mid-stride so suddenly that he nearly fell on his nose in the grass. The man's speech had come out in a series of clicks, whistles, and trills. Yet Blade's brain had registered them as plain English words.

That was a miracle, but it was a miracle that Blade was used to by now. The computer altered his brain each time he entered a new dimension, so that he could both understand and speak the language there. How this happened was something still poorly understood even by Lord Leighton and the high-powered doctors and linguists on the Project Dimension X staff. But this was not the miracle that stopped Blade dead in his tracks.

That series of clicks, whistles, and trills was unmistakably the language of Tharn.

He was back in Tharn.

He had returned to a dimension he had once visited.