He knew his danger and fought back. He rolled off Ooma, who was already sleeping. So simple, so easy to do it like that. Sex, satisfaction and sleep. The three sses.

He jabbed himself with the stone knife to keep awake and bring him back to reality. He made a tour of the camp, halting long in shadow to listen and peer, and saw no danger. Finally, sleep overpowering him, he bedded down in the shadows away from the fading fires. Thus an intruder would be apt to attack Ooma first, so giving Blade a chance at him from behind.

Chapter Ten

Ooma turned out to be a chatterbox. When she was not using her tongue for his, and her, sexual gratification — every night after dinner and before sleep — she talked incessantly. Blade fell into the habit of listening in silence. Now and again he would grunt in assent, or snarl in dissent, and on the latter occasions she would fall silent for a time. Never for long. Blade learned a great deal in those four days, but there were times when he almost wished the beastmen overseers had caught her.

He spent much of his time in deep thought, pondering, trying to fully grasp a concept slowly building in his mind. It came slowly, with much painful groping, for Blade was no scholar, no intellectual and certainly not a scientist. He was a highly intelligent man of action, gifted with a fine brain and a superb body, but he was uneasy with the novel precept slowly burgeoning within him. Lord Leighton would have welcomed the challenge; Blade was baffled and unsure.

He had, of course, read Lamarck and Darwin at Oxford. After the computer experiments began he, at Lord L's behest, did some refresher reading. It was this that enabled him to spot the salient difference in the present X-Dimension, the thing that set it apart from those he had visited before, and also made it so akin to Home Dimension and yet so vastly different.

Blade was witnessing the evolutionary process in microcosm.

First he had been struck by the symbolism — the way the terrain kept rising. He had come out of the swamps, scaled the cliffs and had been climbing ever since. Flora and fauna were changing. The lake people were a cut above the cave people and the girl, Ooma, of the mountain-dwelling Jedds, far superior to both.

Blade had walked through vast stages of time, as reckoned by H-Dimension standards, in a few days. Less than a week. Evolution was encapsulated. It was like wandering through a cross-section of an evolutionary model. In this dimension cultures and civilizations, true men and submen, reptiles and mammals, were developed not along parallel lines, far separated in time and space, but in contiguity. Jam-packed together. Impinging on each other, yet not merging, each with a sharply etched phylogeny of its own.

But if the slant of the terrain was always upward, the ontological line was not. Ooma was proof of that. Her remote ancestors — about whom she was somewhat vague — had built the mammoth idol in which Blade spent the night and from which he had spied on the lake people and seen Ooma escape.

They were bathing together in a limpid pool, warmed by hot springs merging with a slow-trickling cold brook. They scrubbed each other with brushes made of leaves and twigs, and she showed him how to scour his body with fine white sand. Blade watched with some amazement as Ooma cleansed herself and a new girl appeared. He had known she was beautiful. Until now he had not suspected how beautiful.

Blade's libido, as always of late — blame it on the computer and brain restructuring — was enormous and unmanageable. He was not an easy man to embarrass — and in this strange Eden there was no false modesty — yet for once he found himself feeling sheepish. As he watched Ooma make her careful toilet he began to achieve an enormous erection. Helpless, he watched his flesh dilate, grow and grow until it jutted as hard and firm as a steelyard. Ooma saw it, her eyes widened and she began to laugh. Blade managed a faint grin.

Ooma shook her head. «This is not a time for love, Blade master. In darkness, and after food, is better. Can you not control your monster?»

Blade admitted that he couldn't.

«Then let me try.» Ooma giggled and flashed her white teeth. «It frightens me.»

She scooped cold water on Blade. No result. She found a twig and whipped him with it. Gibraltar stood firm. Ooma frowned down at the offender.

«It persists. I do not know what more I can do, Blade master.»

«I do,» said Blade.

She shook her head again. «No. I do not really want to now. And it is written in the Books of Birkbegn that sex is only sanctified after the sun has set.»

The Books of Birkbegn! Blade remembered the rotting vellum in the idol chamber. And pushed it from his mind. Later. At the moment he was not interested in Birkbegn, whoever or whatever he, or she, had been. Very slowly, with a tenderness he thought he had forgotten, he pulled Ooma into his arms. He kissed her softly and stroked her dark hair. With his lips against hers he murmured, «I do not command now, Ooma. I ask.»

She pulled away a little, craning to stare up into his eyes. In her green eyes was a flicker of something he had not seen there before — though he had seen it often enough in the eyes of other women. Many times he had seen it — in various dimensions and in Home Dimension. Love. Devotion. Submission. Ooma had changed. For her, sex now had a new meaning, new values. Ooma was in love with him.

Blade put the thought away for consideration at a more convenient time. Just now he itched with desire. And knew that it was more than desire.

Still she demurred, though she stroked his face with her fingers. «I am clean at last, Blade master. If we lie in the grass or on the earth I will be dirty again. And there are the Books of Birkbegn. I—»

He could wait no longer. He was being consumed. He pulled her closer, kissed her avidly and muttered, «We will do it here, standing in our bath. The flowing water will carry away the sin and Birkbegn will forgive us. I must, Ooma, I must. Do not make me order you.»

She clung to him, limp and phocine, her wet hide gleaming, her damp breasts squashed flat against Blade's massive chest. She let her knees sag, spread herself for him, then gave a little upward leap and locked her legs behind his back. Blade plunged and she emitted a groan of mingled pain and pleasure.

It was short and incredibly sweet, and when Blade collapsed he took her beneath the water with him, down to where the springs were nearly boiling hot. When they surfaced, sputtering and laughing, both realized, with no words spoken, that things had changed between them.

That night they camped near the Api country. Ooma spoke not of the Api, for she had already warned him of what might befall them, but of the great idol and the Books of Birkbegn.

«I will tell you,» she confided, «as it was told to me by my father, and my grandfather, and his father and grandfather, and by all the old men who have lived since the beginning of time and life. Since the egg was hatched.»

«The egg?»

She poked him with a stick she held. This night they had no fire and had eaten cold meat. Blade fashioned a cunningly contrived lean-to that blended in with the forest They spoke in whispers. This was Api country.

Ooma poked him again and leaned close. «Do not interrupt me, Blade, or I will never get it told.»

He, in his new softness for her — a thing he did not quite understand as yet — had decreed that she no longer need call him master. And, though he hastily pointed out that it did not mean they were equals, the girl did not seem to care either way.

She whispered: «I will tell it in the exact words I had from my father, for I know no others. And I may forget some of it, for my memory is not good.» Here she gave him an impish smile. «But you will not know the difference.»