Brief memories, misty and fragmentary, drifted through his mind like a cleaner smoke than that now encompassing him. Taleen — Lali — Zulekia. Had he really known them all, made love to them all, left them all forever? Had they ever been anything but dreams, computer-induced fantasies?

Ooma smiled in her sleep. Blade in turn smiled and continued to stroke her hair. Renewed tenderness surged through him. In what dreamland did she wander? Through what maze and in what personal dimension? Through what reality was she struggling at the moment?

He felt the beginning of pain and rubbed a spot on his forehead just between his eyes. Reality — who could say what it was? Not even the person who experienced it and—

Pain sprang at him like a tiger. His head was filled with white-hot sparks and expanding gases. Blade moaned and leaned forward, then fell over on his side. Lord L and the computer were reaching, searching, had found him. His last thought, as darkness swirled in with a rocket roaring, was that of resentment. Not yet. He was not yet ready to return.

A splash of icy water in his face brought him awake. Ooma was haunched down beside him, peering at him anxiously. She had made a gourd of one of the huge fruits and had carried water from a nearby spring. It was still half full.

«Blade? Blade master — do you live?» She raised the half gourd and was about to drench him again. Blade rolled away and sat up, sputtering.

«I am all right, Ooma. I merely slept, girl.» He tried to carry it off with a grin. «Am I so dirty, then, so unclean that you must bathe me while I sleep?»

She put down the dipper and regarded him with narrowed eyes in which there lurked both suspicion and concern. «You were talking, Blade. Talking and screaming and crying in your sleep. A most strange sleep, I think. I was very frightened. It was as — as if your body remained here while your soul had gone far away. As if you had left me and would never return. I was,» she repeated, «very frightened. I would not have you leave me, Blade. Ever.»

He felt a twinge at the dog-like devotion in her dark eyes. He pulled her down beside him and held her tight. No use trying to explain the truth to Ooma, no use at all. Matters must take their course, as always. But the computer had almost had him that time, had nearly taken him back to Home Dimension. Lord Leighton was searching for him with a vengeance. Why was he so loath to go? Blade could not answer that.

They made love, slowly and with great pleasure, and not until it was over and they had caught their breath did Blade mention the stinking smoke that by now was clogging the valley and hanging over them in a greasy brown-and-gray pall.

«They are burning corpses.» Ooma explained at once. «Or so I think. In my life I have never seen it done, but I have heard the old people speak of it. It is like the Yellow Death, come again to plague the Jedds. It is said to appear once in the lifetime of every man, if he lives a true and normal span.»

Blade listened carefully, silently, prompting her only when she faltered in the tale. She did not seem unduly concerned, and this he understood. Ooma was young and had never seen the Yellow Death, and so to her it meant little. Blade felt a bit differently — his prime mission was to survive and to return to Home Dimension with a report. This expedition, into a dimension so like his own, with the promise of vast treasure to be teleported one day — was especially important. Plague could kill him as surely as a knife or spear or sword.

Yet go into it he must. He and Ooma resumed their journey. She had never seen a victim of the Yellow Death, but could only tell him what she had heard. Blade, listening intently, could not escape the parallelism. He had read it all before in his history books.

The Yellow Death came suddenly and without warning. None knew whence it came and no Jedd was safe. First there were blinding headaches and a rash, then buboes — inflammations — in the armpits and groin, then bleeding from the nose and ears. All this was accompanied by a heavy jaundice that turned the victim a deep yellow color. Then death. Death always to manic laughter.

This last shook even Blade. He questioned her closely on it as they trekked deeper and deeper into the smoke.

Ooma, trotting along beside him and clinging to his arm, tried to answer all his questions. «Some call it the Laughing Death,» she said, «but most call it the Yellow Death because that is how the elders have always called it. But it is true, or so I suppose, that all begin to laugh when death is near. They cannot stop laughing, nor can anyone else stop them.»

«How long does it last, this laughter?»

Ooma shrugged her shapely naked shoulders. «I have not seen any of this, Blade, as I told you. But some laugh for hours, I have heard it said, and some for a few minutes. Some hardly at all. But of one thing I am sure, for I have heard it so often — the laughter means that death is near.»

Blade did not feel at all like laughing. Yet, as they drew near to the first charnel pit, he found some personal comfort even in the Yellow Death. The Jedds, being struck by a plague of such proportions, were all the more apt to be disorganized, off guard, and this should make it easier for him to establish himself and take charge. For that was what he meant to do. He must become head man. This was a technique for survival that he had understood since his first trip into Dimension X. It was simple, stark and true — dominate or die.

They began to pass houses now, mostly small dwellings built of stone and mud with thatched roofs. Some of the houses had a yellow mark on the door. Blade did not need Ooma's explanation of this.

Beyond the first small cluster of houses they came upon the pit. It was twenty feet deep and about one hundred feet square. Already it was half filled with corpses of women, men and children. In the distance, toward the taller buildings of Jeddia, Blade saw strings of carts bearing more bodies.

For a time he and Ooma watched, standing well concealed in a grove of melon trees. Not that anyone paid them the slightest attention. The pit attendants — Ooma called them «corpseburners" — were too engaged to mind anyone's business but their own. Their method was simple — they took the corpses from the carts and distributed them about the pit, using every inch of space. They then sprinkled some kind of oil on the fresh bodies and set fire to them. Then the same thing again, over and over, the corpseburners being careful to leave paths among the dead so they had room to move and work.

Blade studied the attendants carefully. They were big fellows, most of them, hairy and slovenly, and all wore the same uniform: long yellow breeches and a yellow vest that left their arms and chests bare. On their heads they wore a sort of yellow stocking cap. Blade began to form a plan.

Ooma, for the first time, began to show uneasiness. She tugged at his arm. «Come away, Blade. I do not like this. Come — we will go to the house of friends of mine who live not far from here. They will give us food and clothes — for now that we are in Jeddia we must have clothes. It is forbidden to go naked in the streets.»

He noted that she was averting her eyes from the corpse pit. It was beginning to sink into the girl that she too was mortal. An unusual thing, Blade thought, for the very young.

They circled the walls of the city and came to a small house that stood on a hill within a forest of melon trees. Here Blade was introduced to two older women and an enormously fat man. The women were aunts of Ooma, and the fat man, called Mok, was, so far as Blade could ascertain, the lover of both. They accepted Blade as a matter of course and with no small amount of awe at his size and appearance. He was well fed and given a shirt and breeches of rough homespun cloth that, he gathered, was made from the bark of the melon trees. This he could believe, since the clothing chafed even his toughened skin unbearably. He was also given a pair of roughly tanned sandals.