Chapter Eighteen

Blade was traveling light. For weapons he had only his short iron sword and a dagger. He carried neither food nor water. He waited for an hour after full darkness, then made his way through the narrow winze that had eroded past the end of the steel wall. The way was tortuous and he was scraped and bleeding from a dozen minor abrasions when he emerged on the Krope side of the wall. He sought safety in the shadows at the foot of the cliff and took a breather and his bearings. And knew at once that something was wrong — or, from his viewpoint, right.

Except for the shadows where he now lurked, the great wall was lighted clear across the valley. He could see no fixtures, no light standards, nothing physical, yet the light was there. A misty soft radiance lacking any glare, yet showing up every detail. Blade smiled a bit grimly. Transmission of power without wires. They were working on it now back in Home Dimension.

He studied the large metal building. It was well lit, but now stood in silence and with no movement of any sort. No sound, no sign of life, only the eerie, brooding loneliness. Blade began to understand. He waited another ten minutes, then stalked into the light, his outward mien bold enough and his spine cold. If the ball of fire rolled now, if he had guessed wrong—

Silence. Nothing. Blade approached the metal house and peered through a window. They were in there, the robots, and they were motionless, frozen, caught in strange attitudes when the power had failed.

Failed? Or had it been cut off deliberately? Blade thought it must be the latter. He had just bet his life on it. He was awaited.

There was a full moon. It shimmered up over the horizon, a great golden orb in a cloudless sky, and against it Blade saw the gleaming spear of the high-rearing tower he had glimpsed from the crag. He began walking toward it.

He trudged in a silence and a desolation he had never known before; not for a little time did he come to realize that the aching solitude was as much in his own heart as in the forsaken landscape. He thought of his dead Ooma and willed himself not to think of her. The golden image of Mitgu leaped to his mind and that he also banished. His head pained and he began to sweat copiously. On and on he stalked, past the soundless factories and the empty homes — though he could see robot figures motionless in them both — and at last he came to where the land moved away toward the horizon in an endless belt of slow motion.

Blade halted and wiped his face and neck. He was drowning in sweat. His vision was fuzzy. He stared at the moving earth, then laughed harshly at himself. It was a moving walk, a level escalator six feet wide, moving toward the shining tower over which the full moon now hung like a yellow lantern.

He did not step on the moving walk at once. New pain lanced his head and he doubled up with another pain in his belly. Sweat cascaded down his big body. When the gut pain had gone, Blade straightened and, with his fingers, explored his groin and armpits. They were there — the soft swell, the beginning mushy lumps. Buboes. He had mistaken the headaches! It was not the computer searching for him.

Blade had the plague.

His nostrils tickled and he put a finger to his nose. It came away slightly stained with blood. The Yellow Death.

For one moment he knew terror as he had never known it before. Fear scourged him until his knees trembled and he could not breathe; and his throat and chest were stuffed with a noisome mist that choked him. For that instant he was a beaten man — then he breathed deep, stared at the tower and stepped on the moving sidewalk. He was not yet dead and there remained a task to complete. And there was, for him, a trifle of hope. Hope the Jedds could not know. Blade had a chance. A bare chance.

As soon as he stepped on the walk it speeded up. Now it carried him toward the looming tower at a great rate. He was right. He was awaited.

It was a quarter of an hour before he reached the foot of the tower. As he rode toward it Blade studied it with appreciation and awe. It was of the same shining metal as the wall across the valley, but here mere utilitarianism had been forsaken for beauty. As an aesthetic concept it had the just-rightness of perfection, in that Blade could not have imagined it any different. It stair-stepped up in massive beauty and was lost in small, moist clouds newly formed about the spire. The tower was, he reflected, very nearly a mile high.

The moving walk slowed and stopped opposite a tall arched entrance. Blade left the walk and went into the tower, past robot guards and attendants, past men and women and children, all robots, all frozen into workaday attitudes. There could have been no warning, Blade thought. These robots had been cut off in the midst of life. And yet they were not dead in the real sense. They waited.

He crossed a vast lobby to where a bank of elevators hung motionless, their machinery as dead as the robots. Blade began to search for a stair, wondering if he had the strength to climb a mile into the sky, when he heard a faint whirring sound. He found the source at the far end of the elevator bank. One small lift, nothing but a series of barren cages, was in operation. Like empty boxes on a chain the little cages constantly ascended and descended on the far side.

Blade hesitated, still wary, and for the first time the voice spoke to him. Spoke in his brain. There was no outward sound, no echo in the great lobby, nothing but the neutral and unshaded voice — pure sound — speaking clear in his mind. Wearily he wiped his sweat away again and prepared to obey. Sound telepathy.

In his brain the voice said: «Step into one of the cages, Richard Blade. Ascend to me. Fear nothing. When you have reached my level I will speak again.»

Blade stepped into a moving box and was carried upward. The journey was slow and seemed endless. There were no doors, no windows, apparently no floor stops, and when the lobby vanished from sight he was in a tube of steel being borne upward. And up and up and up—

The voice spoke to him again: «Soon you will come to a light. Step off the cage there.»

Up and up. He saw the light sliding down to meet him. As the box slid past, Blade stepped off and was in a narrow, upward-slanting tunnel of steel. A light glowed at the top of the tunnel. Blade made for it. He passed under it and through an open door and into a vast open rotunda. It was open to the sky on all sides and guarded only by a railing. Moonlight drenched it and Blade caught his breath. To the south, far off beyond the wall, he could see the fires of the Jedd camp.

The voice came back. «There is a ladder near where you now stand. Find it and climb 'to the next level.»

Blade ascended the ladder. He was weak now, still drenched in sweat, and the head pains came with ever-increasing frequency. He could feel the tumors growing in his armpits and groin. How soon would the crazy laughter begin?

He was halfway up the ladder when the voice spoke to him: «You are dying of plague, Richard Blade. You know it and I know it. But you will live yet a time. Long enough to do something for me — the one thing I cannot do for myself.»

Blade stared up, his big hands white-knuckled on the rungs of the steel ladder. «How do you know my name?»

«I have followed your every move, and known your every thought, since you arrived in my dimension.»

Blade halted just beneath a square opening that led to the level above. «You understand that? You know of computers and X Dimensions?»

Laughter in his brain. «I understand the concepts. But do not waste time. Climb. I am in need of you.»

Blade climbed up through the aperture and found himself in a high-walled room of steel. A gleaming square room with no openings. In the exact center of the room was a high tank on stilts of metal. It too was square, about forty by forty feet and twenty feet in depth. A ladder led up the side to a runway atop the tank.