They came up to the House of Fertility at a brisk trot and formed a ring around the broad wooden stairs. Blade walked up those stairs with Melyna one step behind him and struck the high silver door three times with the hilt of his sword.

«Who craves entrance?» came a booming voice from above.

«Blade, a warrior of the Purple River, to speak with the Mistress.»

As Blade had expected, this produced another of those long silences. This one stretched on for nearly ten minutes. The people in the street below began to fidget. The sky had grown noticeably lighter by the time the silence was broken.

It was broken by the huge silver door beginning to slide open, smoothly and with only the faintest of grating sounds. There was a concerted gasp from the people below. The door slid into a wall slot, leaving an arched opening thirty feet high and forty feet wide.

Against the pale gold light filling the opening Blade saw a small figure silhouetted.

It was a woman, the smallest that Blade had seen in Brega. She was several inches under five feet tall and looked at least a hundred years old. Her hair was silvery-white, making a striking contrast with her plain black robe.

«You are Blade.» It was a statement, not a question.

«I am.»

«I am the Mistress. Enter the House, and the woman with you also.»

«My-«

«They may wait. No harm will come to them, the city being as it is.»

Blade hesitated for a moment, but only for a moment. A trap? Not likely. The Mistress looked about as capable of setting a trap as of beating him in hand-to-hand combat. He stepped forward, Melyna followed him more slowly, and the door slid shut behind them.

There was no trap for Blade and Melyna in the House of Fertility. Instead, there were three hours of tramping endless corridors floored in shining black and walled in equally glossy white. Three hours of following the tireless footsteps of the diminutive Mistress from one gold-vaulted chamber to another. Three hours of marvels-enough to give Home Dimension doctors ten years' work in analyzing any one of them and the people of Brega a thousand years' work in relearning how to use them all.

Outside, Blade knew that daylight must long since have come. Perhaps the city had awakened from its daze, and his party was fighting for their lives against the enraged women. The Mistress assured him that this was not so. But how could she know? The walls of the house seemed thick enough to resist a bomb, let alone shut out the noise of any battle.

And then finally they came to the Chambers of Nurture. Row on row of tubular glass incubators filled it, stretching away into the shadows at the far end. In almost every incubator was a baby-naked, healthy pink, sometimes kicking small limbs. At the end of each incubator sat a small gold box about a foot long, with a dozen or so flickering lights on the top.

The Mistress pointed. «As soon as an infant can live outside the womb, it is taken from its Brood Mother and brought here. It is placed in a Nurturing Cell, and the Watcher for the Cell is activated. For-«

«The Watcher is-what?» Blade stared at the gleaming cylinders and the gold boxes.

«The gold box. It senses any change in the condition of the baby, and-«

But Blade was not listening to the explanation of the Mistress. Pain-raw, tearing pain-was beginning to pound in his head, pound at his brain. Lord Leighton's computer was only seconds from taking him. His time in this dimension was coming to an end, and he still had nothing to show for it.

The Watcher! Perhaps it was worth-

«Mistress!» He fought to keep his voice under control. «Could I see one of the Watchers? I want to-look at one-more closely. In-my-land-«He did not want to just run over and snatch a Watcher, risking the precarious peace to satisfy his own curiosity, or even to carry out his mission!

The Mistress looked at Blade strangely, for his voice sounded distorted and pain-ridden even to his own ears. But she stepped over to one of the vacant Cells and picked up its Watcher. She came back to Blade, saying, «To activate it, one-«

But Blade could hold back no longer. His arms reached out; his hands clutched the box so hard that he felt the thin metal bend under his grip. The Mistress stared wide-eyed, while Melyna gaped in growing terror.

Blade clutched the Watcher to his chest just as the pain reached a peak. He knew his legs were buckling under him, but he managed to throw himself backward instead of falling on the Watcher. His head struck the floor with a crash and pain flamed through him. But he did not relax his grip on the Watcher. He was still holding his arms clamped around it when the pain washed over him and carried him away into blackness.

Chapter 20

J stubbed out his cigar in the marble ashtray and pushed the manila folder across the teakwood desk at Blade.

«There's your copy, Richard. It's only a preliminary assessment, of course, but-«

«What is the Watcher, then?»

J began to rummage in one drawer of the desk for another cigar as he spoke. «Apparently it is an extremely complex protein compound, only one very small step below living matter. That is a rather impressive achievement, all by itself.»

«There's more?»

«Yes. Remember what the Mistress said-about the Watcher sensing changes in the baby's condition? Well, that's what it does. In some way it undergoes subtle chemical changes whenever there is a deterioration in the vital signs of any human being it is watching.»

«A sort of robot nurse, in other words?»

«All that-and more besides. The people in Brega must have been very close to creating artificial life-completely synthetic artificial life-when the disaster came upon them. But at least we've got the Watcher.»

«By good luck and a margin of about ten seconds, yes.»

There was an edge in Blade's voice as he said that which made J look sharply at the younger man. Blade showed no sign of injury from his trip to Brega except a small bandage over his scalp wound. He was tanned even more than usual, and seemed to have been toughened and trimmed down. That was it-Blade was looking too lean, too stripped down to the basics. J swallowed. This would be a delicate question.

«Is-something particular bothering you-about the trip to Brega?»

Blade shrugged. «Not this trip all by itself. But this on top of all the others-I'm getting tired of relying so much on luck.»

«You don't rely on it, Richard. You-«

«Please-spare me the lecture about making my own luck.» Blade paused. «Sorry, sir. I shouldn't have snapped back that way. But-sometimes I just get the feeling that I'm going around in circles. A lot of work is going into-what? So far there hasn't been a single worthwhile development from everything I've brought back.»

It was J's turn to shrug. «I know. I don't like it any better than you do. But the scientists aren't magicians. And if large-scale teleportation ever gets perfected-«

«And how long is that going to take?» said Blade. He took a long pull at his Scotch.

«Lord Leighton estimates-not more than another five years.»

Blade was so obviously not making the obvious retort-«I may be dead by then»-that J felt slightly embarrassed. To cover that feeling, he lit a cigar from the drawer and took a few puffs on it.

«I'm not asking to be taken off the project,» Blade went on. «It's too important for England-and that means I'm too important for England. I can't indulge myself-although I can't pretend any more that the idea isn't getting tempting.» When Blade mentioned England, there was a world of meaning in the word, meaning which would have sounded like parody or satire if anybody else had said it. But Blade and J-and Lord Leighton and the Prime Minister-saw eye-to-eye on this, if on little else.