Джеффри Лорд - Return To Kaldak

That left Doimar. The border wasn't far, nor was it that heavily patrolled-at least on the Kaldakan side. If Blade pretended to be a defector from Kaldak, he might learn a few of Doimar's secrets. He might not learn enough to wreck Doimar's war plans, as he had last time. He might not even learn enough to win back his position in Kaldak-which didn't really matter, since he wasn't going to be in this Dimension forever. He could still leave the information in safe hands before he returned Home.

In Doimar, he would be out of reach of Baliza and the truth-seers. The rival city had no such devices. They were said to have telepaths, but that was only a rumor and Blade was willing to take his chances with them. He'd resisted the telepathy of the Wizard of Rentoro, whose mind had been powerful enough to transport him from Renaissance Italy into Dimension X.

Blade became aware that the School Commander was looking expectantly at him.

«Well?»

«Sorry, sir. I'll go under the truth-seer.»

«And you give your word of honor not to leave Kaldak before then?»

«Yes, sir.» He'd told larger lies to protect smaller secrets.

«Very good. Dismissed-and good luck.»

«Thank you, sir.»

Shortly after midnight, Blade left Kaldak. A week later, he was across the border into Doimar.

A week after that, he was in prison in a research laboratory far from the city, waiting to be used as an experimental subject.

Blade stared at the wall and tried to shut the moans of the dying woman in the far corner of the cell out of his mind.

The cracks on the wall stared back.

This was one of the times when the cracks took the shape of a gigantic rabbit with a single huge eye set between its ears. If Blade concentrated on this rabbit long enough, it began to seem about to say something to him.

If he'd thought it would tell him how to get out of here, he would have listened. However, it hadn't said anything yet. He'd learned more from the surly guards and even from the woman, although she'd been half-mad with pain and fever the first day she was in the cell with Blade.

After a while Blade knelt beside the woman's sodden pallet and sponged her off again. She looked like a concentration camp victim, her naked body gaunt and covered with the oozing sores of the fever with which she'd been infected.

When he'd finished sponging her, Blade dropped the foul-smelling cloth into the waste can and held a cup of water to her lips. She swallowed it, more by reflex than anything else, and gripped Blade's free hand in both of hers. She still had the strength to grip painfully hard. Blade put down the cup and let her hold on until suddenly she was slimy with sweat again. The attack of fever was breaking.

At last the woman turned on her side with a little whimper and fell peacefully asleep. Blade sat cross-legged beside the pallet and gritted his teeth. He didn't know the woman's name, where she came from or why she'd been sent here. She might even be a criminal. He still knew that if he had to go on much longer watching her die by inches, he was going to go berserk. He would start tearing guards apart with his bare hands, killing them until he was killed himself.

That would be foolish, of course.

The guards were an unpleasant lot, but hardly essential to Doimar's war effort. He could kill a hundred of them without setting back Doimar's plan of conquest by a single day. Better to wait until he could take out a few of the key Seekers-those who made up Doimar's scientific elite.

However, even if he killed Seekers, he would die here in Doimar. What he'd learned would die with him. He might gain Kaldak some time, but if they didn't learn the danger they faced, would they be able to put it to good use?

Blade doubted it. Kaldak was nearly a democracy; Doimar was nearly a dictatorship. A democracy can catch up with a dictatorship in war if it has the time. If Blade's theory about Doimar's plans was correct, Kaldak wouldn't have the time.

In plain English, the Doimari were planning to bombard Kaldak with ballistic missiles, carrying warheads loaded with deadly germs. Possibly other things as well (nerve gas, nuclear weapons, radioactive dust?), but germs for certain.

The Doimari wouldn't have been at all happy to find out how easily Blade learned their secret. The night they brought him to the research complex, he'd seen an unmistakable gantry crane on the horizon. He'd heard the equally unmistakable sound of large rockets being fired several times. (And now he understood the secret of the Doimari base he'd surprised. It was a ranging and tracking station for the missiles; the craters around it were from test missiles or warheads.)

Blade had been brought to this cell in the research complex to act as a guinea pig in the test for new strains of deadly germs. He found this out from the guards who'd brought the woman in and had wondered out loud if she would infect him.

«Probably,» said one. «Does it matter?»

«I don't bet either way. I've heard they're ready with Culture S, so they may not need any more tests.»

«Maybe. But this one-he looks like a fighter. Suppose they want to find out how long he can handle a weapon with S in him? That's something could mean your arse and mine when the Day comes.»

«All right. But we'd better shout the first thing he shows any sores.»

«He'll shout loud enough. You ever heard anyone in first stage?»

«No.»

«You don't want to, either.»

The guards went out, and the last piece of the Doimari puzzle fell into place for Blade.

Although Blade's deductions would have surprised the Doimari, they wouldn't have surprised J. He knew that Blade was an exceptionally keen observer, even by the standards of a profession whose members had to be rather sharper than the average if they were to live long enough to draw their pensions or even justify much of their not too generous salaries. Blade treasured a remark passed on to him by a friend who'd overheard J say, «Richard is in a class by himself awake. He's fairly good sound asleep. And frankly, I wouldn't care to reveal any secrets in the same room as his corpse.»

Unfortunately the Doimari weren't being hospitable to «defectors» from Kaldak. Of course Blade couldn't have known that. He'd had to run, and even though getting captured and put into the Doimari research complex hadn't kept him from figuring out what they were up to, it would probably keep him from doing any vital damage. It would almost certainly keep him from getting a warning to Kaldak. That could make his trip just as useless as if he'd been shot dead the minute he stepped across the frontier!

Blade went over to his own pallet and lay down on it. It looked as if this trip to Dimension X was going to end in the same sort of confusion and frustration as it began. The only trouble was, he was probably going to end along with it.

It was time to get his own sleep, while the woman was between bouts of fever. It seemed to help her if he was sitting beside her. If he could do nothing else, he could try to see she didn't die alone. There were worse ways of spending his own last days.

Blade was awakened by the cell door crashing open. Four guards with drawn pistols tramped in. The pistols weren't lasers but heavy revolvers, with as much stopping power as a Home Dimension Magnum. They could disable a man even if they didn't hit him in a vital spot.

«Up!» snapped one guard. Blade rose swiftly. He wanted to appear frightened and submissive, to make the guards less alert.

Another guard bent over the dying woman and shook his head. «She won't last the day.» He drew his revolver and shot the woman in the head. At least it was a more merciful death than being left alone in her last delirium.

The four guards made a square around Blade and marched into the corridor. Blade realized they were probably taking him somewhere else to experiment on him. Down the whitewashed corridor to an elevator, up what seemed like three or four floors, then out into another corridor. This one was brightly lit and hummed with activity behind closed doors of polished metal. It reminded Blade rather of the main corridor in the Project's Complex One.