Dimension Of Dreams

More weeks passed; the Dreamers now had over two hundred people and nearly fifty fighters, and the Waker gangs were becoming fewer and farther between. Blade doubted that the losses he and his followers had inflicted were enough to account for this. The word was out among the Wakers, no doubt. The darkness, for generations the time when they moved about and raided with impunity, had suddenly become deadly. Now it was infested with gangs of Dreamers that did not cower or flee but fought back and, turning the tables completely, hunted down the Wakers! Blade wondered if the Wakers were concerned about a mysterious new leader that the Dreamers had found! The Wakers at least had the advantage of knowing what Blade looked like. Would any of them be able to put two and two together?

As the activity of the Waker gangs declined, more and more of the Dream patrols drew a blank. They continued to bring in Dreamer recruits in ones, twos and half-dozens until there were enough to fill more than forty vaults. But there were nights when not even a single wandering and bewildered Dreamer appeared. When that happened, Blade would inevitably lead his patrol into one of the regular hiding places and wait for daylight to spread across Pura and give them a safe return home.

The night had become unexpectedly chill and rainy toward the end of one of those useless patrols. The first gray light of a tentative dawn found Blade, Erlik, Narlena, and four other Dreamer fighters huddled on the tenth floor of a tower in the western section of Pura. The small windows had kept out much of the wind and rain. But the chill seeped through nevertheless. And the dampness in the air turned the dust on the floor to a thin layer of slimy mud that covered the tiles and smeared the clothing of the people squatting there and shivering.

Blade wondered, not for the first time, why he was here, doing what he was doing. For the marconite, of course-that might be worth more than everything else he had brought back from Dimension X put together. But that wasn't enough to explain why he was training and leading the Dreamers, risking his neck every day and night for them.

It wasn't that he had forgotten Home Dimension. On his early trips into Dimension X, he had. Then there had been a new Richard Blade who came out of the computer, a Richard Blade who barely remembered that there was a Home Dimension. Alterations in the computer had taken care of that. Now Blade not only remembered Home Dimension as he struggled to survive in Dimension X but had total recall of everything that happened to him there and took it back with him to Home Dimension.

Remembering Home Dimension didn't help. He still tended to get involved with the people he encountered, tended to hope that the computer would not snatch him back until he had finished whatever work he had set himself to do. Was that foolish sentimentality, something he would have to root out of himself? Maybe it was, but he clearly saw he couldn't do things any other way. He would just have to struggle along, getting sucked into every local problem that came along and hoping he was fast and smart enough to get out again.

All this deep thinking wasn't going to make him any warmer, drier, or less muscle-cramped, he reminded himself. He stood up and looked out the window. A watery dawn light was gradually washing away the darkness. Blade hoped that the sun would be out shortly, drying the streets and banishing the rest of the gloom from the city. In this shadowy morning light a few bold Wakers might continue their prowling beyond the normal time. Both he and his companions were chilled and weary after a long night of tramping through the pitch-black streets, slipping on wet rubble with clatters and crashes that made them clutch their weapons and would certainly have attracted any Wakers within earshot. He did not want to face a fight now on the way home.

He decided that if another week went by and the night patrols continued to draw a blank, it would be time to seek out and raid a Waker stronghold. He hoped this would not be throwing away the lives of his followers and their hard-won self-confidence. Right now they saw him as an almost super-human being and in spite of their occasional losses they were developing an almost arrogant belief in their own prowess. Yekran was the only one not so naive. He shook his head when he heard boastful talk of rooting the Wakers out of their lairs like the vermin they were.

The sullen gloom of the morning bothered Blade. It gave him the feeling that such an unusual light might hide more than it revealed. And what it hid might be unwelcome. The feeling was too vague for him to make anybody else believe it, almost too vague to be put into words, but it was there. And he would not ignore it. Those same vague forebodings had put him on the alert and saved his life three or four times during his career as an agent. Perhaps it had taken his brain this long to create these feelings of adjustment to Dimension X — certainly he had never felt this way during any of his previous trips.

It was time to move. His six companions were experienced soldiers by Dreamer standards. By now they all had swords and spears. They also had heavy sandals, and most had leggings to protect their shins and calves from grazes and scrapes on the rubble. They had gear pouches and waterbottles but no food, because the food machines' sweetish cake would not travel well. Another point to check-could the machines be readjusted to make something more durable? Dreamer patrols would soon be out for days on end and would need field rations. Blade sighed and shook his head. It seemed that every time he knocked one problem down, two more popped up.

The seven men moved out into the morning in two lines of three, one on each side of the street, with Blade himself taking the lead, spear in hand. He would have liked to head for the nearest Dreamer-held vault by the shortest route, but that route ran for a mile along a level street so broad that even the debris from collapsed buildings on either side had hardly narrowed it at all. By now even the newest Dreamer recruit understood why it was not wise to travel along a wide street where one stood out like a fly on a tabletop to anyone watching from above.

Blade brought up the rear while they crossed the avenue. Crouching behind a fallen slab of metal roofing, Blade watched the other six dash in succession across the open street, scramble up the ridge of debris on the far side, and vanish down the other side. To the north of the avenue lay a maze of smaller streets that offered a far more sheltered route than the avenue's hundred-foot expanse of stone.

The last of the six vanished, and now it was Blade's turn. He nearly fell on his face as his foot came down on a rainslick patch, but miraculously he kept his balance and charged across the street. Using hands and feet, he hurled himself at the twenty-foot slope of rubble. Loosened chunks toppled down into the street with nerve-racking crashes and thumps. He reached the crest, flung himself over it, then turned back to search the avenue in both directions. As his eyes swung to the left and east, he saw something moving furtively on the far side of the avenue.

Blade froze and fixed his eyes on the spot. But the pavement there lay deep in shadow, too deep for him to clearly make out what was moving. What else could it be but a Waker moving by day? One or many? Again he couldn't see, not even with his abnormally acute vision. But still less could he wait to find out. Time was suddenly precious. They would have to make their way east and into shelter before the Wakers could detect them and launch a full-scale hunt.

He scrambled down into the street. His haste should have told the six waiting below that something was wrong, even if he hadn't quickly explained the situation. Narlena paled, and the four recruits frantically tried to look in all directions at once.