City Of The Living Dead

«Blade, were you wounded?» asked Geetro. «I should… «

«No,» said Blade. «I wasn't wounded. I think…»

Then he could no longer speak, because his head was suddenly a roaring whirlpool of pain that swirled faster and faster. It sucked him in, although he fought to hold onto the world around him. He saw Geetro and Sela leap forward to grip him, but he felt nothing. They felt nothing either-he saw that clearly on their faces. He was as intangible to them as the air. He felt the rifle slung across his chest, he felt the great collar of golden bars around his neck, he thought he felt the rough hide of the sniffer's head under his hand.

Then he no longer thought or felt, as the whirlpool of pain sucked him down, out of everything into nothing.

Chapter 22

Lights in a thousand colors and combinations of colors began to swirl around the chair in the glass booth. They formed ghost shapes in one moment and broke apart into a dancing fog in the next. Slowly the lights began to draw together into two coherent shapes.

Richard Blade was coming home, and he was bringing something large with him. What would it be? J wondered. At least Blade didn't seem to be on top of it, so it probably wasn't a horse. J remembered vividly the pandemonium the Golden Steed caused when Blade returned with it.

Then the two shapes suddenly took solid form. Blade was sitting in the chair, wearing a stained black coverall, boots, and helmet. A strange-looking rifle was slung across his chest. He looked like a commando back from a difficult mission-except for the massive collar of gold bars hanging around his neck.

Beside the chair Blade's companion took shape. It was not a horse, although it wasn't much smaller. J saw a forest of legs underneath, a forest of spines on top, a long tail waving ominously, great yellow eyes that flared open, a mouth gaping to show rows of white chisel-teeth.

Then the beast was rising on all its feet and coming across the room. J fought down impulses to draw a pistol he wasn't carrying and to jump up on the spectator seat like an old lady who's seen a mouse. He stood motionless as the beast slipped past him and walked up to Lord Leighton. Its nose was twitching furiously, like a rabbit's: The scientist also froze, but J noticed that one hand was only inches from the ALARM button.

Then the beast reared up, the front seven or eight pairs of legs off the ground. It put two pairs of legs on Leighton's shoulders. A long blue tongue crept out between the teeth, and with mightily slurping noises the beast began to wash Leighton's face, like a cat washing one of its kittens. It alternately whimpered with delight and purred with utter contentment as it worked on Leighton.

The scientist didn't move. He didn't dare. I didn't move, and neither did Blade as his awareness of Home Dimension returned. Both J and Blade were struggling too hard not to burst out laughing.

J and Blade were sitting in chairs in Leighton's private office, facing his desk. The desk had been moved eight feet to one side of its original position, to allow room for the sniffer to curl up beside it.

Absently Leighton reached down and scratched the sniffer's head. Its tail (from which the poisoned spines had been carefully extracted) began to wag like a cocker spaniel's, and it began to purr. It purred so loudly that it was like having an outboard motor in the room. All three men had to raise their voices in order to make themselves heard.

«This was quite a successful affair,» said Leighton, folding his hands on his desk. «That shock rifle alone is worth a good deal.»

«It's a bit short on range for military work in the field,» put in J.

«I agree, although with a larger power source the range can undoubtedly be increased. But I was thinking of it more as a police and riot-control weapon. You know the demand for that sort of gear, and you know how hard it is to get something that's genuinely nonlethal. On low power those rifles could break up a riot in minutes without giving anyone anything worse than a headache.»

Blade nodded. If the shock rifles could be duplicated, a good many people would gladly pay the Project large sums for the right to manufacture them. That was a big «if,» of course-it always had been, with the Project, and it always would be. Fortunately, it had also never been Blade's worry and never would be.

«There's really only one point where I wish we'd had better luck with this mission,» Leighton continued. «I really wish Richard had been able to bring back one of the Inward Eye tapes. A machine would have been even better-«

«But hardly possible,» put in J.

Leighton frowned at the interruption. «Precisely what I was about to say. Even a tape, though, would have been a good starting point toward duplicating the Inward Eye process. Ah, well, there's no helping it now.»

Fortunately, Blade added mentally. He wasn't quite as happy with the mission as Leighton seemed to be. He'd taken gambles that hadn't turned into disasters as much by good luck as by anything he'd done. Not gambles with his own life, but gambles with other people's lives. He'd gambled the lives of everyone in Mak'loh in crippling the city's defenses and starting a civil war. He'd done this on the assumption that the Shoba's army wouldn't strike until the city was ready to defend itself. He'd been right-by the narrowest of margins. But he'd made his assumption on much too little hard evidence. He'd made a mistake.

Was he getting stale or tired? That was a question he'd have to face in the privacy of his own mind, before he even raised it with J. There was no need to breathe a word about it here.

He was certain of one thing though. It wasn't bad luck that he hadn't brought back the secret of the Inward Eye. It was the best sort of luck, for him, for the Project, for Britain, and for the whole world of Home Dimension.

He'd seen too clearly what the Inward Eye could do to people frightened of reality-and there were plenty of people in Home Dimension filled with that same fear. Too many of them had already retreated into drink, drugs, mystical religions-a dozen strange ways of life. None of these cut them off from the world and sucked them in as thoroughly as the Inward Eye. None of these was so dangerous.

To be sure, Home Dimension might in time develop something like the Inward Eye on its own. Blade couldn't do anything about that. But in the meantime, he could be happy that he hadn't brought back from the city of the living dead a secret that could bring his own world down in ruins.