Wizard Of Rentoro

Blade stood in silent sympathy. Once again he couldn't help feeling that perhaps he was the lucky man in the Project. In another hour he would be striking out across some unknown land far off in Dimension X. J would still be here in Britain, sweating over irritated Prime Ministers, the internal politics of American intelligence agencies, and a dozen other administrative problems.

Any of them would have quickly driven Blade mad. He was not an administrator. A desk could never be his home. He was a natural adventurer, born into the wrong century. Yet somehow he'd found the one job which he could do better than any other human being. That was better luck than Blade would have believed any man could enjoy-certainly better luck than J's or Lord Leighton's.

The door in front of the two men hissed open, and Lord Leighton's gnome-like face peered out at them. His glasses were shoved up on his wrinkled forehead, and for a moment he didn't seem to recognize them. Then he pulled his glasses down into position and gave his usual brief smile of welcome.

In silence J and Blade followed the scientist into the room that was Leighton's private preserve. All around them the gray crackle-finished consoles of the master computer towered toward the bare rock of the ceiling. In the exact center of the room a grimly functional metal chair squatted inside a transparent glass booth. That chair was the begi

Blade left the other two men. J sat down on the folding spectator seat, while Leighton took his position by the main control panel. Blade went to the changing room carved into the rock wall, pulled the door shut behind him, and began stripping of his clothes.

When he was naked, he picked up the pot of dark grease from one corner and began smearing it over every square inch of his skin. It had the consistency of suet pudding mixed with well-rotted rabbit droppings, and smelled nearly as unpleasant. Blade would have been more than willing to leave it off, if it hadn't been for the danger of electrical burns. A frightening amount of current passed through his body as he was hurled into Dimension X. He would riot run even the slightest risk of winding up fried like a chicken.

Blade finished smearing himself, knotted a loincloth about his waist, and stepped out of the changing room. Leighton was standing by the chair now, a bundle of wires and electrodes gripped in one surprisingly large and strong hand. The scientist must be more eager than usual to see me off, thought Blade. Well, he can hardly be more eager than I am. At this point the last of Blade's tension always faded away, leaving behind only a great impatience to be off on his next adventure.

Blade sat down in the chair, feeling the chill rubber of the back and seat against his bare skin. He leaned back and started breathing quickly and deeply, filling his whole system with oxygen. The doctors of the Project had the notion that if he hyperventilated before the computer gripped him, it might help prevent the splitting headache he usually felt after arriving in Dimension X. The headache always went away within a few minutes, but during those few minutes it was often so painful that Blade could hardly move. It would be an advantage to be ready for action the moment he awoke in Dimension X. Only a small advantage, to be sure-but Blade's training and experience had taught him how much even small advantages could mean to survival.

Lord Leighton practically ran in circles around Blade, attaching the cobra-headed metal electrodes to every part of Blade's body. From each electrode a colored wire led off into the bowels of the computer. By the time Leighton finished, Blade sprouted wires from the crown of his head to the tips of his toes. He looked like the victim of a mad scientist in a low-grade horror film.

Well, Lord Leighton certainly looked enough like a mad scientist to be cast for the part. There were probably some people who thought he actually was mad. Certainly he could be eccentric, stubborn, outrageous, and totally impossible to get along with. Blade wondered how many of the white hairs on J's head had been added by having to deal with the scientist. Probably quite a few. But it was worth it. Lord Leighton might hold a large part of the future of the human race in his mind and hand.

Blade saw the room around him appearing with u

A buzzing started in Blade's head, then swelled to a screaming roar. It sounded like a jet plane winding up for takeoff, and Blade half expected the room to start vibrating savagely. It seemed u

In the next moment the room tilted up on end, as if a giant hand were gripping it and heaving. Blade saw Leighton and J standing frozen as the floor tilted, until they were standing at such an angle that Blade expected them to fall down out of sight. The floor tilted still more and the whole room turned upside down-Lord Leighton, J, the control panel, the computer consoles, Blade in his chair, everything. Now Lord Leighton and J seemed to be hanging head downward, like bats from the ceiling of a cave. The roaring swelled until Blade wanted to scream at the tearing agony in his eardrums.

Suddenly the noise died, and in the same moment the chair detached itself from the inverted floor and plunged downward, carrying Blade with it. He plunged into a vast windy darkness that suddenly spread beneath him. The darkness swallowed him, the wind howled about him, and a numbing chill began to gnaw at his fingers and toes.

The fall through the darkness went on and on, and the cold began to work through Blade's skin into his internal organs. Then there was no longer darkness below, A vast plain spread out in all directions, a plain made of shimmering green light. In a hundred places vast mouths gaped open, mouths with lips of dancing golden fire and blazing silver teeth. Now they seemed to be aware of Blade and they began opening and shutting furiously.

Blade tried to twist in midair, to divert his fall and plunge into the green light instead of into one of the mouths. He failed. A mouth yawned wide directly below him, silver teeth flashed past him, he felt a moment of searing heat as deadly as the cold before-then he no longer felt anything at all.

Chapter 2

The first thing Blade felt was rain on his bare skin and wet grass under him. He opened his eyes, then realized with delight that his head was not throbbing with pain. There was a faint ache, rather like a mild hangover, but nothing that would slow him down even slightly. The deep breathing-or something-had worked.

That was pure good news, like anything else learned about Dimension X or ways of reaching it in one piece. Exploring Dimension X often seemed like trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing. Now he'd just found one more piece.

Blade rose, stretched his arms and legs, and did a quick series of limbering-up exercises. When he'd finished, he felt ready to look around him and see where he'd landed.

Overhead was a sky of featureless gray clouds, trailing cotton-wool tufts of mist all the way to the ground. A fine rain was still falling.

Blade was standing in ankle-deep grass by the edge of a shallow drainage ditch now filled to the brim with muddy water. On either side of him rose thick tangles of vines. The leaves were long and thin with a white stripe down the middle. The fruit was the size and shape of grapes, but bright blue.

The vines rose ten feet high on either side of Blade and stretched away in both directions. In front of him they seemed to go on forever, until they vanished in the rain and the mist. He turned, and saw the vines ending fifty feet away at a waist-high wall of roughly dressed stone. He started walking toward it.