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In front of him lay a crater, half a mile across, more than a hundred feet deep, outlines softened by erosion and long grass but quite unmistakable. Once, long ago, an atomic bomb had exploded here.
How long ago? The grass was thick and looked healthy enough, while bushes and even small trees grew on the very lip of the crater. Long enough for most of the radioactivity to be gone, it seemed.
Blade walked in a wide circle around the crater, finding bits of metal, black, twisted, half-melted, chunks of stone and concrete, blobs of glass, slabs of what might once have been a road leading down to the river. He couldn't even guess what might have stood here before the bomb. Whether or not it hit its intended target, it did a thorough job where it struck.
Blade wondered if the rest of the bombs that must have gone off in that long-ago war had done an equally thorough job. Probably not-this civilization still had enough sophisticated jet planes to fly them over this wilderness every day. However much they'd mangled themselves, they weren't a bunch of cavemen.
What else were they? Blade wondered as he made his way across the open ground. He kept low, his eyes searching the sky, ready to dive under the nearest bush or into the nearest patch of long grass at the first sound of a plane. The only way to find out more about these people was to push on until he met them, but he still didn't want to be spotted by one of the planes. It would be hard to prove he was friendly by waving at the pilot, and hard to survive if the pilot decided he was an enemy.
Blade left the open ground behind well before dark. The next day he found himself in the woods again. It was no longer virgin wilderness, but second growth on land which had once been farms. Every mile or so he passed traces of stone walls, farm buildings, bridges over streams, even a road. No traces of violence, though. Had nature covered them over, or hadn't there been any? Perhaps the people of the area simply packed up and left after the war, or perhaps they died from something that left their homes and walls intact. Radiation, disease, chemicals, starvation, radiation-induced sterility?
Blade found himself more and more reluctant to push on with no weapon but his rough club. He tore off a length of tough vine, then went down to the riverbank and picked out a handful of rounded stones, each about half the size of his fist. With a little practice he had a fairly useful sling. It might not slay Goliath, but he could hit a man in the head with one of the stones at twenty-five yards. After the stones were gone, the vine was tough enough to use as a strangling cord. Blade made a belt out of another length of vine and a pouch out of the hide of one of the squirrel-rabbits. Then he dropped the stones into the pouch and moved on.
If they could only work the bugs out of getting some equipment into Dimension X along with him! He wouldn't ask for much, just a few essentials like boots, a canteen, emergency rations, and some sort of weapon. He'd even be happy if the scientists would let go of his old commando knife, which had made the round trip with him. The scientists insisted they still needed it for further study, Lord Leighton supported them, and against that combination even J's protests couldn't do anything.
That evening the planes seemed to be coming overhead in squadrons. Blade was careful to get well under cover, and when he started off the next morning he moved more cautiously than before.
It was a good thing he did. Just before noon he saw nearly a dozen planes diving on something only a few miles ahead. Then he heard a steady crashing of explosions. After a few minutes the explosions died away, the planes flew off, and several new flying machines came whirring in over the treetops. They looked like immense gleaming sausages with lift propellers in the wings and drive propellers in their high tails. When one of them hovered, then landed a mile ahead, Blade decided to get out of sight. He was at the base of a tree when he heard the soldiers approaching. By the time they came in sight he was thirty feet up, hard to pick out even if they'd thought of looking.
When the soldiers passed, he still wasn't completely sure he ought to try meeting them. They looked as if they were on a combat mission, they might be rather trigger-happy, and if they were they were carrying enough firepower to make themselves thoroughly deadly to Richard Blade. Slings and clubs against automatic rifles wasn't his idea of safe odds.
However, these soldiers didn't seem to have much idea of how to handle themselves in the woods. He could almost certainly follow them anywhere, without having to meet them if he didn't want to.
So he climbed down the tree and set off on the trail of the soldiers.
The soldiers not only moved noisily, they moved slowly. Blade's main problem at first was not overtaking them and being seen. After a while he realized that wasn't going to be much of a problem either. The soldiers' training hadn't included anything about how to move cross-country in hostile territory. They marched looking mostly ahead, occasionally to the side, never above or behind.
Unless there was a second patrol following this one, guarding their rear? Blade thought he'd better check. He dropped back, hid under a bush, and waited, listening to the first patrol tramping off, then listening for the approach of a second.
Eventually he decided the first patrol really was being as careless as it looked and set off after them again. When he came in sight of them, they were still tramping along as casually as before. Some were begi
He'd just completed the thought when there was a thunderous explosion not far ahead. Even through the treetops Blade could see a mountain of gray smoke towering against the sky. The ground heaved, birds screeched, small animals dashed about in terror, twigs, leaves, and birds' nests showered down on Blade. Most of the soldiers threw themselves on the ground.
A yellowish-brown animal the size of a small deer burst out of the undergrowth to Blade's right, plunging toward the line of soldiers. One of them rose on his elbows, aimed his rifle, and squeezed off a burst. Whatever the rifle fired, it hit hard enough to not only blow the animal's head off but cut down a couple of small trees behind it. The headless corpse collapsed, spouting blood, and the trees dropped on top of it.
Before the animal stopped twitching, the burst of rifle fire was echoed from ahead and to the left. Bursts alternated with single shots and the noise steadily increased. Blade heard grenade explosions, shouts, and once the unmistakable shrieks of someone in agony.
So much for the notion that he'd wandered into some harmless maneuvers! He began to wonder if the best thing might not be to wander out again while the soldiers were fighting their battle. He didn't see any particular point in getting his head blown off like the animal's.
Then suddenly ru
Both sides were paralyzed with surprise for a moment. Then the paralysis ended and the forest exploded with a deafening roar of gunfire as both sides let fly. Blade flattened himself on the ground. For the moment he could tell what was happening without seeing it, and he didn't want to be drilled by any of the stray bullets whistling in all directions like mad bees.