Ogar reached out a hand, then snatched it back. Blade continued to dangle the meat enticingly. Ogar drooled and put out his hand again. Slowly it approached Blade’s. Again Ogar hesitated. Then in one swift motion he snatched the meat from Blade’s hand. For an instant their fingers touched. Blade experienced an odd shock, a tingling of energy, as though he had touched a cool and vibrant snake.
Ogar had forgotten him again. He found a new stick and seared his meat and gobbled it. He wiped his mouth on his hand and his hand in his body hair. Once again he began to search his body for such small edibles as might be present.
Blade watched all this. Lord Leighton, he thought, would be in paroxysms of delight. He was getting all this on tape and camera, getting it for posterity and the insurance of his own fame. As if that was necessary.
Blade thought of J’s plan and his smile was grim. There would be one hell of a battle. Lord L was not a man to surrender a prize like Ogar without a death struggle.
Ogar chose that moment to defecate — literally in his tracks. He had been squatting by the fire, Blade apparently forgotten, and now he crouched and grunted and let fly. It was a spattering mess and the odor was horrible. Worse than Ogar’s own.
When he had finished Ogar moved slightly and returned to his search for lice. The smell lingered. Blade made a face.
«Not so much on the toilet training, are you, old boy? Never heard of paper, for instance? Too bad. I’m afraid I shall have to think twice about having you up for the club after all. Wouldn’t do just to let go in the bar, you know. Bad form. Terribly bad form.»
Ogar, blissfully unaware of his social solecism, grunted and began to scratch his genitals with both hands. He gave Blade a toothy smile. Or so it seemed.
It was time to go. Blade got up and moved away from the fire. Ogar watched him. Blade smiled and patted his chest and, folding his hands alongside his head, yawned. Ogar blinked.
The animal noises continued from outside. Lord L was repeating the tapes now. Ogar did not move from the fire. To him it was dark out there and the only safety was in the cave by the fire. He watched Blade move toward the entrance.
Blade halted at the cave entrance and looked back. Ogar was on his feet. New sounds came from his throat He extended a hand to Blade. Slowly Blade went back to the fire.
«Ahh nah guuu— nah — nah— gah guuuu nah guhh.»
«I agree with you,» said Blade, «but I really must say goodnight now. Goodnight, Ogar.»
«Nah guh.»
Ogar fell to his knees. He stared up at Blade for a moment, moving his hands back and forth. Then he laid his face against Blade’s feet and made guttural sounds of obeisance. Blade smiled down and touched the hairy shoulder lightly. Ogar flinched and quivered but did not leap away. Blade gave him the last chunk of meat.
Godhood had just been conferred on him.
Chapter Six
During the next few days Blade lived almost continually with Ogar. He swiftly mastered the various rudimentary sounds that served Ogar for language and these, coupled with sign language — and here Ogar was very fast on the uptake — allowed them to converse after a fashion. Ogar was completely awed and subservient. Blade was the god who brought the meat.
Ogar did not appear to think it strange that it was always dark outside the cave and that the terrible night noises never ceased. This temporal discontinuity especially impressed Lord Leighton.
«No sense of time,» his Lordship noted in his ledgers. «It follows that at his stage of development he does not foresee death for himself, does not understand it in other things. Death is a mystery to him, the more so because of his complete unawareness.»
Then J, after a series of talks with the Prime Minister, sprang his surprise. Lord L was caught off guard.
J joined the issue over dinner one night, after leading the unwary old man into a cunning trap. Blade, over a steak nearly as raw as those he shared with Ogar, kept out of it as a good subordinate should.
J said: «The computer is repaired, then? We can send Richard into Dimension X any time we choose?»
Lord L, busy with his notes and barely pecking at his food, nodded vaguely. «Yes. I suppose so. But don’t trouble me with that now, J. That can wait. At the moment Ogar is much more important than Dimension X.»
J finished chewing and swallowed. Then, «Bear with me, Leighton. Now — can you achieve the same setting on the computer that you had when it backfired and Ogar came to us?»
His Lordship began to sense trouble. He put down his notes and glowered at J. «I suppose I can. What of it? What are you getting at, J?»
Blade stared down at his plate. He knew what J was getting at. He waited for the explosion.
It came. J socked it to the old man. «The Prime Minister wants Blade to go out at once. As soon as possible. Ogar is to go with him. Both of them through the computer and back to Ogar’s dimension. I am sure that you will see the advantages of this — Dick will have a friend, a guide. For once he will not be going in cold. I—»
Lord Leighton’s leonine eyes glittered down the table at J. «I see that you have been going behind my back. You have been conspiring against me, running to the PM with tales. I must say I am surprised, J. I expected better of you. But you’ve wasted your time. I am in command of this project. I and I alone. I will say when Blade goes into Dimension X — and that will be when I am ready, not before. And most certainly Ogar will not go with him. Lose Ogar now? Send him back to his own dimension? You must be out of your mind, J!»
J shook his head, in regret more than anger. «You’re wrong, you know. On all counts. The Prime Minister runs the show. He holds the purse. Face reality, my dear Leighton. The Prime Minister wants results. Now. Practical results. Something to show the Committee on Secret Funds. Ogar’s dimension is the answer — you yourself say that it must be very like our own was half a million years ago. Think, Leighton! Think of all that vast treasure. Untouched. Unspoiled. Oil, gold, coal, uranium, bauxite, copper — the list is endless. Diamonds lying around on the surface. And a laboratory, Leighton! A living, breathing, existing laboratory for Blade to study and report on. Against all that, Leighton, Ogar is of very little significance.»
Lord L sat very still. He picked up his teacup, stared at it for a moment, then hurled it across the room to smash on a wall. «Of little significance, J? Ogar of little significance?»
The storm broke. Blade sat in silence and admiration. He had long known, and appreciated, the old man’s command of billingsgate, but now his Lordship surpassed himself. He cursed J and the Prime Minister for five minutes and did not repeat himself once. J, like a clever old tree, bowed to the wind and was not broken. He gave Blade a saturnine smile, winked, and listened unperturbed to comments on his ancestry.
In the end Lord L went stomping off to see the Prime Minister. Hours later he returned, bitter and somewhat chastened, but unforgiving. J had won. Blade, and Ogar, were to go out first thing in the morning.
J had been sure of the outcome. After Lord L limped out, pale with rage and near to frothing, J said: «The boffins in Scotland are very near to a breakthrough on teleportation. A year. Two at the most. That means we will be able to achieve large-scale transport from X to Home Dimension. It bears very heavily with the PM. And with me, for that matter. I used it as a fulcrum to move him to my way of thinking.»
He gazed fondly at Blade. «And it will be a great help, Dick. For once you won’t be going into Dimension X as a total stranger. Ogar should be of immense value back in his own world.»
Blade nodded slowly. The plan did have its advantages. What the disadvantages were, if any, he would have to wait and see.
«We’ll have to drug Ogar tonight, then,» J continued. «A light dosage. Enough to get him to the computer and through it before he wakes up. It’s the only way.»
So that night Ogar was treated to an especially delectable hunk of raw meat, saturated with a powerful sleeping potion. Ogar wolfed it down, rubbed his hairy belly, gibbered at Blade in
appreciation — and soon dropped off into a deep slumber.
As dawn was breaking over London, Blade carried Ogar up the stairs, into the elevator and finally to the tiny room nestled in the penetralia of the gigantic computer. Lord L, who was not speaking to either of them, this time allowed J to enter the sanctum, something he had never permitted before. It was, J thought, an obverse gesture of contempt for all stupid and pragmatic minds. Lord L had not been persuaded by J’s argument that if they could get Blade back from Dimension X they could also recover Ogar.
«It doesn’t work that way,» Leighton said tartly. «Blade’s brain has been conditioned. Ogar’s has not. It was sheer lucky chance that we got Ogar in the first place. No. Ogar will never come back.»
His Lordship wasted no time. He set about his task as grimly as any executioner. He had devised a technique in half an hour, when he knew he must, and now he bound Blade and Ogar in a reticulation of wires and electrodes that practically made them one. Blade, sitting in the chair with Ogar clasped in his arms while J looked on uneasily, noticed an odd fact: he was hardly aware of Ogar’s smell.
They were ready. Lord Leighton stepped to his instrument board and made a complicated series of adjustments. He had not spoken since they entered the compartment.
J cleared his throat. He was actually seeing it for the first time and he felt a renewed sense of the terror he had experienced in Reading. Sweat trickled down him and his knees felt quavery and there was an enormous painful lump in his stomach. Fear for Blade, and even for Ogar, lanced him. They were all mad, he told himself. Mad. And no help for it. None at all. Too late. Lord L, without warning, was pressing the red button.
A steady pillar of white flame began to build inside Blade. He was being scooped out, burnt hollow, eviscerated. His eyes left his skull and became separate entities attached to his body by long stalks. The ceiling slid down at him, about to crush him, then a rift appeared and he went soaring up and through the rift into blackness.
Not for long, the blackness. Blade went swirling through it on a long curving vector, the force and velocity of which were so complex that Blade, as he riddled the answer in neon chalk on a celestial blackboard, marveled at his own acumen.
The equation slipped away, torn from his bleeding brain by a mauve wind that blew between the spheres. Blade did a wingover, adjusted the fleshy rudder on his coccyx and became aware of a rude knocking on the tiny door in his belly.
A hairy little doll with a macrohead was demanding to be let in. A horrible stench sifted into the corridors of Blade’s nostrils and drifted through him like decayed smoke.
Knock-knock-knock — the stinking little mannequin was demanding to be admitted into Blade’s guts. Why not? Plenty of room. Was he not disemboweled? He reached down and opened the door of his belly and watched the small figure disappear within.
Immediately the pain began. Pain made more dreadful because Blade could not scream. His lungs were full of fetid smoke.
The universe screamed for him. One cosmic shriek of agony. The pain went on and on.
He was falling now, dropping into the midst of a bloody sun. Red incandescence licked at him. He was consumed. Ashes — ashes— Nothing — nothing—
Chapter Seven
Blade, after four trips through the computer, had learned his lesson well — lie still. If you were fortunate enough to be under cover, stay there. Look and listen. Begin the adaptation to a hostile environment.
He was lying naked on marshy land, a sort of tundra that moved and quaked beneath his weight. But not so barren as tundra. Quite the opposite, in fact, for he lay in coarse grass that grew close-spaced and towered over him. This strange grass was a reddish-brown in color and the blades half a foot across; by looking straight up he could see the tops, some thirty feet high, and beyond them a fast darkening sky.
There was violent movement somewhere out in that sea of grass and great trumpeting sounds of combat, a violent threshing about, a final roaring and a death screech. Then the sound, unmistakable, of enormous cruel jaws and teeth devouring something. Blade huddled in his grassy niche, unmoving. The noises were very like those played on Lord L’s tapes.
Ogar! Where was Ogar?
Blade’s altered brain began to function at full capacity. Already, like the chameleon J had compared him to, Blade was beginning to adapt to this new Dimension X. But where was Ogar? Strange that they had been separated, but then you never knew what the computer would do. He rose cautiously and peered about. Suppose Ogar had gone to another Dimension X? Or that this dimension in which Blade now found himself was not that from which Ogar had come. In that case Ogar was not likely to be much of a help. More a liability.
It was growing darker. All about him, in the giant swamp grass, the feral sounds continued. It was feeding time. Life or death time. To Blade’s left something vast went crashing and staggering through the grass. To his right a sound of slithering and a long, drawn-out hissing. Blade realized that unless he found some sort of shelter, some protection, he would not last through the night.
Where in hell was Ogar?
Blade was taken by surprise. The grass parted and Ogar rushed at him. He had found a stout stick somewhere and he aimed a terrible blow at Blade’s head, his fangs flashing as he snarled deep in his throat. Blade had found Ogar. But godhood was dead. Ogar did not remember him.
Blade took the blow on his forearm. It hurt and numbed the arm, but the bone did not go. Blade caught the stick and wrenched it away from Ogar. Ogar snapped at Blade’s throat with his long teeth. Blade hit him squarely between the eyes with his fist, a terrible blow that would have felled a horse. Ogar slumped into unconsciousness.
Blade recovered the heavy stick, then knelt beside Ogar. He was not too surprised. Ogar’s brain was that of a man-thing of 600,000 years ago on Home-Dimension scale; his cortex was primitive, lacking the thousands of convolutions of Blade’s own, and Blade had noted the short attention span. The trip through the computer had completely obliterated Ogar’s memory, such as it was. Blade made a wry face. Now he had it all to do over again. He dug with his hands into the marshy earth and found water six inches down. He began splashing it into the brute face.
Ogar’s eyes flickered and he gazed up at Blade. Blade moved back two paces and waved the stick in menace. Ogar cowered away. He was beaten. Might was right and Ogar understood that Blade loosed a string of the guttural sounds, grunts, snarls and sign language that he and Ogar had used back in Home Dimension. He pointed to his mouth and rubbed his belly. Ogar got it immediately. He rubbed his own belly and pointed away through the grass. Blade nodded and pointed in the same direction with the stick. He was relieved. At least he and Ogar could still communicate to a certain degree. And Ogar seemed to know where he was — they had landed back in Ogar’s dimension.
Ogar, on all fours, was banging his head against Blade’s feet. Restored to godhood. Blade tapped a hairy shoulder with the stick and pointed again. Ogar got to his feet, still cringing, and waved a long prehensile hand at Blade. He growled. «Come on then. Follow me.» Blade supplied the words.
Ogar went slipping rapidly and skillfully through the grass jungle. The grass had sawtooth edges and Blade was cut in a dozen places before he learned to sidle through it as Ogar did. The creature moved swiftly and purposefully, and what few doubts Blade had had vanished. Ogar was on his home territory.
They reached an immense clearing in the grass. Here the tall-growing vegetation had been mashed flat, either by fighting or mating, or both, and near the center a spring welled and flowed and disappeared into the ground again. Ogar ran to the spring and threw himself flat and thrust his face into the water. Blade drank from his cupped hands. He was uneasy. This was obviously a watering place and, though the sounds in the grass jungle had died away for the time being, Blade did not want to linger.
Here in the clearing it was not so dark. Light still lingered in the sky, and somewhere beyond the grass the sun was lancing yellow and rose and mauve shafts of fire acro
ss this new world. Blade gripped his stick and waited for Ogar to finish drinking.
Ogar did not want to finish. Already his belly was swollen and still he kept drinking. Blade kicked him lightly and gestured with the stick and rubbed his belly with his free hand. Ogar grunted and left the spring reluctantly. Blade pointed with the stick and did a little snarling of his own. Ogar got the message.
Ogar surprised Blade. He did not immediately lead the way out of the clearing. Instead he walked from one side of the clearing to the other and peered through the grass. Several times he did this, shielding his eyes with a hand, then suddenly he grunted and slapped his chest and beckoned to Blade.
When Blade joined him Ogar pointed through the grass. There was a path, well trodden and wide enough to provide a vista for some distance. At the end of the path — Blade judged the distance to be not more than a mile — there rose a line of dark cliffs. Blade stared. Smoke drifted above the cliflftops and he thought he detected the red flicker of a fire. The cliffs must be Ogar’s home. That meant food and shelter, fire, protection from the monsters of the night. Blade grinned at Ogar and prodded him gently with the stick. He pointed to the cliffs and smiled. Ogar made a happy sound and rubbed his belly.
As Blade followed Ogar along the path he was content enough. Things were working out as J had projected them. So far. Blade had a friend and a guide. He could get right to work looking for the mineral wealth that would keep the Prime Minister happy and Lord Leighton in funds.
For just those few moments Blade was careless, not quite as alert as he might have been, and it cost him dearly. Ogar was hurrying along, no doubt scenting the odor of seared meat long before Blade would, and he did not look back. He was fifty yards ahead of the big man when Blade stepped into the quicksand.
Blade stopped and reared back too late. Already he was in the stuff halfway to his waist. Blade let out a bellow and Ogar turned and came back. He had known about the quicksand and avoided it without thought. It would never occur to him to warn Blade.
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