Dragons Of Englor

Chapter 2

Richard Blade awoke slowly, with his head throbbing as usual. The sun was out-he could feel it on his skin. So he lay quietly on his back, his eyes closed against the light, while the headache faded and all his other senses built up a picture of the world around him.

There was the sun. There was a definite breeze, warm but with a sort of faint undertone of damp coolness. It felt very much like the breeze on an English spring day. There were bushes around him and trees overhead, their leaves rustling in the breeze. There were flowers blooming close enough for their scents to reach Blade. He recognized roses and half a dozen others, all surprisingly familiar. Under him, prickling gently against his bare skin, was short, thick grass, still slightly damp from a night's dew. It felt trimmed as close and as neatly as any lawn or park.

He could hear the faint drone of insects, the fainter chirps of birds, far away and fainter still the barking of a dog. Still farther away was a subdued murmuring and muttering. If Blade had been in England, he would have called it heavy traffic on a road several miles away.

The headache was fading now. Blade sat up, shaded his eyes to keep from getting the full blast of the sun, and opened them.

He was between two rows of bushes, with trees arching overhead to form almost a canopy. Through that canopy he could see cotton-puff clouds ambling across a deep blue and faintly hazy sky. On a branch seemingly close enough to touch, a bird perched. It was the size and shape of an English robin, except that its breast was a genuine crimson rather than a reddish orange. As he watched, it sprang into the air. He noticed that its outspread wings had pale, almost whitish tips.

The grass under him was definitely a lawn-recently mowed, too. He picked up a handful of clippings and let them sift through his fingers and scatter on the breeze. The ground under the bushes was freshly weeded, too. This was obviously a park or some rather extensive and well-kept estate.

That suggested a fairly respectable civilization. Blade was pleased. He could survive anywhere, among any kind of people. He had done so many times in the past, and no doubt would do so many times in the future, until either his luck ran out for good or until someone else was chosen to go off into Dimension X. Yet he was still a good deal more comfortable among people who took baths, wrote and read books, and were not in the habit of killing strangers on sight.

Blade stood up and started walking along the strip of grass between the two rows of bushes. He would do well to get out of this park or estate and get to some place where he could find some clothes. After that it would be safe to start exploring and trying to meet people. Civilized Dimensions had at least one disadvantage. They had proper authorities, and those proper authorities often disapproved of people wandering around dressed as Blade was, in nothing at all.

Blade quickly saw that a fence ran across the far end of the grass strip, completely blocking his exit. He moved on, noticing that the well-trimmed bushes on either side of him looked remarkably like an English privet hedge, although the berries were pale blue rather than grayish white.

Blade came up to the fence. It was a plain undecorated piece of work, wrought iron painted fiat black. Peering around the hedges, he could see the fence stretching away in either direction. It looked like a hundred other fences be had seen in similar parks and estates in Home Dimension. Nothing surprising or unusual about it at all.

On the other side of the fence was a white gravel path, neatly raked and weeded, also stretching off in either direction as far as Blade could see. He could see quite a distance, and all he could see appeared to be more park, more trees, more pruned bushes, flowerbeds, and neatly mowed lawns. Very far away he thought he could make out an occasional quick-moving splash of color and hear the murmur that sounded like traffic noises.

On the other side of the path was something just as familiar as all the rest. In fact, it was so familiar that Blade began to find it vaguely disturbing. It was a white porcelain drinking fountain with brass fittings, mounted on a plain concrete base. It was thoroughly twentieth century British, except that this wasn't twentieth century Britain.

Or was it? Blade found a thought slowly forming in his mind. It was not vague at all, but it was even more disturbing than the drinking fountain.

Was he still in Home Dimension, even in England? Had the computer finally misfired, merely shifting him a few miles sideways in space and perhaps a few months forward or backward in time? Was he in a park in the suburb of London, and were those distant murmurings that sounded like traffic noises exactly that?

It was too soon to call that the explanation. There was that robin that wasn't quite a robin, that privet hedge that wasn't quite a privet. Also, there was no sound of air traffic overhead, neither jets nor light planes nor helicopters.

True, all of this. But Blade had to admit that birds and shrubs weren't things he knew very well. Both the «robin» and the «privet» could be something perfectly common and respectable that he simply didn't recognize. As for the air traffic-well, there were undoubtedly parks even in the suburbs of London a good distance from any air traffic lanes. The same thing would be even truer of other towns and cities in southern England.

On the whole, Blade rather hoped that he wasn't still in England. The public authorities there definitely frowned on people wandering around naked in public. Unless he was very lucky in the matter of finding clothes, he would be arrested sooner or later. Then there would have to be identifications and explanations made, somehow, preferably without involving J or anybody else even remotely connected with the Project. A hundred different things could go wrong, possibly reviving the whole «mystery hero» problem or even breaching the security of Project Dimension X.

There were no spikes on top of the fence. Blade put both hands on the upper crossbar and got ready to swing himself over it. He wanted to inspect that drinking fountain, and, if it was as authentic as it looked, get a drink of water from it. Then he would be on his way. The park seemed fairly deserted-it was probably a weekday. But somebody was bound to wander by sooner or later.

Blade had just taken a firm grip when he heard a weirdly familiar sound overhead, growing rapidly louder. His head jerked up, in time for him to see a large four-engined transport plane sail low overhead. He got a good look at it as it passed barely a thousand feet above him. Long after it was out of sight and hearing, his mind tried furiously to sort out what he'd seen.

Unmistakably, the plane was a Royal Air Force Lockheed C-130 Hercules, with four turboprops. It was identical to those he'd seen at RAF bases and even parachuted from a few times. It was identical from nose to tail, including the form of the insignia on the wings, the camouflage pattern, and the lettering of the serial numbers. If it had been a little lower, Blade suspected he'd have been able to identify the squadron badge on the nose.

He was still in England. Suddenly it was hard to believe anything else. It was more than hard, it was almost impossible. He could certainly not find plausible the idea of a Dimension X that flew airplanes virtually identical to those of Home Dimension.

No, he was still in England. The computer had slipped up and there was an end to it. Blade shrugged. There were going to be all sorts of problems, unless by some chance he was lucky enough to escape arrest and get to clothes, money, and a telephone. If he was that lucky, a quick call to the Project's secret number would raise J, and he and the older man could be dining at J's club tonight. That would certainly set the all-time record for a quick trip through the computer!

Blade felt like laughing with one breath and swearing with the next. It was ludicrous. Here he was, after all the ordeal of another brain-twisting by the computer, still in England. Here he was, in no danger of either being hailed as a god or sacrificed to one, in no real danger of anything except insect bites and arrest for indecent exposure!

It was also unpleasant to think about what it might mean if the computer had developed a new quirk. But that was a worry for the future, and in any case more for Lord Leighton than for him. Here and now, it was time to get moving in search of those clothes, some money, and a telephone, and to put an end to this nonsense.

In the next moment Blade realized he should have got moving a little sooner. Brisk footsteps sounded on the path to the left. He sprang back from the fence, looking around for a hiding place.

Before he could find any, two people strode swiftly into view, a man and a woman. The man was tall and large-framed, with an erect bearing and a commanding air about him. His hair and large mustache were thick and gray, and his face was red but showed no softness or sagging. He wore British Army battledress and a black beret. Blade could not make out his regimental badges or his rank. The battledress suggested a senior NCO-British Army officers seldom wore it off-duty. But the man's manner suggested a field-grade officer-a senior lieutenant colonel, perhaps, who'd kept himself in first-class physical condition.

The woman looked like the perfect wife for such a man. She was only an inch or two shorter than he was, with large capable-looking hands and a long, almost horsey face. She wore a long-sleeved blouse and a gray tweed skirt down to mid-calf, and carried a sweater over one arm.

As the couple came into view, the woman started to unfold the sweater from her arm. As she did, her eyes swung toward the side of the path and fell squarely on a Richard Blade who would in that moment have cheerfully paid any price to become invisible.

The woman's eyes and mouth opened wide. For a moment Blade thought she was going to faint or scream hysterically. Instead she whirled, grabbed her husband's arm, and pointed with the other hand. «Michael-there's a drunken man in the bushes!»

The man whirled to look where his wife was pointing. His own eyes widened, then his hand made a dive for his belt. For the first time Blade noticed that the man was wearing a holstered sidearm on his belt. His large hand moved with surprising speed and came up holding a businesslike black automatic.

«What the devil-!» the man snapped out, in unmistakably plain English with an educated accent. Then:

«Halt!»

— as Blade whirled and took to his heels. A second «Halt!» rang out behind him as he sprinted back the way he'd come. He was busy looking for a break in the bushes, where he could get out of the officer's sight. There was no point in trying to hide now, not in this park. The hunt would be on soon enough, and his best chance of avoiding it would be to get as far away as possible as fast as possible.

Blade ran on. At every step he half expected to hear the automatic crack and to hear a bullet whistle past him-or feel it drive into his body.

A low place in the bushes appeared to his right. He swerved without slowing and leaped without breaking his stride. He soared high, landed on his feet on the other side, and kept right on going. He could hear the officer blowing loudly and shrilly on a whistle. He did not slow down until the sound of the whistle faded away behind him. Then he started off more slowly, in a direction the sun told him was west. Now he moved carefully from one piece of cover to another, with long-practiced skill.

Blade could practically do this sort of movement in his sleep. So now he could spare some thought for the little brush with the military man. There'd been something distinctly and disturbingly odd about it. A British Army officer or NCO might conceivably wear battledress off-duty. But he would never carry a sidearm while strolling through a public park with his wife.

Never, that is, except in wartime.

Blade frowned. Could he have been pushed a few years into the future, into a time when Britain was somehow at war again? Perhaps. It seemed unlikely, though. A war large enough to have army officers wandering around with their sidearms would almost certainly have produced many other changes, changes he would have seen already. He remembered the books he'd read and the pictures he'd seen of World War II. A park like this would have had the fences torn down for their metal, posters plastered all over, and perhaps an anti-aircraft gun or two lurking in the bushes.

It was unlikely but not impossible. After all he'd seen and experienced in Dimension X, «impossible» was a word Richard Blade refused to use.

If he'd traveled forward in time, even only a few years, it was all the more necessary to avoid arrest until he'd sorted things out a bit more. In a Britain at war, never mind where, why, or with whom, the authorities would be more than usually suspicious about unidentified and unidentifiable people found wandering naked in the public parks. It might take weeks instead of days before he could make a phone call to anybody who could vouch for him.

But would there be anyone who could vouch for him? Both J and Lord Leighton were old men who might well be dead by now. Then what? There would doubtless be people who remembered him still working in Intelligence. There wouldn't be anyone cleared to know about the Project, though-assuming it was still in existence. That would complicate explaining how he came to be where he was, to put it mildly.

That wasn't the worst of it, either. There were all sorts of paradoxes that could crop up in time travel, such as meeting another Richard Blade doing useful war work for Intelligence here and now. If that happened, Blade didn't care to think about what else might happen. Confronted with two Richard Blades, the authorities might very well decide to lock up the odd Blade out and throw away the key-or possibly even make him quietly disappear some night.

Blade suddenly realized that he might be in a good deal more danger than he'd thought. He would not die of plague or as a sacrifice to the local gods here. But there was still a much better chance than usual that he'd never get back to where he'd started. If the computer had bobbled him forward in time to a Britain at war, it might be the last bobble it ever made with him.

The noises that sounded like traffic, and probably were, grew steadily louder as he moved. After a while he could see a main road off in the distance, through the trees, and a good deal of traffic passing along it. He could not clearly make out the types of vehicles, but they seemed to be mostly trucks of various sizes. Some of them seemed to be painted in military olive drab.

Blade shifted his direction. If possible, he wanted to come out of the park in a quiet neighborhood, not onto a busy road with dozens of people in sight, some of them probably armed and alert.

Two more aircraft flew over the park. One was a jet fighter, moving too fast for Blade to identify the type. The other was a small helicopter. It seemed to be passing rather low overhead, and Blade had an unpleasant moment's wondering if it was looking for him. Then the helicopter moved on and so did Blade.

What lay on the other three sides of this park was a matter of educated guesswork. Blade kept angling steadily farther and farther away from the road, listening to the traffic' noises slowly fade. He also listened for any sound that might give him a clue of what lay in the other directions. He was as alert as a hunting animal. He also had to fight an urge to laugh at the notion of having to use his skills in escape, evasion, silent movement, and all the rest here in his native country.

Suddenly the sound of voices came from the other side of a screen of bushes. Blade dropped fiat on the ground and listened. He heard footsteps, the metallic chink of military equipment, then more voices. One of them had an unmistakable flavor of cockney.

«'E must've 'eaded this way, or, Blooey'd 'ave picked 'im up. «

«Don't know 'bout that,» said the other voice. «If he's running around starkers, he might be a bit off in the head. I'm not going to worry, no matter what Sergeant Bloody Lamb says.»

Blade lay still until both the footsteps and the voices faded away, and for a little longer after that. The hunt was on, that was certain. It sounded as if the army was taking part in it. That made no sense, unless he was in or near some military installation, which didn't seem likely.

In any case, he'd have to turn back, at least for the moment. The bushes and trees ahead made a barrier too thick to push through quickly or quietly. Blade rose to a crouch and began retracing his steps, moving even more quietly than before.

After a hundred yards or so he changed direction again. His new course took him down a gentle slope, heavily overgrown with low shrubs. He was able to keep under cover all the way down the slope, until it suddenly steepened and he found himself standing on the edge of a stream. The stream flowed through a steep-sided gulley nearly eight feet deep. Fifty feet upstream a narrow, whitewashed wooden bridge crossed the gulley.

Crossing the stream looked like a gamble, whichever way he did it. But he didn't seem to have any choice, and he certainly had no time to lose. He carefully scanned every tree and bush and patch of open ground he could see. Then he slipped from the shelter of the last bush and slid down the side of the gulley.

He landed with a faint splash in a slow-moving trickle of cool, muddy water. He crossed it in two steps and began to look for handholds in the bank in front of him. Just one, and he'd be up the bank and back under cover.

Blade was just reaching out for a likely-looking root when someone shouted angrily.

«Hi there! Stop, in the name of the law!»

A large man in a London policeman's uniform was standing on the bridge, glowering down at Blade. He was also pointing at Blade an equally unmistakable and thoroughly vicious-looking submachine gun. It was a remarkably incongruous weapon for a London bobby, normally armed with nothing more formidable than a truncheon and his bare fists.

Blade's eyes flicked quickly up and down the gulley. There was no cover he could possibly reach before the bobby could put half a dozen bullets through him. He stepped away from the bank into the center of the stream, turned to face the bobby, and carefully raised both hands over his head.

The chase was over. It would have been over even if he'd had a weapon to pick off the bobby, submachine gun and all. Security in this wartime Britain must be very tight indeed if even the bobbies were carrying submachine guns. In that case, resisting arrest would be fatal, sooner or later.

«That's much better,» said the bobby, with grim cheerfulness. «Now, come toward me, verrrrry slowly, and just stand quiet where I tell you.»

Blade shuffled toward the bridge, the oozy mud of the stream bottom sucking at his feet each time he put them down and clinging to them each time he raised them. It was like walking through a bowl of sticky oatmeal.

Blade was ten feet away when the bobby held up one hand. Blade noticed that he was wearing tan gloves with some sort of red badge on the backs. No doubt a wartime uniform change.

«Right there, now.» The bobby took the whistle hanging around his neck, stuck it in his mouth, and began blowing long shrill blasts. The submachine gun remained pointed straight at Blade.

Now that he was close enough, Blade recognized the submachine gun the bobby was carrying. It was an Israeli Uzi. It was an odd weapon to see in the hands of a London bobby, but under the circumstances neither surprising nor sinister. The Uzi was one of the best submachine guns in the world. When the war broke out, no doubt someone in the Ministry of Defense had arranged a license to manufacture it here in Britain. Just another detail of this new and confusing time in which Blade found himself. There was going to be a whole great mass of those details before things got sorted out for him, if they ever did.

The bobby stopped blowing his whistle. «Now, I don't know what you think you're doing, running around without any clothes on. This is Englor, not some black country down in the tropics. We've got laws, and at a time like this-«For a moment the bobby seemed too disgusted over Blade's behavior to go on, but that moment didn't last long. The bobby's lecture did.

As it went on, Blade began to wonder if the man had some sort of speech defect. Every time he spoke the name of the country, it came out «Englor.» Something wasn't working right-either the policeman's tongue or Blade's hearing.

Before the bobby could finish reading Blade the whole lecture, help arrived in the form of two soldiers. Both wore battledress and combat webbing and were also carrying Uzis. Hard on their heels appeared the military man Blade had first met, his pistol still in his hand. His face was a good deal redder than before.

«Is this the man, sir?» asked the bobby.

The man stared at Blade. It was a cold and unfriendly stare. Then he nodded and holstered his pistol. «I am Lieutenant Colonel Michael Morris, Duke of Pembroke's Own Light Infantry. Who might you be?»

Blade did a quick set of mental calculations. Refusing to give his name would be extremely suspicious. Giving a false name would be just as bad. What would be a false name under the circumstances? «Richard Blade» might get him in as much hot water as any name he could make up on the spur of the moment. On the other hand, it would stand up better under any interrogation with truth serum or lie detectors, and he had to reckon on that possibility. All in all, it would probably be better to give his own name.

«Richard Blade.»

«Well, Mr. Blade,» said the colonel. «I don't know what you think you're up to, trotting about the parks in your-in your present state of dress. But I'm quite sure a magistrate will be interested in finding out as soon as possible.»

That was no surprise. Blade wondered if the next question from Colonel Morris would be where he'd left his clothes. Blade hoped that question would remain unasked, because it could not be easily answered. At least it could not be answered in any way that would not lead to all sorts of other questions and in the end probably to danger for the secret of Dimension X. Blade was determined to keep that secret, even from his own countrymen and at the cost of his own life. He, would only relax on that point if he found himself face to face with J or Lord Leighton, alive and in the flesh.

Apparently Colonel Morris didn't care about Blade's clothes. He merely motioned to one of the soldiers, who threw a folded poncho down to Blade. Blade unfolded it, pulled it over his head, and scrambled up the side of the gulley. Morris took salutes from the two soldiers and the bobby, then strode briskly off down the path. The bobby led Blade off in the opposite direction, with the two soldiers falling in behind. The bobby had slung his submachine gun, but Blade noticed the two soldiers still held theirs at the ready.

The little procession tramped briskly back through the park, retracing more of Blade's steps, heading directly back toward the main road. Blade found himself becoming steadily more alert and observant out of sheer curiosity. What had happened to his country since he'd stepped into the computer, with the passage of time and the strains of this new war? Who was the enemy? Who was winning? He wanted answers to these and a hundred other questions.

In a few more minutes they reached the main road. It stretched away in either direction, bordered on one side by the park and on the other by a mixture of ordinary suburban villas and small shops. Blade looked at some of the signs in the shop windows. Nothing out of the ordinary there, although he didn't recognize some of the brand names. There also seemed to be fewer advertisements for beer, and more for wine. Well, if there was a war on and France was an ally, why not? Nothing surprising there, although he rather hoped that one could still get Mackeson's Stout. It had always been one of his favorite drinks.

To Blade's right was a police van. It was dark blue, with a large crest and some white lettering that he couldn't recognize on the door facing him. The two soldiers swung away to the left. Blade looked after them and saw four large army trucks and two tank transporters parked by the curb. All six vehicles had ring-mounted machine guns on top of the cabs, with soldiers in black berets manning them. Other soldiers were emerging from the park and climbing into the backs of the four trucks.

On each of the two tank transporters sat two small tanks. Like the Uzi submachine guns, they were a perfectly recognizable type. They were Scorpions, the light reconnaissance tanks the British Army had introduced a few years before. Some of the antennas and other external hardware were different, but the silhouettes seemed virtually identical. Blade felt somewhat relieved. He definitely couldn't have been pushed too far into the future if the RAF still flew C- 130s and the British Army still used Scorpion tanks.

All this time, traffic had been passing back and forth along the road in front of him. He'd noticed a perfectly ordinary mix of cars and trucks and buses, with an occasional motorcycle or scooter. Now his eyes were drawn to a large green truck that pulled up to the curb in front of a newsstand. Several bundles of newspapers were thrown out and the truck started off again. Another policeman climbed out of the police van, darted across the street in the intervals between cars, and bought an armful of newspapers from the boy at the stand.

Blade's own bobby took his arm firmly and led him toward the van. As they approached, the other man laid most of the newspapers down on the hood of the car, then opened the one he held. Blade looked at the newspaper, and suddenly he felt all his internal organs from his throat down to his groin turn into solid ice.

The newspaper had the exact form of the familiar London Tames. But it called itself Imperial Times. Under the newspaper's name was a motto, «For Emperor, For Englor.» Its price was given as «One Imperial Shilling.»

That was bad enough, but it wasn't the worst. The headlines read, bold and black:

RUSSLANDER ULTIMATUM. RED FLAMES SAY:

EVACUATE NORDSBERGEN. FOREIGN MINISTRY SAYS HOSTILITIES NOW INEVITABLE.

Worst of all was the date. Somehow, this was the same day as it had been when Blade sat down with the computer. The day, the month, and the year were all identical.

Blade shook his head. Either his eyes were telling him more lies than he could imagine, or else he was not in the future.

Yet this wasn't the England of Home Dimension, either. It was a land-an empire-called Englor, facing war with somebody called the Red Flames who ruled a land called Russland.

Where and when was he?