The Forests Of Gleor

Chapter 1

If Richard Blade's MG hadn't burned out a bearing in Windsor, he wouldn't have been in the train wreck. He might still have been involved in an accident on the way to London, of course. The sleet storm that made the rails so slick made the roads even worse. He might have gone off the road and broken his neck, or gone into the Thames and drowned. But those would have been more private accidents.

The commuter train rattled toward London at full speed. Blade stretched his long legs out as far as he could and opened his copy of the Times. In the opposite seat of the compartment sat a young mother and her little girl.

Perhaps it was time he admitted that the old MG had come to the end of its road. It would be hard parting with the car after all these years of driving it. Yet he had to face the fact that the MG was no longer reliable transportation. A sentimental relic, yes. A valuable antique, too. The car hadn't been brand-new even when he bought it, and that had been when he was fresh out of Oxford. Perhaps he could find some antique-car lover to give the MG a good-

The train jerked savagely, as if it had been caught in an explosion. Blade flew out of his seat, to crash into the opposite side of the compartment. Twisting his body in midair, he just missed landing on top of the mother and child. He didn't miss the lamp fixture. The glass globe shattered and for a moment Blade felt as though his head would shatter too. Pain exploded in his skull, with a roar that for a moment drowned out the screeching of tearing, twisting metal.

When Blade could see and hear clearly again, he realized that the car was now tipped sharply forward. Blade unfolded himself cautiously. His head still throbbed, but otherwise there didn't seem to be anything wrong with him.

That was good. Blade had been on his way back to London when the MG gave out. In London he would sit down in a room carved out of the rock far below the Tower of London. His brain would be electronically linked to the giant computer that filled most of the room. Then the computer's inventor Lord Leighton would pull a red switch and the pulses from that computer would flow into Blade's brain. The room, the computer, Lord Leighton, everything Blade saw with his normal senses would vanish. He would whirl off into nothingness, and awake somewhere in the vast unknown they called Dimension X.

Blade was the only living human being who could travel into Dimension X and return alive and sane. He was about the most perfect combination of physical and mental qualities anyone could imagine-as long as he was in good health. If he succeeded in getting himself thoroughly battered and banged about in an ordinary train wreck, the trip to Dimension X would be off until he was fully recovered. Even Lord Leighton would have to admit that, though he would do so with the worst possible grace. Lord Leighton had the finest scientific mind in Britain and one of the worst tempers in the world.

There was also the man called J. He was one of the greatest of living spymasters, the head of the secret intelligence agency MI6, the man who saw Blade's promise while the younger man was still at Oxford. Under J's guidance Blade became one of the top agents for MI6. But to J he was also the son the older man had never had. J would be worried about Blade's accident, even though his worrying would be hidden from everyone-except Blade-behind a sober, reserved mask.

All that was for tomorrow. For the moment, Blade's job was doing what he could for the other passengers on the wrecked train. The mother and her little girl were stiff with fright, but Blade couldn't see any visible injuries. Then the child opened her mouth and started bawling lustily. Blade could hardly believe any child able to make that much noise could be seriously hurt. The mother's eyes met his and she smiled sheepishly.

Blade nodded. «If you'll be all right for a bit, I'll go see about some of the others.» Not everyone in the train had come through the crash as well as he and the woman and child had done. He could clearly hear screams of pain from elsewhere in the car.

The compartment's door into the corridor was jammed. «Turn your face away,» Blade said to the woman. Then he braced himself and kicked hard with both feet against the door handle. Metal screeched again, the last of the glass fell out of the door, and it slid open with a crash. Blade crawled over to the doorway and looked up and down the nearly vertical corridor.

The windows on the opposite side of the corridor were all smashed, and gusts of chill damp wind blew in. At the bottom of the corridor several bodies were piled, covered with shattered glass. In the darkness Blade at first thought they were all unconscious or dead. Then one of the bodies groaned and sat up. The groan turned into a gasp of pain.

Blade clambered down the length of the upended car, using both hands and feet with practiced ability. As he reached the bottom, a man sat up. He looked about thirty, and one arm dangled uselessly.

«Can you get up?» said Blade. There was a certain risk in moving the man. He might have internal injuries. But there was no way to get at the people under him without his moving.

«I–I suppose so,» said the man.

«Come on, I'll help you up.» Blade took the man by his good arm and shoulder. The man gritted his teeth and rose to his feet with another gasp. Blade braced himself and supported the man until he was steady on his feet. Then the man clambered painfully out through the nearest window, pulling with his good arm as Blade pushed from below. He dropped to the ground with a loud yelp of pain, then Blade heard him getting to his feet.

«All right?»

«I think so,» came back from outside.

«Good. Help's going to be along pretty soon, so don't wander off. If you have to move, watch out for fallen wires.»

«All right.»

Blade turned to the next victim. This was an older woman, well dressed, unconscious, and with a trickle of blood from one corner of her mouth. Moving her would definitely be too risky. But there was a third person down there, visible under her feet.

Blade gently lifted the woman's feet and saw a small boy held upright among the twisted metal plates. Blade saw no blood, but a twisted length of steel bar was pressing into the boy's back, trapping him in the wreckage. Blade bent down, discovered that he could just reach the bar, and took a firm grip on it with both hands. Then slowly he heaved.

Blade stood more than six feet tall and weighed two hundred and ten pounds. He had both enormous strength and great experience in using that strength. He needed all of both to pull the bar away from the boy. A fraction of an inch at a time, the bar gave, as sweat popped out on Blade's forehead, as sharp stabs of pain flared in arms and shoulders and chest, as his shirt split down the back with a sharp ripping sound that he barely noticed. Then the space was wide enough for the boy's shoulders. Blade put one hand under each of the boy's arms and lifted slowly. Easily and effortlessly, the boy rose to freedom.

Blade lifted the boy in both arms and carried him outside. He laid him on the damp grass, made sure he was still breathing normally, then returned to the car.

There might be other people, trapped still farther down in the twisted metal of the car's forward end. If there were, they were either dead or beyond Blade's helping. He clambered back up the dark corridor, looking into each compartment for people he could help. He found them.

An older man, sprawled helplessly and apparently choking to death. Blade bent over him and used mouth-to-mouth breathing until the choking stopped and the thin chest began to rise and fall normally. Then he pulled a blanket from the rack overhead and spread it over the man.

A woman, slowly bleeding to death from glass cuts in her leg, while the other three people in the compartment stared helplessly at her face going white. Blade pulled the woman's silk scarf off her head and used it as a tourniquet. «Now-one of you loosen that scarf every ten minutes once the bleeding stops. Understand?»

Vague nods. Blade knew the others were still in shock, but he had to hope for the best. He scrambled out and on upward.

Sometimes there were people who were beyond help-an old woman who lay with her head twisted at an impossible angle and no pulse at all in her bony wrist. As Blade searched for the pulse that wasn't there, a small boy tugged at the woman's other hand.

«Grandma, grandma, wake up! I'm scared!»

Blade had to get out of that compartment quickly.

In other compartments there were people who needed nothing but a little time to recover from the shock of the accident. One of them had the sense to hand Blade a large flask filled with brandy. He passed it around.

«Don't try climbing out unless you feel in the pink,» he said. «It would be bloody silly to fall down the corridor and break your necks now.» The remark drew nervous laughter. «Don't try moving any of the injured, either. We don't know how they're hurt.» They nodded and Blade moved on.

Pick glass out of wounds, wad handkerchiefs over gashes and cuts, apply tourniquets, use mouth-to-mouth respiration, give sips of brandy and words of encouragement-everything blended together in a single swirling chaotic nightmare until Blade no longer remembered details. He didn't care about that. What he did care about was keeping going until there were no more people in the car to look at. Then he would start on the next car, and then on the last, and then-

He'd just reached the rear of the car when the sound of approaching sirens and motorcycle engines reached his ears. A red flashing light glowed through the storm, then a yellow one.

Blade suddenly realized that he had to get out of here. He'd done what he saw as simple duty. But the police and the papers would still call him a hero. He would be standing in the full spotlight of publicity for days or even weeks.

Blade had a cover identity, of course. But could it defend him from all the questions the papers and the BBC would be asking? Even more important, could it defend every bit of the secret of Project Dimension X? Blade wondered.

Well, he'd done his duty in one way. Now he had to do it in another. He had lived in the shadows ever since he joined MI6. It was time to slip away into those shadows again.

Blade scrambled across to a window, kicked a few jagged pieces of glass out of the frame, and dropped to the ground. He landed heavily on hands and knees, but rose quickly to his feet. He was gone into the storm before the first motorcycle pulled up beside the wrecked train.

It was another hour before the chief constable for the county appeared. By that time the doctors had finished sorting the hundred-odd passengers into the dead, the hurt, and the unharmed. The three derailed cars and the smashed locomotive still sprawled hideously across the landscape. In the gloom and the falling sleet, the emergency lights made the cars look grotesquely twisted and bloated.

The chief constable's irritation at being dragged out of bed in such grisly weather vanished in a moment. He hadn't seen anything this bad since the Blitz!

«Good God! What happened?»

The police inspector in charge shook his head. «The Railway people think it may have been ice on the tracks, so that they hit this curve too fast. But that's only a guess.»

«How many-?»

«Twelve so far, and about forty hurt. We've also got a bit of a mystery on our hands.»

«Oh? How so?»

«It seems there was this chap who went clambering around one car like a ruddy monkey, giving first-aid to everyone. The doctors say he saved a good half-dozen lives. But he's nowhere around now.»

«Did you get a good description of him?»

«Oh, certainly, sir. Big fellow, over six feet, and heavily built. Dark hair and skin, but dressed like-well, like a gentleman. A good dozen people would probably be able to recognize him.»

The chief constable nodded, considering the mystery. Dash it all, he didn't want to track down a man who'd apparently been more than a bit of a hero, and who might have some perfectly good reason for disappearing after he'd done his work! But there was no doubt about it-the mystery man's behavior was suspicious, and part of the chief constable's job was to follow through on his suspicions.

«Well, I think we'd better get out a 'wanted for questioning' bulletin on this fellow. Also, ring up the Yard and see about having an artist sent out. With a dozen good witnesses we should be able to get a fair enough composite drawing of him.»

«Yes sir.»