Undying World

CHAPTER 4

A few moments later be discovered that he had been living in a minuscule world while all about him was macroscopic reality. In the little sheltered bower by the path there had been only the three of them, Blade and the two stilled lovers, and reality was what Blade made of it.

He now pushed cautiously through the rubbery brush and came to a spot from which he could observe a lake, and all sense of Home D reality fled away. He saw what he saw and did not understand, but it did not frighten him. He had completed his adaptation to this new dimension. He was a different creature well equipped for survival, and he did not bother to ponder it. He was by now hungry and thirsty and he still needed clothing and weapons; he examined and noted and filed the information automatically in his expanded memory files.

A path circled the lake. There were benches, food stands, a dock and boats on the lake. And everywhere the sleepers. Hundreds of them. All of them beautiful, all of them with the same antenna behind their right ear, all of them halted in the very act of whatever they had been doing when death came, or the power had been cut off, or whatever it was that had stilled them. It was, he thought as he walked among them without fear, as though one gigantic heart had beat for them all and had stopped without warning.

They were all dressed much alike, similar to the lovers he had stumbled over, and he sought for a jacket and shorts that would fit him. Most of the men were too small. As he was about to leave the park he found a news-vendor, paper upheld and still standing outside his kiosk, who was bigger than any of the men he had seen yet. Blade disrobed the man and slipped into the clothes and, after bursting a few seams, found they would do.

He now had clothing and a weapon-a short knife picked up at the stand of a food-seller. The food was dry and stale-and there remained his thirst. He tried a fountain. It was dry. A thought struck him. He went back to the food-vendor's, searched and found a bottled drink. It was tepid and too sweet, but it quenched his thirst. He quickly drank one bottle, took another and went back to the park entrance.

All this while he had remained under cover as best he could. He began to doubt that his solitary figure could be spotted from that baleful moon, but it was best to take no chances. From the shelter of an archway he studied the moon again, with the ever-blazing spotlights like lesser moons, and saw that the illumination was far from perfect. There were shadows aplenty if he made crafty use of them. He set out.

All that night, or so he thought of it at the time, he crept through the giant city like a furtive rat, a scavenger for information. He had not gone six blocks before the obvious parallel struck him-it was as if Blade, a stranger and alone, had entered London or Manhattan to find every soul plunged into this strange, deathless death.

They were there in their hundreds of thousands, caught in every conceivable act. In stores and small shops, theaters and restaurants, hotels and apartments and factories and offices.

One thing he noted-none of the buildings were more than six floors tall.

Another matter, and this disgruntled him a bit-he found no weapons. He found other short-bladed knives, such as the one he had, but nothing else. No bows and arrows, spears, swords or lances. Nothing at all resembling a firearm. He explored a museum on a great wide avenue and found not even an antique sword. They had not been — were not, for he was by now convinced that they only slept-a martial people. Either that or they had been forbidden arms. From the concealing shadow of a doorway Blade looked at the close-hanging moon and wondered.

By now he realized that there was no day or night in this place, not as he knew it back in HD. The moon was always the same and the bland-yet bright-illumination was always the same.

The cars he found everywhere-parked, or garaged, or stopped in the midst of traffic-were also the same: standard, Jeep-like vehicles. He examined one and found no gas tank and no conventional engine. There was only the little stud-like antenna and what appeared to be a small dynamo activating the wheels. He skirted railyards where all freight and passenger traffic was stilled. By now he paid little attention to the sleepers. They were simply there, everywhere about, as they would have been there in a normal bustling city. Except that they did not bustle. They slept, frozen. He found no animals of any sort.

Hour after hour he explored, keeping in the shadow, now understanding there would be no dawn. He chose one apartment — house as typical and searched through it. The sleepers were at table, in bed, at play. A crowded elevator was stalled at the fourth floor. Blade left the apartment and entered a small hospital. One of the beautiful sleepers was in childbirth, the child a boy, halfway out of the womb. Blade examined the tiny body and found the stud behind the right ear. The antenna was full size.

On the next floor he found a male whose chest had been slashed open by the surgeon. Blade peered at the exposed heart. It was very like his own. For once and all, he decided these were not robots. They were sleepers.

He was tired. He found an empty apartment and ate from the enormous stocks of canned food available, then he slept for a few hours. Just before he dropped off he willed the crystal in his brain to communicate with Lord Leighton back in Home Dimension. He could not always establish contact, but when he did it was automatic. Blade's expanded memory file simply fed the information into the crystal and then stored Lord L's reply.

This time the crystal worked. When he awoke, refreshed, the answer was in his brain. Blade sat on the edge of the comfortable bed, scratching at his already thick stubble-he invariably grew a beard in DX-and let the message from Lord L flow into his conscious mind.

Seems you have landed in unproductive dead world. Suggest you try establish contact with moon you describe, but leave this to you. Scene you describe fascinating but hardly see how it will benefit Project unless, repeat unless, you can find source of power and possibly reanimate. This also your discretion. In any case suggest if you linger in this megapolis do try to locate power source now shut off. Secret of this could be invaluable in HD.

That was all. Blade yawned and wondered at Lord L's use of the word «megapolis.» His subconscious brain, his memory file and the crystal must have fed the word to his Lordship. It was true. He realized it now as he walked to a window and cautiously peered out. Everything was as he had left it for a few hours' sleep.

Megapolis. He had found no open spaces, other than the parks, in all his hours of walking. When he had spied from high points of vantage, he had seen nothing but the city. It went on and on and on. This Dimension X, with its plastic foliage, had no countryside. It was all one vast nightmare of a city.

Loneliness, the longing to hear a human voice, Blade had never felt the need so keenly before, And yet Lord L was wrong about landing in a dead world. Blade was sure of that. He sensed it. This was not a dead world. It was, rather, an undying world, a world of sleepers.

Sleepers. A million sleepers. How did one account for it?

He found the bathroom and tried the shower handles. No water.

He went into the kitchen, ate from cans and drank the bottled drink, and then set about making a spear. This he did by using a curtain pole and lashing the short-bladed knife to it with wire from what was apparently a TV set. Blade grinned. Even when these people had been unsleeping, their world had not been perfect.

When his spear was ready, he set out again. Find the power source. Orders were orders, yes, but it was easier for Lord L to order than for Blade to do. On the whole he preferred to linger among the sleepers for a time, to search for the power source, than to contact the moon as the old boy suggested. He did not like those spotlights nor the sensation of being watched. He did not, in fact, care much at all for that huge silver eye in the sky. All of Blade's animal cunning, his instinct, told him that when danger came, it would come from the moon.

But Blade's instinct could be wrong. He had gone about six blocks, skulking along in the shadows, when he heard the sound. For the first time it was a sound not of his own making. He halted, frozen, as quiet as any sleeper, listening. Sweat sprang out on him and his heart thudded in his chest. He was not afraid-indeed he welcomed the sound, even if it meant danger-but tension built in him as he willed the sound to come again. It did not. Blade opened his mouth, hardly breathed, and was once again at one with the absolute silence.

And yet there had been a sound. His mind was not playing tricks. He stayed where he was, silent and unmoving, and tried to reconstruct the sound. Just what kind of a sound had it been? He strained to recover the aural sensation.

A pinging sound. No-too mild a term. A clang, a slight clanging sound. Metal, then, being lifted, touched or moved in some way. Concentrate, Blade.

Metal, a large piece of metal being lifted and dropped, or let fall accidentally, a short distance away. That was as close as he could come to it.

Blade let his gaze rove out of the shadows where he lurked. Not far away from him, in the middle of the street, was a kiosk. He had examined one already and found that it housed a manhole cover, a huge disc of metal. Even his great strength had not been able to budge it and he had no tools. He had peered through a hole in the center of the disc and decided that it covered nothing but a sewer. Possibly it was a very large sewer, and he meant to explore it later, but now-

He darted for the kiosk. It was full in the light from the spotlights on the moon. He knelt beside the sewer lid and examined it again. Yes. Such a round of metal, lifted and dropped back into its bed, would make exactly the sound he had heard. But not this particular sewer lid, for the sound had not come from this direction. It had been behind him.

Blade scuttled back into the shadows. He was afraid now, a healthy fear that had kept him alive many times, but along with his fear was relief and expectation. He was not alone in this place of silence and shadows and that loathsome moon. There was somebody, or something, down in those sewers.

Blade welcomed it, whatever it was.