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.