One of the four men Blade had trained as emergency pilots must have already been at the controls, because even before the hatch was completely shut the big flier lurched off the ice and zoomed upward, wobbling and lurching still, throwing people about in the hold with screams and yells and crashes. Blade lurched to his feet, every muscle in his body from his innermost viscera out to the tips of his fingers and toes clamoring for rest, denied their clamor, and made his way forward. The emergency pilot handed him the master key; Blade stuck it in his pocket and collapsed into the pilot's seat.
Under his relatively more experienced hand, the flier's gyrations straightened out, the panicky uproar behind him faded, and the flier arrowed out on a course south. Blade stayed high and fast, figuring the Menel now had far too much to worry about to bother pursuing him. And perhaps they wouldn't want to. He had won almost all the victory he had planned and dreamed of, but he would not mind staying in this dimension long enough to know what the future relations might be between human and Menel.
Stramod came forward into the control room, his long face haggard and his longer arms sagging at his side in a way even more ape-like than usual. But there was contentment in his voice as he said, «I have done a count of the people we evacuated. Nearly four hundred slaves and Girls. And we lost only thirty-one men doing it. We have quite a few wounded, of course, but-«
«No doubt,» said Blade. He hoped weariness didn't make him sound too callous. «How is Doctor Leyndt?»
«Leyndt? She will be all right with a little care and much rest. I hope you and she will-.»
Whatever Stramod might have hoped for Blade and Leyndt was lost, as the sun rose behind the flier. A searing light gushed across the landscape, turning the glaciers even whiter than nature could make them, then faded through purples, reds, and oranges. As the glow died, Blade turned the flier around in a wide circle so that he could look to the north, to see what he had known he must see.
A creamy cloud was beginning to bulge above the horizon, like a blob of whipped marshmallow, with thin writhing tendrils creeping out in all directions, vivid against the blue sky. It took on no mushroom shape, but rather swelled continuously into a broad dome. Here and there in it flecks of gold, green, and silver sparkled as the sun was reflected off debris thrown up into what must already be well into the stratosphere if the cloud was visible from so far away.
Blade turned the flier away and increased the speed. There was no point in not outrunning the shock wave, not when they could move at twice its speed. And there was little point in watching for anything more in the north-at least not now. The Ice Master's stronghold was gone as if it had never existed; nothing could be back there now except a steaming hole chewed down through the glacier deep into bedrock, miles in diameter and buzzing with lethal radioactive particles.
Stramod turned to him now and muttered, «I wonder what happened to the Menel in that blast? If their settlements were sufficiently far from the stronghold and sufficiently well-built, they may have survived. In which case-«
Blade was not listening to him, however, because it suddenly seemed that a smaller version of the explosion in the north had flared in his own skull. Again the world turned white, then faded through purple, red, and orange. And his mind screamed out as though its voice could be hurled across the dimensions to where the computer was reaching for him:
«No! Not now! It's not finished yet! I can't leave until-«
— but the pains continued to tear at his head. He lurched up out of the chair, thumb of his right hand stabbing for the button that would engage the automatic pilot while the other hand reached up to cradle a head that seemed on the verge of splitting apart. If the automatic pilot was on, the flier would hold its course south to Tengran and one of the emergency pilots could land it safely.
He felt the button click in, then the computer's grasp on his mind tightened and the button turned to mush and his hand sank into the control panel. His arm followed it, and as a fading Stramod gaped at him he slowly seeped through the control consoles and out through the skin of the flier on to its nose.
He rode the nose like the figurehead of a sailing ship, oddly aware that no cold or wind seared at him. Then he became aware that, preposterously, the sky ahead seemed to be getting closer. It was getting closer. There was a pattern on it becoming visible, a pattern of lines etched as if on glass. They were going to hit!
They did hit it. The sky fell apart along the etched lines and one huge fragment swept down and sliced him clear of the flier. He clung to it, finding it cold but in spite of its total smoothness easy to cling to, as it spiraled downward, twisting and sliding like a falling leaf, down, down, down, until he suddenly fell off and kept on going down by himself into a blackness that yawned below, down into a blackness that now rose up about him like a fog. Sensation faded. Sensation vanished.
Chapter 20
The four men sitting around a table in the study of the Prime Minister's shooting lodge were all feeling rather short-tempered. For three of them it was an inconvenient place to be at an inconvenient time-but the P.M. was notably disinclined to interrupt a good grouse season for anything short of the Last Judgment. So Lord Leighton, J, and Richard Blade had trundled out to meet him. For two of them there was an additional strain in that Lord Leighton was being even more maddeningly stubborn than usual when he had started some particularly fascinating bare, and both J and the Prime Minister were doing their best to grab the scientist by the coattails and keep him from disappearing over the horizon with the whole Dimension X Project. And for Richard Blade, there were some personal pains, which Lord Leighton had touched on but for once had the tact not to pursue. Had he done his best to preserve the Menel?
At this moment, however, the Prime Minister was holding the floor, holding it so stubbornly that not even Lord Leighton's willingness to interrupt anybody for any reason was stopping him from getting his thoughts out. «Now damn it all, Leighton, this time you're asking for the moon. Not just the moon, but the moon in a bloody giftwrap as well! You've got to sit down and look at it from the point of view of keeping the Project going over the long term.»
«Yes,» put in J, «and from the point of view of keeping Richard alive and sane, which is also a trifle important for the project in the long run. It's simply preposterous to talk about canceling the search for other candidates in favor of this new whatever-you-call-it.»
«A Replication Module,» said Leighton shortly. «Obviously-«
«Obviously we have to consider all sides of the problem,» said the P.M., accomplishing simultaneously the considerable feat of getting his irritation under control and the positively prodigious one of successfully interrupting Lord Leighton. «Let's go through Leighton's request from the beginning.
«What you want, if I understand it correctly, is that the main effort of the project now be turned in the direction of first, determining the exact relationship between X Dimension and Home Dimension, and then modifying both the programming and the hardware of the computer so that we can send Blade to any given X Dimension in a controlled fashion, rather than simply firing him off into the blue the way we've been doing. Is that right so far?»
Leighton nodded but said nothing, apparently not recovered from the shock of being successfully interrupted. Oh well, thought Blade, there's a first time for everything, and a politician like the P.M. has had enough practice interrupting nonstop talkers to be able to cope with almost anybody if he wants to.