Blade began to feel ashamed of his panic. His nerves were going, almost gone, but he must hold on. His head was full of pain. The computer was reaching, but it was not yet time. The pain was not severe enough. The computer could not save him.
Blade shook his fist at the face on the screen. He let flow a string of profanity that would have made Lord Leighton, himself skilled in the art of foul-mouthing, turn a deep red.
Blade got angry. «I have agreed. I have no more to say.»
Onta was laughing and near choked as he said, «A fifteen count and I stop the bomb.»
Blade looked up. The great breast-shaped bomb, with elongated nipple and vanes, lingered in the milk sky, hovering. Blade felt that he could have reached out and touched it. Roughly speaking, he thought, it was about the size of Big Ben. It was absurd, fantastic. But it had stopped.
He was bone weary now. He looked at the screen. «What must I do?»
«Go to the roof and wait. You will find a pad there near the chute. A magnacar will come for you. It will arrive in a count of five. You will enter it and lie prone. Do nothing else.»
«I agree.»
«Go now.»
Norn cried out and clutched at him. Blade told Jantor to seize her. The Gnomen watched in silence as he climbed a short ladder through the open dome and went to the pad near the chute. He gazed up and around him. There was nothing but the enormous bomb now partially blocking the view of that thing he had always feared and distrusted since landing in this Dimension X-the Moon.
The magnacar was there. It was the size of a large coffin with a transparent bottom. The top whined open and a mechanical voice said, «Enter and lie prone. Touch nothing.»
Blade obeyed, thinking that the Selenes must have mastered the secret of magnetic fields. The car had no motor or engine of any sort. If the car moved he was not aware of it. There was no sense of motion. All the same he was aware of passing the bomb.
He was prone and staring down through the transparent bottom when he saw it. The bomb struck the city. Onta had lied to him. Onta had intended all along to destroy the city. The Selenes were weary of the Morphi and the Gnomen. Blade was more than a little weary himself, of everything.
Below him was a fire such as he had never dreamed could exist. The air itself was aflame. The flame resolved itself into lava that flowed thick and sluggish and destroying, covering and obliterating the city as a hundred gallons of paint would cover and obscure a child's desk globe in HD.
It was over-forever over for the Gnomen and the Morphi… or was it? The thought ticked in his brain and he clung to it. If the women pregnant by him had gone deep enough…
CHAPTER 18
The parallelism was so exact in so many ways, and so grotesquely different in so many others, that Blade withdrew into his shell and made no attempt to probe or understand the Selenes. In any case the head pains were getting steadily worse. The computer would take him back soon, if he survived.
He knew only one thing-the crystal had ceased to function the moment he landed on the Selene Moon.
He did not see Onta. He saw nobody but a medium-sized, mediocre-appearing person who introduced himself as Zampa. The magnacar had deposited him in a spacious, sterile docking area lined with white tile. Blade decided it was a laboratory.
Zampa wore a neat gray business suit with a thin black tie and stiff attached collar, patent leather pumps and thin dark socks. He appeared middle aged with a lined face, graying hair and the pocks of a bad case of long ago acne. He extended his hand and Blade, not caring one way or the other, shook it, finding it moist and plumpish.
«Welcome to Selena,» said Zampa. «We were worried about you. You must have had some terrible times down there.»
There were two easy chairs in a corner of the lab. Blade sank into one, Zampa into the other. He was offered no refreshment or a bath or any change of costume.
Zampa did offer what might have been an apology. «We wish to examine you, to, conduct the first series of tests, while you are in your, er, shall we say primitive state. Do you mind?»
«Would it matter if I did?»
Zampa smiled. «Not in the least.»
Blade stared at the man who called himself Zampa. His eyes were the only thing remarkable about him. They were pink and green-a pink dot and concentric rings of green, forming a bull's-eye. Other than that he might have been any slightly weary London businessman. Blade wondered if such were the case? Was it all a computer joke with Lord Leighton made up as Zampa? To hell with it. He was too exhausted to speculate.
Blade said: «You did not keep your promise. You dropped the bomb.»
Zampa leaned toward him. «Onta made the promise, not I. Not that it matters. I would have done the same. A promise is only words and words are only meaningful when they serve one's own purpose. It was time to find a final solution to the Morphi and Gnomen problem and we have done so. But for your presence down there-and how we did fear for you, Blade-we would have done so much sooner. You have caused us a great deal of worry, you know. We dared not invade for fear you would act wrong-headedly-fight on their side and be killed.»
Blade nodded. «I would have, too.»
«Umm-so we feared. And we dared not drop the bomb until we had you safely away from there. You see our dilemma?»
«I can see,» said Blade calmly, «that you Selenes are a bunch of liars. If I had to make a choice I would prefer the Gnomen or the Morphi to you people.» For the first time he noticed the only way in which this Zampa resembled Onta-the head was too big and the neck too thick.
Zampa smiled and took a little red book from a breast pocket of his well-cut jacket. «Liar? Ummm, yes, here it is. One of our people who was sent into another dimension and got back safely-the only one so far, I am afraid-he mentions the words lie and liar in his report.»
There was no help for it. Despite his fatigue, his bone weariness, his many wounds and his very real lack of interest, Blade came alert. He had to. Lord L would expect it. And he still had a job to do-if it could be done.
He watched Zampa. «You have sent a man into another dimension?»
«I said so, did I not? Only one has come back thus far, which leaves, I am afraid, some hundred odd roaming around out there whom we will never recover.»
How many in his own Home Dimension? Blade could not help grinning. This was going to startle old Lord L.
Zampa was very patient. He tapped well-kempt fingers on his knee. «What do you call the dimension from which you come?»
«Home Dimension. HD.»
Zampa studied his book again. «That would correspond to our S Dimension, I suppose. How are you sent and recovered?»
Blade explained as best he could. Zampa listened without interruption, then crooked a finger and said, «Follow me, please.»
He might have been in the Tower computer complex but for the silence. Millions of tiny lights winked and blinked but there was not the faintest hum. Zampa led Blade into an inner chamber and pointed to a square pad of shiny material that might have been linoleum but for a metallic glisten. There was no chair, no wires or electrodes or consoles.
Zampa pointed to the pad. «We stand our subject on that and attune power to him by what our experts call sympathetic surge.»
Blade asked, «You are not a scientist?»
Zampa laughed heartily. «Dear me, no. I am what we call a friendly relations officer. I have been trained to make you like and trust me, Blade.»