"It was," Sela said.

Now the Entesh Field could only act as a sort of burglar alarm. Even then it depended heavily on the reliability of the Watchers-which was steadily deteriorating.

Finally, there was the Hoak Field, which produced the screen of blindness along the top of the Wall. That alone at times had been enough to keep Mak'loh safe from intruders from the Warlands outside.

"Anyone who was willing to feel his way along for another twenty-five feet could pa.s.s safely through the Hoak Field," said one of the men. "But the Warlanders had degenerated into superst.i.tious barbarians, who would never be capable of such a thing."

Blade wondered if anybody in Mak'loh had ever seen the Shoba's men in action. No one he'd talked to had mentioned them, so he doubted it. The Shoba's trained soldiers might well be superst.i.tious, but they were not barbarians, any more than the legions of Rome bad been. Sooner or later, if the Shoba's army held together, it would be making a serious attempt on the Wall.

The main power plant of the city impressed Blade even more than the force-field generators. For one thing, the Authority people who ran the power plant and guarded it seemed to have escaped some of the apathy that had swallowed up their comrades. They were brisk, alert, and efficient. They also had several hundred picked android soldiers under their command. The Power Guard was the most highly trained fighting force Blade had seen in Mak'loh. "They must be the best," the woman in charge of their training said with a shrug. "How can they be otherwise? If the power dies, so does Mak'loh."

The power plant itself operated by the direct conversion of ma.s.s into energy. Theoretically, it could use any form of ma.s.s, including sewage. In practice it was simpler to use heavy metals extruded into fine wire and fed into the converter.

Because of its abundance in this Dimension, gold was the favorite heavy metal. Blade saw the gold that was currently providing the power for the whole city-a bar that he could lift in one hand. He also saw the gold stored away for future needs-room after room of gold bars, stacked higher than a man. This ma.s.s of glittering metal would outweigh the combined gold reserves of every Home Dimension nation combined. At the present rate of consumption, Mak'loh had power for at least a thousand years. Ironic, when the city and everybody in it would be dead in less than half that time.

So it went, everywhere Blade traveled in Mak'loh. The city was a breathtaking and contradictory mixture of dazzling genius and creeping decay, with the decay slowly winning.

After a week of touring the city, Sela taught Blade how to use one of the Authority's flyers. The gravity-control fields in the Houses of Peace required heavy generators and a great deal of power. They could not be used in small flying machines. So the flyer was no more than a platform with controls slung between two ducted fans. It was easy to control, and the ones in service were all very carefully maintained. That was good news to Blade. As he put it: "A thousand-foot fall can ruin a man's whole day."

Blade enjoyed the leisurely flights across the gardens, above the tops of Mak'loh's highest towers, even out to the Wall. There was no way to pa.s.s beyond the Wall, since the Hoak Field rose higher than the flyers could climb, and no man could control one of them blind. That did not worry Blade. He knew he had the measure of all Mak'loh's defenses, and none of them could prevent him from going where he wanted, when he wanted. This was vital to a plan that was rapidly taking shape in his mind.

It was a particularly lovely day, flawlessly clear from the moment the eastern sky began to turn pink with dawn. Blade and Sela were up early, bathing, breakfasting, and ordering the androids to prepare their flyer for the day's traveling.

They walked out to the landing platform as the sun crept over the Wall. Overhead the sky was turning the pale blue that promised a scorching hot day. The android servant stowed away their lunch under the seat of the flyer, then climbed into the seat and strapped itself in.

Sela shook her head. "No, you will not be needed today."

"Yes, Master," said the android. It unstrapped itself and vanished down the stairs. Sela turned to Blade and smiled.

"We are going farther than before today, into the western forests close to the Wall. It is so wild there that no one ever comes near it. Working androids do not know what to do there, so they are more of a nuisance than a help."

"I see," said Blade. By now he'd got used to the worker androids so they hardly seemed more than pieces of furniture. He was still happy to be free of them whenever possible.

Blade lifted the flyer off the platform, took it up above the highest tower of the city, and headed west. He flew slowly, his helmet off and his coveralls zipped open halfway down his chest. He savored the sunshine, the breeze, the gentle whirr of the fans, and the view below. From this high there was nothing to show that Mak'loh was a dying city, and all the colors of its towers blazed in the sunlight.

The city crept past below them; then came the inner wall and the gardens. They were green and luxuriant-too much so, with water plants choking streams, and ponds and creepers twining around trees. This was good land though-fertile and well-watered. With skilled cultivation, it could feed twice as many people as Mak'loh held now, and in time ....

No, he wouldn't let his mind spin fantasies of what could only lie in the distant future. There was little chance of Mak'loh turning back to the land for its food, and, perhaps there would be no need to. Blade hoped so. The people of the city would have to do many things they were not doing now in order to survive, but they should not have to become sweating peasants. Not if his plan worked and the people of Mak'loh showed at least a little intelligence!

Half an hour later Blade sent the flyer spiraling down to a landing on the edge of the forest along the western Wall. He couldn't land in the forest itself without the risk of impaling the flyer on a treetop.

The flyer touched down, and the fans whispered into silence. Blade and Sela climbed down to the ground, hoisted their gear, and strode into the forest.

They walked a mile through the hot, windless silence under the trees, brushing off insects and rapidly working up a sweat. At last they broke out of the trees onto the bank of a small stream. It flowed down a hillside between two gra.s.sy banks, clear and cold, so fast that the water plants hadn't been able to choke it. Flowering bushes like lilacs dotted the hillside, rising twelve and fifteen feet, covering the gra.s.s with fallen yellow blossoms and filling the air with a delicate sweet scent. It was an absolutely irresistible place for a picnic.

Blade dropped the gear, while Sela sat down and pulled off her boots. She lay back on the gra.s.s, wiggling her toes, hair spread out around her head, the picture of absolute contentment. Suddenly she sat up and began undoing her coveralls. "Blade, I think I'll take a bath in the stream before we eat. I feel like I've been cooked along with the mush in one of the food factory's raw material vats."

"Can you swim?" Blade had to ask. He'd never seen Sela enter the water, or indeed do anything without at least her coverall and boots on. He'd always been aware of the body under those coveralls, but he'd never seen it.

Before he could complete the thought, Sela's coveralls were lying on the gra.s.s beside her boots. She stood up, wearing a sort of padded green body stocking. Her figure hardly needed padding. Blade a.s.sumed it was some sort of protective garment, like the bulletproof vests worn by the android soldiers. She reached around behind her and tried to undo the neck of the vest. Her fingers waved desperately an inch short of the seal.

She laughed in amused frustration. "This is the first time in years I've tried to take off one of these things without an android to help me. Could you help me, Blade?"

Blade stepped over behind Sela and gently undid the neck of the vest. Even more gently he undid the seam down her back, until he could see an expanse of creamy skin stretching all the way down to the cleft between her b.u.t.tocks. A second glance told him that skin was lightly freckled. He let his hands rest on the back of her neck for a moment. Then he pushed the vest slowly down off her shoulders. She stood without moving or even breathing hard as it slipped down to her waist. Then she turned around.

Against the freckled whiteness of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, her large nipples were startlingly dark. Blade raised his hands, ran them down her neck and over her shoulders to her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, brushed his thumbs lightly across the nipples, felt them harden and rise. Sela still did not move, but her b.r.e.a.s.t.s seemed to take on a life of their own as her breathing quickened.

It had been almost inevitable that sooner or later they would come together like this. Blade had been too aware of Sela's beauty not to be showing interest. Sela was experienced enough to notice those signs of interest. To be sure, she hadn't had an actual Physical s.e.x experience in more than fifty years. Those of the Authority had many more waking hours free of the Inward Eye, but they also had much more work to do. Besides, they seldom found anyone but another member of the Authority a congenial bed partner.

Sela continued to stand motionless while Blade worked on her with both his lips and his hands. His lips crept up and down her body from throat to navel, lingering the longest on her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, drawing her nipples out, making the skin around them flush. His hands slowly shoved the vest down past her waist, her hips, her thighs, until it slid on its own down her legs to fall in a pile at her feet. She still stood motionless as Blade stepped back from her long enough to strip off his own coverall. He wore nothing under it but a padded loinguard, and then nothing at all.

This time Sela moved when she felt his hands on her. Her kiss began as tentatively and fumbling as the first kiss of a schoolgirl, but did not stay like that for long. There was little skill in it, but there was a pa.s.sion ready to be given with no thought of holding back. Blade's mouth opened to meet Sela's, and his arms went around her as hers gripped him.

They stood like that for a time that neither could measure, lips on lips, hands everywhere and anywhere on each other's bodies. Blade's hands gripped Sela's firm b.u.t.tocks, while her hands strayed from the small of his back into his groin. Blade felt a rising heat there and felt dampness in the fine hair between Sela's thighs. That hair seemed to have a life of its own as it curled around Blade's rising erection, enticing, inflaming, maddening.

The madness was more than either could continue to endure where they were. Blade wasn't sure whether they lay down of their own free will or whether their knees simply folded under them. He found himself on his back in the gra.s.s, while Sela straddled his thighs and slid down upon him in the same moment that he thrust smoothly up into her. There was a moment's tension, a moment's resistance, then an easy joining. For another moment Blade held himself absolutely still, terribly certain that with Sela's warmth around him he would explode if he made a single movement. Then the matter was out of his control, as Sela began to move upon him.

She moved up and down and from side to side, twisting all of her body from her thighs up to her head. She threw her head forward until her hair flowed down over her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, then threw it back until the hair flowed down to the base of her spine. She tossed her arms about, clutching now at Blade, now at the empty air, now burying her fingers in her hair, now stroking her own b.r.e.a.s.t.s. She seemed to be turning from a woman into an animal, and then into something that was not even flesh and blood, only pa.s.sion cleverly disguised.

As she changed, Sela drew Blade steadily after her, until he could not be sure that he was still part of the world around him. All his being was becoming part of the woman above him, as all of her being was becoming part of him.

They merged until it seemed that their bodies must blur, melt, and run together. In that moment they reached their peak, held that peak for another moment, then fell down the other side of it with flame before their eyes and thunder roaring in their ears. They could not have told one moment from another and one sensation from another to save their lives.

Slowly the world around them returned. Blade felt gra.s.s p.r.i.c.kling against his bare-skin, sweat trickling down it, the breeze on his face, the warmth and softness and weight of Sela sprawled across him. He raised his head enough to see that she was sound asleep, little gasps from her open mouth stirring the hair on his chest. It seemed to Blade that Sela was doing a sensible thing, and he did the same.

Eventually they woke and took the baths that had been so pleasantly delayed. They were hungry after that and emptied the picnic box in record time. Their hands met as they stowed away the plates and bottles, and the meeting of the hands awoke desire again.

They spent all afternoon making love there by the stream. Blade saw how the sunlight creeping through the leaves dappled Sela's body, how her lips danced with exquisite abandon up and down his body, how bits of leaves got caught in her hair as it grew steadily more tangled.

Eventually the afternoon came to an end. Blade had reached his limits, and Sela was getting ravenously hungry. Since the nearest food was more than forty miles away in Mak'loh, there was nothing to do but pack up and go home.

They flew back to the city as the western sky began to glow red. Blade flew in a complete circle around the city before landing. He contemplated the new and marvelous colors the sunset gave to the soaring towers. He also contemplated the best way of using a flyer in his plan to release Mak'loh from its living death.

Sela laid a hand on his arm and smiled. It was a lazy, sensuous, satisfied smile, warm with memory and also with antic.i.p.ation. It told Blade a great deal. Above all, it told Blade that Sela had no intention of letting another fifty years go by before she joined Physically with a man. In fact, she wasn't going to wait even fifty hours.

He'd brought her to a new awareness of the delights of the Physical, and now she was half in love with him, or at least half addicted to him. So she might take what he was about to do to her city as the grossest treachery, a blow too brutal to endure.

Blade didn't like the thought, but he didn't see that he had any real choice. Mak'loh was too far gone for there to be any safe or easy way to save it.

Chapter 16.

Blade waited until Sela was so deeply asleep in the great bed that an earthquake couldn't have awakened her. Then he slipped out of the bed, went out into the corridor, and ran to the room where he'd left his equipment.

He quickly pulled it on. There was a complete combat outfit, from helmet to boots, including a shock rifle, grenade thrower, sack of extra grenades and power cells, and a Watcher control. It was just possible that by morning every man and woman in the city of Mak'loh would be ready to kill him on sight and there would be nothing he could do to change their minds. In that case, staying around would be a singularly pointless form of suicide and a quick retreat over the Wall into the Warlands the only sensible thing to do.

Neither androids nor human beings paid any attention to Blade as he walked down the corridor and rode up the shaft to the roof of the building. Some of the people in the Houses of Peace were vaguely aware that there was a stranger in Mak'loh, a man said to be from another of the Cities of Peace where life was very different from what it was here. More Physical, or so the rumors ran. However, no one had been sufficiently curious about this Physical stranger to speak to him.

That would certainly change tonight. By dawn everyone in Mak'loh would have heard of Richard Blade of England, no matter what they thought of him.

He stepped out on the roof, walked to his flyer, and checked it carefully. He'd loaded it with extra food and water, extra power cells for the fan motors, a tent sewn together out of old robes and blankets, and a sleeping bag. He might be able to fly out of Mak'loh tonight, if he did have to leave. In that case, why not fly out ready to live as comfortably as possible until he returned to Home Dimension? Blade was not a man to run around naked and live on raw meat merely for his own amus.e.m.e.nt.

He lifted the flyer into the night sky and climbed until it would be impossible to see him and hard to hear him from the ground. Then he set a course for the field-generator building and flew slowly and levelly.

He would have to succeed the first time, or not at all. Even if he personally survived a failure tonight, he would have lost the necessary advantage of surprise. All the vital installations would be heavily defended and the Authority on the alert. The soldier androids might not be very good, but there were far too many of them for one man to face if they had orders to deal with him.

Over the industrial area of the city, Blade dropped to rooftop height and slowed down until he was practically drifting along. At last he saw the six-hundred-foot tower that held the generators for the force fields looming out of the darkness ahead. He climbed slightly, skimmed in over the edge of the roof, and landed. Instantly he was out of the flyer and flattening himself on the rough pebbled surface of the roof. He lay searching the darkness until he was certain that the roof was empty.

Blade had landed on the roof because he expected it to be unguarded, not because it was closest to the control room. That lay five hundred feet down a spiraling ramp. From the control room, another ramp led to the ground level. A dozen androids guarded that ramp. It was a.s.sumed that no one could possibly come down from above except other members of the Authority, and they could not possibly be dangerous to anything or anyone in Mak'loh.

Blade fixed his bayonet, raised his rifle, and began to descend the ramp. The rifle was set to stun, and he carried two fused gas grenades in his belt. Over his nose and mouth he wore one of the Authority's gas masks, a transparent sheet of plastic-like filtering material no heavier than a pocket handkerchief. Yet it would protect him completely from a gas that could kill an unprotected human being in thirty seconds.

The ramp was well-lit, and Blade could have gone much faster than he did. Instead, he waited at each turn, listening for the slightest noise from ahead. He heard only the distant pulsing of the field generators that came steadily through the solid walls. He saw only the ramp and walls, bare except for small doors that led into the generator compartments. He was able to measure his downward progress by reading off the markings on the doors.

A hundred feet down from the roof. Two hundred. Three hundred. It began to seem impossible that there could be anyone waiting for him, when all the lights went out. He hit the floor before the after-images faded from his eyes. As he stretched out, he heard feet climbing out of the darkness toward him. Blade unhooked one of the gas grenades from his belt and, without pulling the pin, sent it rolling down the ramp toward the oncoming footsteps.

It clattered away into the darkness. The footsteps halted. Then the white flare of rifle fire lit up the ramp. He'd drawn the fire to the approaching people, as he'd hoped to.

Aiming by sound in the darkness, the unknown rifleman made a good shot-good enough to burst the grenade. It went off with a sharp crack, followed by the spannnng of flying fragments and the wsssssh of escaping gas. A woman screamed.

Blade leaped to his feet and followed up the grenade. He rounded the bend as the lights came back on again. The ramp ahead was hazy with the yellow-green gas. Beyond the cloud of gas were two people in Authority coveralls. On the right a woman sat leaning against the wall, clawing at her throat. Her head was thrown back, and her eyes rolled frantically upward. A fragment of the grenade had torn open her cheek and her gas. mask, letting a lethal dose of the gas into her lungs.

On the left lay a man, staring as Blade came around the bend. With skill and precision, he snapped up his rifle and fired. Blade was already diving for the floor, squeezing the trigger of his own rifle, as the beam cracked past his head. Blade's own shot took the man in the leg.

Before the man could fire again, Blade rolled over and came up on his knees. They were too close now to fire. The man brought his rifle up to guard against a blow at his chest or throat. Blade went in over the man's guard with his bayonet, thrusting at his face and ripping open his mask. The man screamed. Blade reversed his rifle and cracked the man across the jaw with the b.u.t.t, stunning him. He slumped back against the wall, dying more quietly than the woman as the gas ate into his lungs.

Blade sprang to his feet and plunged down the ramp at a dead run. It didn't matter whether or not there were anyone else waiting in ambush. He couldn't afford to waste a second. The noise of the fight must have alerted the people in the control room. He might have to kill them, and that would absolutely be the end of his chances for staying in Mak'loh after tonight. d.a.m.n it, he hadn't wanted anybody killed at all! There wouldn't have been, either, if these two clowns hadn't ambushed him-and where the devil had they come from anyway?

By the time Blade finished asking himself these questions, he was almost down to the level of the control room. He covered the last few yards of the ramp flattened against the wall. The control team was seated at the board, each man with a rifle across his knees. Only one had his eyes on the board. The other two were looking at the entrances to the upward and downward ramps. Blade raised his rifle and aimed it at the three. The movement caught one man's eye. He shouted and started to jump up.

At that moment, running feet sounded on the ramp from the ground floor. Two more armed men in Authority coveralls burst into view, and behind them six soldier androids. One of them saw Blade and shouted to the androids: "Kill the Warlander!"

The time it took the man to shout was enough for Blade to act. He stunned the man who'd shouted, then dropped flat as the androids sent white fire crackling over his head. The walls and ceiling smoked and cracked where the beams struck. Those rifles were set to kill. Apparently those androids had been told Blade was no Master but a Warlander. That made him fair game.

Seeing androids firing on someone he knew to be a Master, one of the men at the control board sprang out of his chair, firing at the androids. He knocked out two of them and spoiled the aim of the other four. The second human attacker promptly shot the control man. The blast reduced his head to a charred ruin.

In the confusion, Blade dashed across the control room. The androids saw him but didn't fire. They couldn't risk hitting the control board or one of the Masters at it. Blade went over the top of the control board like a high jumper and dropped to his knees on the floor behind it. The two surviving control men threw themselves out of their seats, not sure what was going on but sure they didn't want to get killed in it. The surviving attacker had to climb over one of them to get around the control board at Blade. By the time he'd done this, Blade had his rifle aimed and fired with the muzzle almost against the man's chest. The man flew a foot into the air, then crashed to the floor.

The four surviving androids milled around without firing. They faced a situation not covered in their training, with no orders coming from their Masters or any others. Blade stunned one of them, and that persuaded the other three to turn and run off down the ramp toward the ground level. Blade took a high-explosive grenade, set the fuse for a delayed detonation, and fired it down the ramp after the fleeing androids. Silence followed the explosion.

Cautiously the two surviving control men rose to their feet. They looked at their dead comrade, the fallen humans and androids, and Blade standing by the board.

"What in the name of Peace is going on?" said one of them furiously. He started to sit down in his seat.

"There are going to be some changes made in this city tonight," said Blade politely and tapped the man on the head with the b.u.t.t of his rifle. Before the other control man could react, Blade fired and stretched him out on the floor along with everybody else.

On one side of the room was a large freight elevator that ran from top to bottom of the building. Blade opened the door and shoved all the bodies from both sides, human and android alike, into the elevator. Then he sent the elevator down to the ground level and locked the controls. That should keep everyone safe and out of his hair for the next few minutes. He could sort out who had been trying to do what to whom afterward.

The control room opened on one side onto a balcony that ran around a vast circular chamber, more than two hundred feet across and a hundred feet high. In the center of the chamber, a gleaming steel column fifty feet in diameter rose to vanish in the ceiling. Inside that column lay the working parts of various field generators, stacked one on another in a pile more than five hundred feet high. Around the base of the column was a glittering array of consoles, conduits, displays, switchboards, and piping. There were the essential monitors and power relays for the generators.

If they were destroyed, it would take five years to rebuild them. Until they were rebuilt, the field generators could no longer be powered or controlled safely. The three force fields would no longer protect Mak'loh. Its people would have to look to their own protection, however much this cost them in Physical activity. In five years it was possible that the city would be firmly set on a new course, freer of android servants and the pleasures of the Inward Eye.

It was no more than just possible, but it was the best chance Blade could give this city.

He went to the control board and carefully closed the master switches for all three fields. Every light on the board flashed from green to red, then died entirely. Wrecking the controls with the fields still active could do even more permanent damage, but it might also set off an explosion like an atomic bomb. Blade did not want to wake up Mak'loh by laying half of it in ruins.

Blade walked out on to the balcony, the loaded grenade thrower in his hands. He stood by the railing, sighted on the nearest console, and fired. He dropped to the floor as the grenade exploded, ripping the console to bits and spraying pieces of metal and circuitry in all directions.

Blade worked his way around the balcony as methodically as a farmer planting seed. Explosion after explosion ripped through the equipment below. The lights went out, and emergency lighting came on with dim glows like fireflies. A few more explosions, and the emergency lights also went out.

Blade pulled a flashlight out of his pack and went on shooting by its light.

Explosions blazed orange and circuits flared up blue-white in the darkness. Metal fragments rained down around Blade, skittered off the balcony, clanged and cracked into the walls. Smoke swirled around Blade like fog, carrying a stench of high explosive, burned insulation, and melted metal.

Blade ran out of targets long before he ran out of grenades. Then he climbed down a ladder from the balcony to the floor of the chamber. He'd done a very adequate job with the time and the equipment he'd had.

There was only one more thing to do. Blade flashed his light at the main control board high above. Then he aimed the thrower and fired. The first grenade blew the board off its mountings. The second blew it in half and threw two of the chairs off the balcony. Blade was reloading again when a voice called out of the darkness. He stopped, the grenade in one hand.

He wasn't surprised to hear voices. What the voice was saying did surprise him.

Sharp and demanding, the voice in the darkness called out, "Blade, stop firing! We're on your side!"

Chapter 17.

Blade's first thought was that either his hearing or his brain had been damaged by the grenade explosions. By sheer reflex he dropped the third grenade into the thrower. In the silence after the explosion, the click echoed all around the chamber.

The man above heard it. "Get back, you fools!" he shouted. "He may fire again!" Blade heard the sound of several sets of retreating feet. "d.a.m.n you, Blade," came the voice again. "I told you we're friends. We're from the Authority."

Blade took cover behind a metal cabinet standing on end. "That's not enough," he shouted back. "I've already had to defend myself tonight against four people in Authority clothing. How do I know that I can trust you?"

"We know about the fight," the man said. "We've got the people you put in the elevator. I swear it; you've nothing to fear from us."

By now Blade recognized the voice. It was Geetro, a member of the Authority Council and the man in charge at the main power station. He was one of the more alert minds, even among the power-plant tenders.

Yet that didn't mean he could be trusted. Something was going on in Mak'loh that seemed to have produced open warfare among factions of the Authority. Which faction was Geetro's?

"Turn on a light," Blade shouted. "Then leave it on and come down here. We'll talk privately."