Blade replied, speaking as slowly and distinctly as the robot.
"It was good."
"It is good that the Master is pleased." The robot started to back away. A thought struck Blade.
"Do you wish to please the Master again?"
"It is an order, to please the Master."
"Good. Tell me where the-the woman Master who came with me lives."
The robot sputtered and hissed for so long that Blade thought perhaps he"d asked a question it could not answer. Then the robot"s other hatch opened, and what looked like a thin television screen unfolded. A moment later the screen lit up, showing what appeared to be a map of the interior of a building. The robot made a spitting sound, and a sheet of what looked like plastic-coated paper shot out from the top of the screen and fell to the floor.
Blade picked it up. One room was outlined in green, another in red. The robot spoke before he could ask.
"The Master is in the green room. The other Master is in the red room. Is it the Master"s wish that they be together?"
Blade was about to say yes, then realized that might make the robot bring Twana to him. He would rather go to her and explore this building on the way.
"The Master will go to the other Master," he said. "That will please both of us." The robot made another spitting sound and produced another map. This one had a route from Blade"s room to Twana"s, marked out with a silver line that seemed to glow faintly. Blade picked up the second map. "This is good. You have pleased us. You may go." The robot turned about and rolled out of the room.
s.p.a.cious living quarters, good food, and now a map that showed him the way to Twana. The mystery of where he was and who had brought him there was growing with every minute. However, finding Twana was still the first thing to do. Blade decided it would be safe to take his sword, took it out of the wardrobe, belted it on, and strode out into the corridor.
The map took him down the corridor, around three successive right-angled turns, then up two flights of stairs. At the second turn Blade found a bathroom, with four large sunken tubs, seven shower stalls, a number of toilets, and two robots watching over it all. The robots were wheeled cones, with four jointed arms at the top and four more s.p.a.ced equally around the base.
The map now led Blade through a narrow corridor with an arched ceiling and a floor that sloped gently upward. The corridor began to curve around to the left. Blade followed it and abruptly found himself facing one of the armed Watcher robots. In the narrow corridor it looked even bigger and uglier than it had out on the Wall.
The head swiveled toward Blade as the Watcher sensed his presence. He stood where he was, but made no move to disarm himself. The Watcher"s reaction should tell him more about whether he was a prisoner or a guest.
The man and the robot stared at each other for several minutes. Each minute seemed like half an hour to Blade. When he was satisfied that the Watcher wasn"t simply going to shoot him on the spot, he lowered a hand to the hilt of his sword. Slowly, an inch at a time, he drew the weapon. Then, even more slowly, he raised it to striking position. He was totally alert and ready to drop it if the Watcher showed any reaction at all.
In another minute or two the robot"s head began to swivel away from Blade. He let out all the breath he"d been holding and quickly thrust his sword back into the scabbard.
Instantly the Watcher hooted in alarm, and the head swung back toward him, eyes pulsing angrily. Blade froze, with the knowledge that he"d brought himself very close to being killed or stunned. How?
Again man and robot faced each other, and again the robot finally turned its head away. Blade"s arms flopped to his side almost of their own weight-and again the Watcher went on the alert. This time it raised all four of its arms and held them out toward Blade. Again Blade did his best to imitate a statue for several hour-long minutes. As he stood, his mind was working furiously.
What had alerted the Watcher? Sheathing his sword and dropping his arms to his sides. Both were movements. What else did they have in common? Another moment of furious thinking, then ....
He"d made both movements quickly. Everything else he"d done slowly. Could that be it? Could the Watcher be programmed to react to fast movements and ignore slow ones?
It made sense. The Watchers might be programmed to deal with primitive people, who would be frightened by them and run in panic, like Twana. More civilized people, like the Watchers" Masters, would not be frightened. They would not run.
At least it was worth an experiment.
Without waiting for the robot to turn its head away, Blade raised his arms above his head-slowly. Then he lowered them to his sides, even more slowly. The Watcher kept its eyes on him, but was silent. Blade drew his sword, held it over his head for a moment, then slowly sheathed it. By the time he was half done, the Watcher was turning its head away again.
Blade was almost tempted to leave well enough alone, but there was one more thing he felt he had to know. Even more slowly than before he drew his sword. He held it out in front of him and moved toward the Watcher one step at a time. It showed no more response to him than if he"d been ten miles away. He stepped up to it, raised the sword, and laid the edge against the metal body. Nothing happened-nothing at all.
Blade virtually held his breath as he slipped around the robot, sword still held ready to strike. If something did go wrong now, he was fairly sure he could drive the point into the robot"s head, taking out its eyes and weapons before it could strike him down.
At last he was past the Watcher and into a stretch of corridor with four doors opening off it, three on the right and one on the left. According to the map, the middle door on the right was Twana"s room.
A moment later the map was confirmed. With a shriek that mixed surprise, fear, and delight, Twana burst out of the room into the corridor. She was bare to the waist, and her hair was a tangled mess.
Behind Blade, the Watcher hooted sharply, and a shrill whine filled the corridor as its fan started up. Blade froze and shouted to Twana.
"Stop! Don"t move!"
The sheer volume of his voice caught Twana and held her. Behind Blade the whine and hooting of the approaching Watcher grew deafening. He forced himself to take one slow step at a time, as he moved out of the robot"s path. If his guess about its programming were correct ....
He"d guessed right. The Watcher was already slowing down by the time it pa.s.sed Blade. Its head was turned toward him, and the arms on one side swept within inches of his face. The Watcher glided slowly up to Twana, looped a tentacle gently over one bare shoulder, then cut off its fan, and settled to the floor with a thud. Twana"s eyes were enormous, but she was standing totally motionless. Blade could only hope she wouldn"t faint right in front of the Watcher.
She didn"t. She stood not even breathing deeply, until the Watcher drew back its tentacle. Then it glided off the way it had come, to take up its guard post again. Before Twana could faint, Blade scooped her up in his arms and carried her into her room, out of the Watcher"s sight. They fell down together on the bed, with Twana"s hands pulling at Blade"s hair and his lips on her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Somehow they found themselves naked, then locked together in a furious, exuberant joining that held more sheer relief than real desire.
At last they lay together on the bed, catching their breath. Twana raised her bead from Blade"s chest and drew back her hand from his cheek.
"Blade-what were you doing-out there, when you told me to stop? The Watcher could have killed us!"
Blade ran a hand lightly down her back. "You just demonstrated what I think is going to be our best way of getting out of here. I think the Watchers only attack people who are moving fast. You remember that when you stopped, the Watcher slowed down. When you let it touch you without trying to run, it lost interest in you. It didn"t think you were dangerous."
"Then-we can go back over the Wall?"
"Perhaps." He didn"t want to arouse hopes that might be disappointed, not when there was so much more he needed to find out here. "Certainly we know how to be safe from the Watchers as long as we are here. Meanwhile, we have food, we have water, we have comfortable places to sleep. Are you in such a hurry to leave?"
Twana giggled. "No, I will be happy to stay here for many days." Her lips moved down his body.
Chapter 10.
After the next day, Blade knew that he was absolutely right about the Watchers. As long as he moved no faster than a slow walk and made no other quick movements, they would ignore him as if he were no more than a buzzing insect. It would be slow and tedious exploring the whole land here behind the Wall at a snail"s pace. It would have been much worse to be trapped in his room by the Watchers until Lord Leighton"s computer drew him back to Home Dimension. As long as he moved slowly enough not to alert the Watchers, Blade could go anywhere he pleased. The other robots ignored him completely, no matter how he moved or what he did.
There were several kinds of unarmed work robots. There were the box-like ones that served the meals and did the cleaning. Blade called them Housemaids. There were the Mechanics-the cone-shaped ones he"d seen in the bathroom, who seemed to make all the major repairs. Finally, there were the Gardeners-Mechanics equipped with three extra-long telescoping arms that worked in the gardens spreading all around the building where Blade and Twana were staying.
The building itself was a perfect cube of the same blue-gray material as the Wall, two hundred feet on a side. From the roof Blade could get a tantalizing view of the land beyond the Wall.
The land rose gently upward for three miles toward the east, to the Wall itself. Most of the distance between the building and the Wall was heavily forested. The trees seemed to form a belt along the Wall, reaching as far as Blade could see. Around the building itself was a stretch of formal gardens, an intricate patchwork of hedges, flowerbeds, gravel paths, streams, and ornamental bridges. Miles away in either direction, Blade could see other cubical buildings, apparently identical to the one he was in.
Toward the west lay more gardens, less carefully tended. In places the gra.s.s of the lawns rose knee-high. In other places fallen trees drifted about in the ponds. Blade found only a handful of robots at work here, and those Gardeners were more battered and much slower in their movements than the work robots elsewhere.
So far away to the west that it was visible only from the top of the building lay what looked like a city. By straining his eyes at sunset, Blade could make out the dim silhouettes of high towers. Occasionally he would catch a flash of color, fleeting and mysterious like the flashes of the Watchers on the Wall.
This Dimension seemed to be piling one mystery on top of another, and being beyond the Wall only seemed to be making things worse. There were a hundred and one questions to answer, starting with: Where were the people? Blade could spend half an hour listing them.
One thing seemed reasonably certain. This was a land fast declining. There was an air of shabbiness, neglect, and decay about everything Blade could see. The work robots might be fighting a valiant rearguard action against the ravages of time and weather and plant life, but they were losing.
The best place to start looking for answers seemed to be that city to the west-if it were a city. If it weren"t, he could look elsewhere. The only alternative seemed to be wandering aimlessly about in endless miles of forest and garden and perhaps running into defenses that weren"t so easily fooled as the Watchers.
Now all that remained was to pick a time and a route for their escape. The Watchers seemed to ignore him no matter how much he was carrying, as long as he moved slowly. If they went on doing this, the escape should be easy.
The escape was even easier than Blade would have dared hope, thanks to the weather.
Whatever forces strengthened the Wall and raised the blindness field did nothing to fend off the weather. Blade awoke one night with a chill breeze blowing through the room from the small window that pierced the outer wall. Blade unwound himself from the sleeping Twana and went to the window. As he reached it, the darkness outside exploded in a raw, white glaze of lightning. Thunder cracked, making the whole building jump; then as the rumbling died away, Blade heard the swelling hiss of wind-driven rain. He sprang back into the room as the first cold drops whipped in through the window.
Twana sat up in the bed, drawing the blankets around her shoulders against the breeze. "Put your clothes on," said Blade. "We"re getting out of here. The storm will hide us and cover our tracks once we"re out of the building." Twana nodded without a word and leaped out of bed.
They pulled on their clothes and picked up their gear and weapons. Meanwhile, the storm outside was mounting steadily. Rain blew in through the window almost continuously, soaking the rug.
The Watcher that guarded the corridor was in its usual place, but getting past it was now routine, even for Twana. They filled their water bottles in the bathroom and continued downward. A last flight of stairs, and then a long ramp led them down to the high-vaulted entrance hall on the ground floor.
There were more robots in the hall than Blade had ever seen in one place, including a dozen Gardeners and five Watchers. He couldn"t be sure whether they were on the alert for emergency work on the building or just getting in out of the storm. All he could do was move very slowly, one cautious step at a time, and keep his hands at his sides.
As stiffly as if they"d been robots themselves, Blade and Twana made their way through the crowd toward the entrance. Once Blade had to quickly sidestep a Housemaid that was about to run into him. The nearest Watcher turned its head to look at him and raised one tentacle, but didn"t turn on its fan or sound the alarm. Blade stood still for a moment, the Watcher turned away, and he went on.
At last they reached the entrance. By now the wind was blowing a full gale, and the rain was. .h.i.tting like blasts from a shotgun. It was as black as the inside of a coal mine, and the wind and the thunder together made a roar that would have drowned out a full-scale battle. There"d never be a better chance to get beyond reach of the robots.
Blade found his feet itching a break into a run. He held back, as a Watcher came wobbling in out of the storm, making slow headway against the wind. With one pair of arms, it was towing a Gardener that had apparently been struck by some heavy falling object. Blade waited until the two robots joined the crowd. Then he took Twana"s hand and led her out into the storm.
Instantly the wind gripped them, and the rain lashed at them, driving them along like stampeding cattle. Even when they bent almost double, the pressure of the wind forced them to trot. They didn"t even try moving against the wind.
Several times savage gusts almost tore Twana"s hand out of Blade"s grip. After the fourth gust, Blade led her into the lee of some solid trees and pulled the rope out of his pack. He tied one end of it around Twana"s waist and the other around his own. Getting separated, disoriented, and totally lost in this howling darkness were real dangers.
As Blade finished tying the last knot, something fell almost at his feet with a crash like an artillery sh.e.l.l. It was a branch-or rather, the whole top of a tree, with half a dozen branches, each as long as a man and as thick as a man"s leg.
With this sort of debris blowing about, it didn"t matter how fast he and Twana moved. As long as the storm lasted, the Watchers would be seeing a hundred and one things moving fast enough to alert them. They"d hardly be able to track and examine each one of them. There simply weren"t enough Watchers.
A weakness? Yes, but not against the primitive opponents the Watchers were designed to meet. a.s.suming any primitive opponents got this far beyond the Wall, they wouldn"t be out and about tonight. They"d be cowering under cover where they could do no harm.
Richard Blade was not a primitive opponent, even for the most advanced technology.
He led Twana back out into the storm, and after that he let it blow them more or less where it would. It would be easier to make up lost ground when the storm died than try to fight it while it was blowing, and they had to get as far as they could before the robots realized they were gone.
So the storm blew them onward. It blew them across a bridge and nearly blew them into the stream under the bridge. They entered the trees again on the other side of the stream and pa.s.sed down a long, narrow path. The trees on either side looked like pines and stood eighty or a hundred feet tall, but they were bending like blades of gra.s.s in the storm. The path was already littered with fallen branches, and more were crashing down every minute.
They came out of the trees onto the sh.o.r.e of a small lake. It was only a few acres, but the storm was whipping up respectable waves. The water was churning ankle-deep over the stepping stones they used to cross the lake. Once Twana slipped and went to her knees in the water, but Blade pulled her to her feet and half-carried her the rest of the way across.
They moved on listening to the roar of the wind and the thunder, the crackle and crash of falling trees, the hammering beat of the rain, until they were half-deaf. They were thoroughly drenched, and Blade was beginning to wonder if he were losing his sense of direction. He kept on though-it would be safer to get completely lost than to arouse the suspicion of the robots.
How long he and Twana kept going it was impossible to guess. Blade only knew that it was still pitch dark and blowing a gale when Twana began to stumble and stagger. She shook her head and mouthed the words, "I can"t go on." Blade lifted her onto his back, with her arms clamped about his neck.
His own legs were beginning to ache and stiffen when they finally reached something that could serve as shelter. It was a small stone house, open on one side. Fortunately, the open side faced away from the storm, so the interior was reasonably dry. Blade carried Twana inside and set her down in a corner. He would have liked to make a fire, but there was nothing to burn, nothing to light it with, and too much risk of being spotted by the robots.
Inside, Blade and Twana stripped, wrapped themselves in their soggy blankets, and lay down to get as much sleep as they could. Exhaustion quickly sent them off to sleep, with the storm still howling in their ears.
In the morning the storm was still blowing as hard as ever, and Twana flatly refused to face it again. Blade began to wonder if he"d have done better to leave her in the building by the Wall and do his exploring on his own. Twana could cope with the robots, and they would probably protect her from any other danger until he returned.
However, he and Twana were both committed now, and something good might come of her joining him. The more she saw with her own eyes about what lay beyond the Wall, the more she could tell her own people, and the more likely they were to believe her. Blade was sure that knowing more about what lay beyond the Wall would help the villagers. If it did nothing else, it would ease their superst.i.tious fear of the Watchers.
By late afternoon the wind was no more than a stiff breeze, and the clouds were breaking up. Blade saw several Gardener robots pa.s.s the house, most of them carrying fallen branches in their claws. He and Twana headed straight west until darkness overtook them, seeing a good many more Gardeners, but only one Watcher. They pa.s.sed it slowly, and it ignored them as if they were only leaves blown on the wind. There didn"t seem to be any hunt on for them yet.
They slept that night on the driest patch of ground they could find, deep inside a pine grove. When morning came, Blade scrambled up to the top of the tallest tree he could find and took his bearings. They"d come far enough so that in the pale morning light he could make out hints of the distant city from this lower perch. It looked as if they still had a long walk ahead of them, so the sooner they got started, the better.
They had to walk all that day and most of the next. Every hour or so Blade climbed a tree to check direction. The city was always there, though for a long time it seemed to be getting no closer. At times during the first day, Blade almost suspected the city was a phantom, receding into the distance, as he and Twana advanced toward where they thought it was.
Toward evening he could see the sunset light flashing from dozens of ranked metal towers. The city was there. What surprised him was realizing its size. It must be a good ten of fifteen miles wide, and many of those towers had to be at least a mile high. Blade was tempted to push on through the darkness but decided against it. What lay around him was no longer any sort of garden, but rank wilderness that might hold all sorts of surprises.
This area might have been a garden once. Twice Blade saw heavily overgrown patches of tumbled stone, once the remains of a bridge. But here the neglect that was overtaking the land closer to the Wall had gone totally unchecked for many years. Even the robots seemed to shun this land. Blade hadn"t seen one all afternoon.
They pushed on at dawn the next day. For the first few hours they faced a tangle of vegetation that would have done justice to a tropical jungle. Blade would gladly have traded one of their swords for a machete.
Then abruptly they came out into open country, rolling away toward the city that was now clearly visible from the ground for the first time. Somehow, in spite of its size and the hundred or more shimmering towers, the city looked sterile and asleep, even dead. It seemed to radiate a vast, overpowering silence that spread across the country and swallowed up even the sigh of the wind and the crunch of Blade"s and Twana"s footsteps through the brittle gra.s.s.
Blade wondered for a moment if he"d taken off on a wild-goose chase after a dead city. Still, there was no point in calling the city a corpse until he"d at least tried to take its pulse! He lengthened his stride.
They covered the last miles to the city in a couple of hours. As they drew closer, Blade saw the city had its own wall. It was the same height as the Wall outside, but this one was studded with featureless cylindrical towers about every hundred yards. Towers and wall both seemed to be made of something that looked like frosted, white gla.s.s. There was no shimmering in the air over his wall and no glint of metal from prowling Watchers. This wall looked as dead as the city behind it.
The wall stood unbroken as far as Blade could see, but once more the storm had been his friend. A good many trees grew along the wall, and one of them had fallen against it. Branches large enough to support a man jutted almost up to the top of the wall. Blade and Twana headed toward the tree.
Blade dropped his pack and other gear and scrambled up the tree. Some of the branches sagged under his weight, but all of them held. In a few minutes he crawled out onto the top of the city wall. On hands and knees he crept toward the inner side of the wall, half-expecting to stick his head into yet another weird energy field.
Instead, he found himself staring down at the ground. The city wall was barely ten feet thick. At the foot of the wall was a belt of what looked like faded green concrete. Beyond it was another stretch of ragged garden. Two miles away the buildings of the city began, mounting up like a mountain range, from five-story foothills to the crowning peaks of the mile-high towers. Nothing moved except the gra.s.s, where it was long enough to ripple in the wind.
Blade sighed. It looked as if he had come all this way to reach a dead city.
He crawled back across the wall, threw one end of the rope down, and saw Twana tie his gear and weapons to it. He pulled them up, put on his sword belt, then threw the rope down again. A moment later Twana was standing beside him.
In the moment after that, the city came horribly alive. The nearest tower, fifty yards away, sprouted lean, red-clad figures with gleaming blue rifles in their hands. "Get down!" Blade shouted, grabbing Twana"s belt as he dropped flat.
He was seconds too slow. One of the figures raised his rifle, sighted, and fired. Air crackled and blurred, and a halo of white danced around Twana"s head. She gave a choked cry and threw her arms out wildly to keep her balance. She took a drunken, reeling step; then one flailing foot came down on the empty air inside the wall. She vanished with a scream that ended in a crunch as she struck the ground fifty feet below.
Then there was silence-except for the sharp hiss of Blade"s indrawn breath as he stood up and the softer hiss of steel as he drew his sword.
Chapter 11.
Blade had enough self-control left not to charge or even shout. He stood where he was, staring at the cl.u.s.ter of red figures on the tower. He stared as if the intensity of his stare could draw them down from their perch and into range of his sword.
A part of his mind told him that he shouldn"t do this, that he was endangering himself and his chances of peaceful relations with the people of this city. It was only a small part of his mind that said this, and the rage in Blade made him totally deaf to it. He didn"t care about the danger to himself, not if he could take a few of those red-suited sharpshooters with him. As for peaceful relations-as far as he could see, these people couldn"t have cared less about that. If they were going to be this trigger-happy ....