It must be well into the early morning hours, Blake thought. He now might have only a short time left before someone appeared to open the shop below—before workers were in the laboratory. He must get free!
He discovered a second door into the hall from the bedroom, but it resisted his efforts. The third room proved to be a kitchen. The sight of the appliances there, strange as they were, triggered his hunger. For a moment he wondered about a search for food, but common sense warned against that.
There was only one possible exit—a window. Breaking two finger nails he managed to loosen the panel which closed it. Still between him and freedom was a clear surface. Glass? No. Under his touch it bulged. He labored to force the second barrier, then he breathed air tainted with the usual city smells and some exotic new ones.
Blake's luck continued to hold. Some five feet below a ledge ran along forming a stepping stone to the offset roof of a first story projection. If he could worm through the window. . . .
It was a tight fit and he had to shed his jacket before he could make it. Then he stood shivering on the ledge before jumping to the offset. The bluish street lamps were far away but he could see a little. Here were none of the towering skyscrapers he knew in his own city. Few of the buildings were more than four or five stories high.
He looked down into a pocket of dark which was either a court or a backyard. Once there he might be locked out of the building and be even farther from the carrier.
As he hesitated, Blake saw two orange-red globes move majestically through the night sky, swinging in a circle above the city. Aircraft of some type? He turned to follow their flight and saw another light flash up in the building he had just left.
At the far end a window was a bright square in the dark. In fact it was so bright that Blake believed it must be open. If he could get in. . . .
He pulled himself up on the ledge once more, advancing toward that gleam. Had Lefty managed to get into another room? Then he could help Blake in; and this time he would be told the truth so that they could retreat to the carrier.
But innate caution made his approach to that light a stealthy one. And after he glanced inside, Blake stiffened.
Lefty was there all right. But an altered Lefty, a Lefty at perfect ease in his surroundings, a Lefty who bore only a very superficial resemblance to the frightened crook who had shared Blake's escape from the underground room.
The nervousness, the stare, the twitch of the lips no longer contorted the thin face which was now set in lines of calm force. The untidy hair was slicked smoothly back from a high forehead and there was an odd smile pulling the slack lips into firmness. He lounged in one of the barrel chairs and between his fingers he rolled a brownish cigarette. Lefty waiting—for what? Lefty at home? Here?
Only—the right answer shook Blake—this was not Lefty, not the frightened creature to whom he had felt so superior these past hours. He had been assured that only Pranj knew of the level worlds. Which meant, though the weedy little man in there bore little likeness to the image he had been shown, this was Pranj! A Pranj so able to fit himself with a new character that no suspicion of disguise had troubled Blake.
Then—they had not landed in this world by chance. This was a level Pranj already knew, a world in which he had contacts and a base of operation, a world in which he could dispose of Blake at his leisure, after getting out of him all that he knew. And now the outlaw would believe that his victim was safely waiting his pleasure.
Blake's hands balled into fists. He might not be a match for the psi powered criminal now. But let him reach the carrier—if he could, before the other realized that he was no longer locked in that suite.
A sound from the street sent Blake a step or two farther along the ledge to investigate. There was an egg-shaped vehicle drawing to a stop. From a hatch in its top three men stepped to the pavement and entered a door. Blake hurried back to the window.
On the wall before Pranj, one of the vision plates lit up with a message. He arose to press a button in the frame under the disc. And a minute or so later the three men entered.
Blake studied them. They were all tall and their dress accented the fine muscular development of their bodies: tight breeches with soft boots laced to the knees, jerkin-jackets buckled from throat to belt. Two of them glittered with embroidery of gold and silver, and their buckles and belts were gemmed, as were the guards and hilts of the knives they wore. The third man, who had a short shoulder cape of bright scarlet, remained by the door, his attitude that of a servant.
They were all dark skinned and their hair had been shaved to two narrow strips running from forehead to nape, leaving wide bare spaces above the ears. There was an arrogance about the two who seated themselves without invitation, the assurance of those whose will had never been disputed from birth. If these were members of some native nobility, it was a virile and dominant caste.
Since they were settling themselves as if for a conference, there was no indication that Pranj would be troubled about Blake for a time. Now he should move.
But he would gain nothing by returning to the locked suite; this left the street door through which the visitors had entered. Blake dropped to the offset, sped across it. The street looked deserted; in any event this was his only chance.
He landed with a jar, which brought a grunt out of him. It was to be hoped that the three had been the only passengers in the queerly shaped car. No one hailed him as he sprinted to the door.
It was closed but under his push it began to glide into the wall. Hardly daring to believe in his luck he entered, and not too soon for it snapped shut, catching a fold of his jacket. He tore savagely at the garment with no result; it was wedged fast. For the second time he had to slip it off, but this time it remained behind, a tell-tale sign of his passing.
That clue would shorten his time of grace. Blake sped to the foot of the ascending stairs and listened. There was no sound from above. So encouraged, he hurried down the other flight. The laboratory was just as they had left it, the carrier in its center. Blake remembered that he lacked a weapon. If he were to return to his own time and the care of Scappa, he wanted one.
Swiftly he made the rounds of the tables. Something which could double as a club if he could find nothing better. He was reaching for a small hammer when he saw another object, a dagger similar to those worn by the native noble men. The ten inch blade was razor sharp, the needle point a threat. He thrust it into his belt, but before he left he selected another piece of loot, a smaller edition of one of the demon-headed jars, which he crammed into the front of his flannel shirt with the vague idea of using it to identify this base of Pranj's if and when he ever caught up with the agents again.
Blake scrambled up on the carrier and reached for the control. In this light he was able to see as well as feel a series of small notches along the bar. Using his thumb as a measure he was able to assure himself that its position when they landed here had been at the last of those nicks. Another must stand for the world from which Pranj had originally fled—that of the agents. To get there might be a good idea. The inhabitants of that level would require no explanations and they would be in sympathy with his quest. He need only report to the agents there. He counted the notches again: five—six—Would it be the top one, since this was the last?
A shout carried through the building, jerking him around. He pulled the lever—first notch it would be. But the control did not yield to his tug. He twisted it; and there was the pound of feet on the stair. A second cry with a note of triumph in it. They must have found his jacket!
Blake worked feverishly at the rod and then threw himself down to examine the shaft from which it projected. There was a catch there! And it held stubbornly.
A clatter of feet on the stair. Blake pried at the catch with the point of the dagger and someway touched a spring. It gave, and with both hands on the control, he looked up. They were strung out along the stair: the red cloaked men in the lead and Pranj in the back as if he were a commander who led his armies from headquarters well to the rear. But of them all, Blake was most conscious of the fury on the changed face of "Lefty."
The red cloaked man raised a tube, sighting along it as if he were aiming a rifle. Blake had no time to pick or choose. He simply thrust the control forward, but in that second a numbing blow struck his shoulder and his left arm dropped useless to his side.
Once again the humming, the rise of the green globe of light to encase the carrier. There was Pranj and the others, the three natives open-mouthed with astonishment, Pranj displaying the cold and deadly anger of one who has underestimated an opponent and so lost an important move. Was he exiling Pranj in this world? Blake speculated with a soaring sense of triumph.
Then the laboratory was gone and the stomach- and nerve- wracking journey through the light and dark began. Blake lay flat, his head pillowed on his good arm, his deadened left one along his body, content to rest and leave his escape to the machine he did not understand.
Lights. Dark. Lights. Blue fog. Lights. Dark. The carrier no longer quivered under him. His voyage was ended, and he was in darkness. But with that, exhaustion conquered and Blake slept.
He awoke cold—cold and stiff. His eyes opened and he did not understand. There was a pallid light, a splotch of weak sunlight spotting his hand. Sun!
Stiffly, every muscle protesting, Blake raised himself on his right elbow. Moving his left shoulder sent a thrust of burning agony down his back and breast, tearing a little cry from his raw lips. And, when his head cleared, he stared about him in horror. He had thought himself free!
But this was not the underground room he had left sometime the night before. (Was it only yesterday?) Time no longer had much meaning. He hunched together, supporting his left arm across his knees, gazing dully at what encircled him.
Walls of stone, rough hewn in misshapen blocks, but fitted together with an engineer's precision which left no cracks, spiralled dizzily upward. The carrier rested in the bottom of a dry well was his first confused thought.
But about six feet above there was a break in that wall through which the sun shown, promising a way out. Blake, a little light-headed, got to his feet. The carrier was not steady under him, rocking a little when he moved. It rested on a mass of blackened stuff, from which protruded the jagged and charred end of a beam. And now he noted that the walls about him bore traces of an old fire, fire which must have eaten out the heart of the structure—perhaps in the far distant past, because when he ventured to kick at the beam it powdered away to dust.
This was certainly not Scappa's cellar; nor was it, he was quite sure, the world from which Pranj had fled. Unless the outlaw had chosen to operate out of a ruin far from the main settlements of his race.
Moved by that thin hope, Blake paced about the circumference of the wall. His feet sank almost ankle deep in the charred debris, but, as far as he could see, there was no opening in the stone surface at this level. Any entrance must have been made from above. He eyed the break; it was surely wide enough to provide an exit. Whether he could make it with the use of only one hand was another matter.
Blake sat down once more on the carrier. His hunger was now a gnawing ache in his middle; he ran a dry tongue over dryer lips. He wanted food and water. Should he trust again to the blind chance of the carrier, hoping to land either in his own level, or that of the agents, or should he explore further here?
If Pranj had established bases along the line the carrier was geared to, he might find trouble awaiting him anywhere he dared to stop. And he remembered the agents' warnings concerning level worlds where even their trained investigators dared not venture—the radioactive worlds, and those where humanity had taken other and more desperate roads for survival.
It was quiet here and the ruins suggested that this might be a deserted and relatively peaceful pausing place. He could rest, collect his wits and do a little planning. But first—food—warmth—he shivered as a breeze licked down at him through the shattered wall.
Blake went to the wall. Somehow he made that climb, hitching his way up and over. But a weary time later, shaking with weakness, he stood on the ground looking dazedly around.
There was pavement under his feet, uncovered in places where the wind had scoured away the snow, which in other spots drifted about the bases of towers, the boles of stunted and wind carven trees, now barren of leaf. But that pavement was not any civilized street—instead it was a circle of flagstones with withered clumps of grass and winter-dried brown weeds pulling block apart from block. It was plain that no one had walked this way for a long time.
Blake went down on one knee, scooped up a handful of snow and licked it from numbed fingers. But his eyes swept from one tower to the next, from trees to wall of brush. No tracks of either man or animal patterned the snow. Except for the whistle of the wind playing hollowly across the broken towers there was no sound.
Painfully he dragged clumps of the withered grass free from the frozen soil, and then went farther afield for fallen branches, half rotten sticks. He would have to have a fire—warmth. There was a book of matches in his pocket—he held a tiny flame to the withered grass twist. It seemed, Blake decided with a wry grin, that he was not altogether helpless in his Robinson Crusoe guise.
The blaze caught; the flames were warm on his half frozen body and blue hands. Blake became aware that some measure of feeling was returning to his left arm as the heat of the fire struck in. But whenever he tried to move it, pain streaked out from the point on his shoulder. He could see no blood, no sign of a bullet.
Clumsily he unfastened his upper shirt, the clothing underneath, trying to find the wound. Just below his collar bone was an angry red patch which resembled a burn. Well, there was nothing he could do about it now.
Instead, as he rebuttoned his clothing, he gave his surroundings a second and more intent study. The ruined towers, he could count at least ten within easy sighting, did not appear to be arranged in any consistent pattern of streets or a city such as he could recognize. And there were no other buildings except the tower form to be seen. Towers, which could only be entered from above, which did not even possess slitted windows. That suggested defense—a needed defense of the most serious kind. And yet that tower from which he had just climbed had been stormed, stormed and burned.
A people who had been so hard pressed by some enemy that they had lived in a constant state of siege—a people who must in the end have fallen victim to that same enemy a long time ago.
But the enemy? Had the invaders, or besiegers, having won their victory withdrawn, content with the total destruction of the conquered? He could see nothing to suggest that there had been any attempt to rebuild from the tower ruins.
Blake licked more snow from his hand. Something to eat. This place had gone back to the wild. Rabbits, birds, were everywhere. He had never hunted, and how efficient he would be with only one usable hand he dared not guess. But he had fire and a knife. And if man had long vanished from this place not only should there be small animals prowling among the ruins, but they should also be unafraid and so the easier to bring down. He kicked at the frozen rubble and chose some stones which fitted into his hand. When a man knew how to pitch a baseball, he ought to be able to aim at a rabbit.
He fed the fire with a couple of large chunks likely to last for a while and plotted a path toward a more distant tower whose crown was broken into two parts rather like a pair of teeth gnawing at the morning sky. With that as his goal, and a keen eye for the spoor of game, Blake started off.
The weird sighing of the wind was disconcerting. Sometimes it raised to a scream as it forced across the empty throats of the towers and through gaps from which stones had fallen. Twice Blake sprang for cover, sure that the sound he had heard had come from some human throat. But he saw nothing.
He was heartened by the unmistakable tracks of a pigeon in snow, and then, at the foot of another tower, the paw mark of some small animal he was not woodsman enough to identify. But at that moment any animal meant only meat and he followed the trail.
It led straight to another tower where a large portion of the wall had collapsed. He caught a stale whiff which spelled den. But that did not interest him as much as something else.
Inside there had been another and more recent fall of masonry. And it had broken open an ancient storage place. Blake was deafened by the whirr of wings as pigeons and other birds beat out at his coming. Piles of grain had trickled from the stone coffer, offering such bait as he did not count on existing. He was sure the birds would return. Scooping up a fistful of the stuff, he chewed it as he flattened back into the protection of the remaining wall to wait.
He was right; the pigeons returned first, greedy for the treasure. Blake knotted small stones into the opposite corners of his handkerchief. There was a plump white bird right along a line of scattered grain. . . .
An hour later Blake made a rude toilet in the snow. Meat without salt, even when toasted to take the rawness out, was not the most appetizing dish in the world. And the dusty, gummy taste of the grain he had chewed still clung to his tongue. But he was no longer hungry. Not only that, but deep inside him he had a new satisfaction. He had been moved about by the agents in the game against Pranj. And in turn he had been fooled by the outlaw.
But he had escaped from Pranj. And here, without tools or any real knowledge, he had managed to achieve food and warmth. No thanks to anyone but himself. Some measure of confidence had returned to him.
What had finished off this city? War certainly. But what kind of war? Who had fought whom? Had the tower people been of his own kind—overwhelmed in their refuge by savages who had no wish to follow up their advantage? Had this been the last stronghold of civilization on this world?
Curiosity tugged at Blake. He wanted to explore—to learn. He reached mechanically for more wood and then paused. Why build up the fire? He ought to return to the carrier to try it again. . . .
He stiffened, so startled he did not remember the dagger in his belt. Above, the wind screeched in rising fury. But Blake heard nothing, saw nothing but the thing which had crept up through the brush, its eyes reflecting the light of the flames.