Liberator Of Jedd Part 3

Blade made a slow motion of conciliation with his hand. He smiled. He kept talking all the while, a jumble of softly intoned nonsense words. After a moment of this he reached into the pouch and brought out a hunk of the raw meat. Ogar's nostrils quivered. Saliva dripped from the corners of his mouth.

Blade held the meat on high and waited. Ogar watched the piece of meat in Blade's hand. Blade kept talking, lulling, soothing, coaxing. And watching.

Suddenly Ogar held out a hand. He ceased to snarl. From his throat came a sound that was, quite possibly, a fully formed word. To Blade it sounded like, "Owww-nowwah." Ogar repeated the sound, "Owwwnowwah."

There was no mistaking the entreaty. Ogar was asking for the meat.

Blade smiled and nodded and tossed the meat through the air. Ogar caught it deftly, smelled it, growled and slouched to the pile of f.a.ggots. He selected a stick, the sharpest of the lot, and thrust it into the meat. He took it to the fire and poked it into the flames.

Blade, now as fascinated as Lord L, did not move. He crooned a soft little song in his throat.

Ogar was careful to keep the fire between himself and Blade. He left the meat in the fire barely long enough to sear it, then wolfed it down in two bites, tearing and rending the charred flesh. His little eyes never left Blade.

Blade tossed him another piece of meat. The process was repeated. This time Ogar made three bites of it, rubbed his belly and said something like, "Gooo-nah, nah, "

Blade nodded and smiled and said, "Gooo-nah , nah, "

Ogar looked puzzled. He c.o.c.ked his head to one side, stared at Blade in a different manner, shook his head in some mysterious negation, scratched his chest hair vigorously, found something alive and popped it into his mouth. Then he settled on all fours by the fire and stared at Blade again.

Blade kept talking. And smiling. Ogar kept staring and scratching. From outside the cave came a sudden terrible roaring. Ogar stared past Blade at the cave entrance. He clutched himself and rocked back and forth making whimpering sounds. Ogar was terrified of what was out there in the night. For the moment he appeared to have forgotten Blade, who was remembering what Lord L had said about Ogar's attention span.

"Probably not long," the old man had said. "Very likely that of a three- or four-year-old child."

Blade went into the next part of his act. He walked to the cave entrance. He shook his fist. He let out his very best bellow of defiance. It was a fine effort and he was rather proud of it. Let the current Tarzan match that!

When he glanced at Ogar again he was clapping his hairy, long-knuckled hands softly together and, Blade would have sworn, smiling, even laughing. The big mouth opened, fangs flashed, and there emerged a sound that was half hyena and half jacka.s.s.

"Arrhhh-ahh-ahhhhh-ahhhh-ahhh, "

Ogar was applauding.

Blade kept up the patter. "That's a good chap," he said sweetly. "A fine chap you are, too. I am glad to see that we are going to get along. We will, you know. We're going to be friends, Ogar, real bosom pals. And do you know, Ogar, you remind me of one of my old profs at Oxford. Professor Abernathy, I think. Yes, it was he. You are alike as two peas, you and the prof. Taught the cla.s.sics, he did, and failed me once. Said I didn't know how to study properly. May have had something there, you know. Anyway I had to do the b.l.o.o.d.y course twice over."

Ogar was not listening. He was picking at his body hair again, searching for dessert.

Blade moved slowly toward the club. It lay about ten feet from where he stood. Ogar came instantly alert. He watched and the snarl began to build in his throat. Blade kept moving slowly toward the club.

"Nothing to be afraid of, old fellow. No need for alarm. I'm your friend, remember? I just want to prove it. You watch now, Ogar. You watch me very carefully."

Ogar was doing just that. As Blade stooped to pick up the club, Ogar growled and thumped his chest. Blade turned to show the club, to show that his intentions were pure, but Ogar was gone from the fire. He was back in his corner, terrified and bl.u.s.tering, snarling and raging and leaping up and down as he pounded his chest. Pure bluff, as Blade now understood. It would take a lot to make Ogar attack him now. Ogar was no fool. Blade had the club and Blade was the larger and stronger of the two. That sort of thing Ogar could understand. There should be no trouble now unless Blade did the attacking.

Blade did not forsake caution. He moved slowly, deliberately, smiling and talking all the time. He broke the club over his knee and tossed it into the fire. Ogar stopped snarling to stare.

Blade ignored him. He went to sit cross-legged by the fire. He took a chunk of meat from the pouch, found the same stick Ogar had dropped and poked the meat into the fire. Juice dripped. The smell filled the cave. Outside the horrendous noises continued.

Blade did, in fact, like his steaks on the red side. After letting it cool for a moment, he sank his strong white teeth into the meat and enjoyed it. He had not known he was so hungry. From a corner of his eye he watched Ogar.

Ogar was drooling again. He made word sounds and began to creep slowly toward the fire. Blade ignored him and went on eating. When the body smell told him that Ogar was close he looked up, smiled, reached into his pouch for a piece of meat and extended it across the fire. This time Ogar must take it from his hand.

Ogar was dubious. He stared at Blade and said, "Ruuurr, uuu, gruuuuu-unah, unah, "

Blade laughed and waved the meat back and forth. "That is exactly what I told the boys at the club, Ogar, but they wouldn't believe me. I am happy to see that you think as I do. As a matter of fact, old man, I seriously intend to propose you for members.h.i.+p. You are precisely what St James Square needs. Liven matters up a bit, you know."

Ogar reached out a hand, then s.n.a.t.c.hed it back. Blade continued to dangle the meat enticingly. Ogar drooled and put out his hand again. Slowly it approached Blade's. Again Ogar hesitated. Then in one swift motion he s.n.a.t.c.hed the meat from Blade's hand. For an instant their fingers touched. Blade experienced an odd shock, a tingling of energy, as though he had touched a cool and vibrant snake.

Ogar had forgotten him again. He found a new stick and seared his meat and gobbled it. He wiped his mouth on his hand and his hand in his body hair. Once again he began to search his body for such small edibles as might be present.

Blade watched all this. Lord Leighton, he thought, would be in paroxysms of delight. He was getting all this on tape and camera, getting it for posterity and the insurance of his own fame. As if that was necessary.

Blade thought of J's plan and his smile was grim. There would be one h.e.l.l of a battle. Lord L was not a man to surrender a prize like Ogar without a death struggle.

Ogar chose that moment to defecate, literally in his tracks. He had been squatting by the fire, Blade apparently forgotten, and now he crouched and grunted and let fly. It was a spattering mess and the odor was horrible. Worse than Ogar's own.

When he had finished Ogar moved slightly and returned to his search for lice. The smell lingered. Blade made a face.

"Not so much on the toilet training, are you, old boy? Never heard of paper, for instance? Too bad. I'm afraid I shall have to think twice about having you up for the club after all. Wouldn't do just to let go in the bar, you know. Bad form. Terribly bad form."

Ogar, blissfully unaware of his social solecism, grunted and began to scratch his genitals with both hands. He gave Blade a toothy smile. Or so it seemed.

It was time to go. Blade got up and moved away from the fire. Ogar watched him. Blade smiled and patted his chest and, folding his hands alongside his head, yawned. Ogar blinked.

The animal noises continued from outside. Lord L was repeating the tapes now. Ogar did not move from the fire. To him it was dark out there and the only safety was in the cave by the fire. He watched Blade move toward the entrance.

Blade halted at the cave entrance and looked back. Ogar was on his feet. New sounds came from his throat He extended a hand to Blade. Slowly Blade went back to the fire.

"Ahh nah guuu, nah, nah, gah guuuu nah guhh."

"I agree with you," said Blade, "but I really must say goodnight now. Goodnight, Ogar."

"Nah guh."

Ogar fell to his knees. He stared up at Blade for a moment, moving his hands back and forth. Then he laid his face against Blade's feet and made guttural sounds of obeisance. Blade smiled down and touched the hairy shoulder lightly. Ogar flinched and quivered but did not leap away. Blade gave him the last chunk of meat.

G.o.dhood had just been conferred on him.

Chapter Six.

During the next few days Blade lived almost continually with Ogar. He swiftly mastered the various rudimentary sounds that served Ogar for language and these, coupled with sign language, and here Ogar was very fast on the uptake, allowed them to converse after a fas.h.i.+on. Ogar was completely awed and subservient. Blade was the G.o.d who brought the meat.

Ogar did not appear to think it strange that it was always dark outside the cave and that the terrible night noises never ceased. This temporal discontinuity especially impressed Lord Leighton.

"No sense of time," his Lords.h.i.+p noted in his ledgers. "It follows that at his stage of development he does not foresee death for himself, does not understand it in other things. Death is a mystery to him, the more so because of his complete unawareness."

Then J, after a series of talks with the Prime Minister, sprang his surprise. Lord L was caught off guard.

J joined the issue over dinner one night, after leading the unwary old man into a cunning trap. Blade, over a steak nearly as raw as those he shared with Ogar, kept out of it as a good subordinate should.

J said: "The computer is repaired, then? We can send Richard into Dimension X any time we choose?"

Lord L, busy with his notes and barely pecking at his food, nodded vaguely. "Yes. I suppose so. But don't trouble me with that now, J. That can wait. At the moment Ogar is much more important than Dimension X."

J finished chewing and swallowed. Then, "Bear with me, Leighton. Now, can you achieve the same setting on the computer that you had when it backfired and Ogar came to us?"

His Lords.h.i.+p began to sense trouble. He put down his notes and glowered at J. "I suppose I can. What of it? What are you getting at, J?"

Blade stared down at his plate. He knew what J was getting at. He waited for the explosion.

It came. J socked it to the old man. "The Prime Minister wants Blade to go out at once. As soon as possible. Ogar is to go with him. Both of them through the computer and back to Ogar's dimension. I am sure that you will see the advantages of this, d.i.c.k will have a friend, a guide. For once he will not be going in cold. I, "

Lord Leighton's leonine eyes glittered down the table at J. "I see that you have been going behind my back. You have been conspiring against me, running to the PM with tales. I must say I am surprised, J. I expected better of you. But you've wasted your time. I am in command of this project. I and I alone. I will say when Blade goes into Dimension X, and that will be when I am ready, not before. And most certainly Ogar will not go with him. Lose Ogar now? Send him back to his own dimension? You must be out of your mind, J!"

J shook his head, in regret more than anger. "You're wrong, you know. On all counts. The Prime Minister runs the show. He holds the purse. Face reality, my dear Leighton. The Prime Minister wants results. Now. Practical results. Something to show the Committee on Secret Funds. Ogar's dimension is the answer, you yourself say that it must be very like our own was half a million years ago. Think, Leighton! Think of all that vast treasure. Untouched. Unspoiled. Oil, gold, coal, uranium, bauxite, copper, the list is endless. Diamonds lying around on the surface. And a laboratory, Leighton! A living, breathing, existing laboratory for Blade to study and report on. Against all that, Leighton, Ogar is of very little significance."

Lord L sat very still. He picked up his teacup, stared at it for a moment, then hurled it across the room to smash on a wall. "Of little significance, J? Ogar of little significance?"

The storm broke. Blade sat in silence and admiration. He had long known, and appreciated, the old man's command of billingsgate, but now his Lords.h.i.+p surpa.s.sed himself. He cursed J and the Prime Minister for five minutes and did not repeat himself once. J, like a clever old tree, bowed to the wind and was not broken. He gave Blade a saturnine smile, winked, and listened unperturbed to comments on his ancestry.

In the end Lord L went stomping off to see the Prime Minister. Hours later he returned, bitter and somewhat chastened, but unforgiving. J had won. Blade, and Ogar, were to go out first thing in the morning.

J had been sure of the outcome. After Lord L limped out, pale with rage and near to frothing, J said: "The boffins in Scotland are very near to a breakthrough on teleportation. A year. Two at the most. That means we will be able to achieve large-scale transport from X to Home Dimension. It bears very heavily with the PM. And with me, for that matter. I used it as a fulcrum to move him to my way of thinking."

He gazed fondly at Blade. "And it will be a great help, d.i.c.k. For once you won't be going into Dimension X as a total stranger. Ogar should be of immense value back in his own world."

Blade nodded slowly. The plan did have its advantages. What the disadvantages were, if any, he would have to wait and see.

"We'll have to drug Ogar tonight, then," J continued. "A light dosage. Enough to get him to the computer and through it before he wakes up. It's the only way."

So that night Ogar was treated to an especially delectable hunk of raw meat, saturated with a powerful sleeping potion. Ogar wolfed it down, rubbed his hairy belly, gibbered at Blade in appreciation, and soon dropped off into a deep slumber.

As dawn was breaking over London, Blade carried Ogar up the stairs, into the elevator and finally to the tiny room nestled in the penetralia of the gigantic computer. Lord L, who was not speaking to either of them, this time allowed J to enter the sanctum, something he had never permitted before. It was, J thought, an obverse gesture of contempt for all stupid and pragmatic minds. Lord L had not been persuaded by J's argument that if they could get Blade back from Dimension X they could also recover Ogar.

"It doesn't work that way," Leighton said tartly. "Blade's brain has been conditioned. Ogar's has not. It was sheer lucky chance that we got Ogar in the first place. No. Ogar will never come back."

His Lords.h.i.+p wasted no time. He set about his task as grimly as any executioner. He had devised a technique in half an hour, when he knew he must, and now he bound Blade and Ogar in a reticulation of wires and electrodes that practically made them one. Blade, sitting in the chair with Ogar clasped in his arms while J looked on uneasily, noticed an odd fact: he was hardly aware of Ogar's smell.

They were ready. Lord Leighton stepped to his instrument board and made a complicated series of adjustments. He had not spoken since they entered the compartment.

J cleared his throat. He was actually seeing it for the first time and he felt a renewed sense of the terror he had experienced in Reading. Sweat trickled down him and his knees felt quavery and there was an enormous painful lump in his stomach. Fear for Blade, and even for Ogar, lanced him. They were all mad, he told himself. Mad. And no help for it. None at all. Too late. Lord L, without warning, was pressing the red b.u.t.ton.

A steady pillar of white flame began to build inside Blade. He was being scooped out, burnt hollow, eviscerated. His eyes left his skull and became separate ent.i.ties attached to his body by long stalks. The ceiling slid down at him, about to crush him, then a rift appeared and he went soaring up and through the rift into blackness.

Not for long, the blackness. Blade went swirling through it on a long curving vector, the force and velocity of which were so complex that Blade, as he riddled the answer in neon chalk on a celestial blackboard, marveled at his own ac.u.men.

The equation slipped away, torn from his bleeding brain by a mauve wind that blew between the spheres. Blade did a wingover, adjusted the fleshy rudder on his coccyx and became aware of a rude knocking on the tiny door in his belly.

A hairy little doll with a macrohead was demanding to be let in. A horrible stench sifted into the corridors of Blade's nostrils and drifted through him like decayed smoke.

Knock-knock-knock, the stinking little mannequin was demanding to be admitted into Blade's guts. Why not? Plenty of room. Was he not disemboweled? He reached down and opened the door of his belly and watched the small figure disappear within.

Immediately the pain began. Pain made more dreadful because Blade could not scream. His lungs were full of fetid smoke.

The universe screamed for him. One cosmic shriek of agony. The pain went on and on.

He was falling now, dropping into the midst of a b.l.o.o.d.y sun. Red incandescence licked at him. He was consumed. Ashes, ashes, Nothing, nothing,

Chapter Seven.

Blade, after four trips through the computer, had learned his lesson well, lie still. If you were fortunate enough to be under cover, stay there. Look and listen. Begin the adaptation to a hostile environment.

He was lying naked on marshy land, a sort of tundra that moved and quaked beneath his weight. But not so barren as tundra. Quite the opposite, in fact, for he lay in coa.r.s.e gra.s.s that grew close-s.p.a.ced and towered over him. This strange gra.s.s was a reddish-brown in color and the blades half a foot across; by looking straight up he could see the tops, some thirty feet high, and beyond them a fast darkening sky.

There was violent movement somewhere out in that sea of gra.s.s and great trumpeting sounds of combat, a violent thres.h.i.+ng about, a final roaring and a death screech. Then the sound, unmistakable, of enormous cruel jaws and teeth devouring something. Blade huddled in his gra.s.sy niche, unmoving. The noises were very like those played on Lord L's tapes.

Ogar! Where was Ogar?

Blade's altered brain began to function at full capacity. Already, like the chameleon J had compared him to, Blade was beginning to adapt to this new Dimension X. But where was Ogar? Strange that they had been separated, but then you never knew what the computer would do. He rose cautiously and peered about. Suppose Ogar had gone to another Dimension X? Or that this dimension in which Blade now found himself was not that from which Ogar had come. In that case Ogar was not likely to be much of a help. More a liability.

It was growing darker. All about him, in the giant swamp gra.s.s, the feral sounds continued. It was feeding time. Life or death time. To Blade's left something vast went cras.h.i.+ng and staggering through the gra.s.s. To his right a sound of slithering and a long, drawn-out hissing. Blade realized that unless he found some sort of shelter, some protection, he would not last through the night.

Where in h.e.l.l was Ogar?

Blade was taken by surprise. The gra.s.s parted and Ogar rushed at him. He had found a stout stick somewhere and he aimed a terrible blow at Blade's head, his fangs flas.h.i.+ng as he snarled deep in his throat. Blade had found Ogar. But G.o.dhood was dead. Ogar did not remember him.

Blade took the blow on his forearm. It hurt and numbed the arm, but the bone did not go. Blade caught the stick and wrenched it away from Ogar. Ogar snapped at Blade's throat with his long teeth. Blade hit him squarely between the eyes with his fist, a terrible blow that would have felled a horse. Ogar slumped into unconsciousness.

Blade recovered the heavy stick, then knelt beside Ogar. He was not too surprised. Ogar's brain was that of a man-thing of 600,000 years ago on Home-Dimension scale; his cortex was primitive, lacking the thousands of convolutions of Blade's own, and Blade had noted the short attention span. The trip through the computer had completely obliterated Ogar's memory, such as it was. Blade made a wry face. Now he had it all to do over again. He dug with his hands into the marshy earth and found water six inches down. He began splas.h.i.+ng it into the brute face.

Ogar's eyes flickered and he gazed up at Blade. Blade moved back two paces and waved the stick in menace. Ogar cowered away. He was beaten. Might was right and Ogar understood that Blade loosed a string of the guttural sounds, grunts, snarls and sign language that he and Ogar had used back in Home Dimension. He pointed to his mouth and rubbed his belly. Ogar got it immediately. He rubbed his own belly and pointed away through the gra.s.s. Blade nodded and pointed in the same direction with the stick. He was relieved. At least he and Ogar could still communicate to a certain degree. And Ogar seemed to know where he was, they had landed back in Ogar's dimension.

Ogar, on all fours, was banging his head against Blade's feet. Restored to G.o.dhood. Blade tapped a hairy shoulder with the stick and pointed again. Ogar got to his feet, still cringing, and waved a long prehensile hand at Blade. He growled. "Come on then. Follow me." Blade supplied the words.

Ogar went slipping rapidly and skillfully through the gra.s.s jungle. The gra.s.s had sawtooth edges and Blade was cut in a dozen places before he learned to sidle through it as Ogar did. The creature moved swiftly and purposefully, and what few doubts Blade had had vanished. Ogar was on his home territory.

They reached an immense clearing in the gra.s.s. Here the tall-growing vegetation had been mashed flat, either by fighting or mating, or both, and near the center a spring welled and flowed and disappeared into the ground again. Ogar ran to the spring and threw himself flat and thrust his face into the water. Blade drank from his cupped hands. He was uneasy. This was obviously a watering place and, though the sounds in the gra.s.s jungle had died away for the time being, Blade did not want to linger.

Here in the clearing it was not so dark. Light still lingered in the sky, and somewhere beyond the gra.s.s the sun was lancing yellow and rose and mauve shafts of fire across this new world. Blade gripped his stick and waited for Ogar to finish drinking.