Beside the bed of each sleeper stood a large, polished, black metal box mounted on four wheels. Wires led from it to the metal helmets. On top were a control panel and a series of slots. Two androids stood beside each box, apparently keeping a close watch on it and on the sleeper.

Although they seemed to be sound asleep, the people in the beds also seemed to be having some rather interesting dreams. Several were kicking furiously or churning their legs in running movements. Blade saw two men with erections and one woman writhing in the grip of o.r.g.a.s.m.

At last Blade felt he'd seen enough on this floor. He led the android back to the platform and motioned toward the shaft. The platform lurched into the air, then dropped through the hole in the floor.

Blade examined eight different floors in the building before deciding there was no point in going on. With minor variations, each floor was the same. A large room at one end, with a corridor leading off it. On each floor sixty to a hundred of the private rooms and sixty to a hundred people. About half the people asleep and wired into the black boxes, the other half in the large room being tended by the androids or (very rarely) talking or making love to each other. Always a small army of blue-clad worker androids-at least two for every human being. Always the languid movements and the blank stares, the apathetic manner, and the inhuman perfection of the human bodies.

Blade realized that he had not only seen enough, he couldn't really stand seeing any more for the moment. The people of this city seemed to grow more weird and incomprehensible the more he learned about them! They were not dead, but they hardly seemed to be doing much he could call living.

He'd walked into a city of the living dead, and his first impulse was to walk right back out of it again. Still, there was too great a mystery here to leave behind, not to mention too much that might be worth bringing back to Home Dimension.

There might even be a chance to help these people-if they weren't past wanting help, or even realizing that they might need it.

Blade didn't realize until he started back down how long he'd taken in his exploration of the building. Through a window he could see dawn creeping across the city. If the woman hadn't been discovered and released by the workers, she might have suffocated. At the very least, she'd be trying to scream her head off. When the android let him off the platform at the bottom of the shaft, Blade practically sprinted down the corridor to the room where he'd left the woman.

She was still there, alive, and quietly asleep rather than unconscious or hysterical. She'd certainly done her best to get free-her wrists were raw from the chafing of the rope. Seeing that she wasn't going to get free though, she'd settled down to regain her strength.

This woman was formidably cool-headed and competent-dangerously so, if she remained an enemy. It wouldn't be enough just to interrogate her. He'd have to win her over, as a friend or an ally. Otherwise he'd have to kill her outright, keep her a prisoner, or spend the rest of his time in the city of the living dead trying to look in all directions at once. Blade didn't like any of these alternatives.

Blade ordered two of the workers to bring him a meal, for two Masters. When the meal came, he set the woman's tray aside and emptied his own. The food and cooking were superb-better than Blade had eaten in most expensive Home Dimension restaurants. There people obviously had settled their priorities a long time ago. Never mind if the gardens ran to wilderness or the soldiers ran amuck-as long as the baths were hot and the steaks were rare, all was right with the world.

Yet how did this explain the woman he'd taken prisoner, so skilled and deadly that it had nearly been the other way around? She certainly had not achieved her skill through a lifetime of sybaritic self-indulgence and being waited on hand and foot by androids!

Blade looked at the woman and realized that she was awake and looking at him. He smiled. "The androids have brought a meal for you. If I untie you so that you can eat, will you promise not to call out?"

Their eyes met, and she nodded slowly. Blade guessed he could trust her, but decided to make sure. He sent the serving androids out into the corridor, then closed the door and dragged the table and several chairs in front of it. That would delay the woman in getting out or the androids in getting in. Only then did he take off the woman's gag and untie her wrists. He left her ankles bound and sat in a chair between the bed and the door with his rifle across his lap while she ate.

When she'd finished, Blade untied the knife he'd been using as a bayonet. With the knife in his belt, he sat down on the foot of the bed. He had no intention of laying a finger on the woman again, except in self-defense. He was not yet ready to let her know this.

Blade suspected the woman was of the Authority-the government or police of this city. He also suspected that it had been a long time since even the Authority had come face to face with a civilized person from outside the city. Blade was the unknown, and the unknown always had the ability to sow terror or at least uncertainty in the toughest and best-trained people.

"My name is Richard Blade," be began. "I come from England. I have traveled far and entered this city of yours in peace. I have not found-"

The woman frowned and held up a hand. It was a long-fingered, graceful hand, in spite of the distinctive calluses from many years of unarmed-combat training. "England. What was it called, when it was a City of Peace?"

"I do not know that our land has ever been called anything but England," said Blade. "Certainly there are no records that give another name."

"You do not even remember that you were a City of Peace?"

"As I said, we have nothing left that tells us so." Blade pretended to frown in concentration. "Some say there was once a mighty city called Rome, which ruled all the world and then disappeared. But most among the people of England consider this a tale to amuse children, no more."

The woman shook her head, and her voice held a note of sadness, "It has been a long time since the Cities of Peace ceased to talk to one another. Perhaps it has been long enough even for what you say to have happened. Certainly you are the first to enter Mak'loh from another City in the lifetime of anyone in the Authority, and some of us are no longer young."

"That is not impossible," said Blade. "Certainly it is only quite recently that England has been sending out explorers such as myself to enter the other Cities of Peace. Mak'loh is the first one I have entered, and I had a long journey to reach it." Apparently she a.s.sumed that any civilized man in this Dimension had to be from another "City of Peace." Perhaps she was unable to conceive of any alternative. This was certainly a weakness, but it was a weakness very much to Blade's advantage for the moment.

"You came across the Warlands?" the woman said. She pointed at Blade's sword and knife as she spoke. Blade a.s.sumed she meant the lands outside the Wall.

"I did. That is why I brought those weapons you see. They are not as powerful as those of a City's Authority, but they do not attract so much attention from the Warlanders. And they are powerful enough, if one knows how to use them."

He put down the knife so that he was between it and the woman. Then he made his expression as severe as he could and spoke in a clipped, hard voice.

"You call this a City of Peace. Yet I crossed the Warlands without shedding a drop of my blood. Only when I entered Mak'loh was I in real danger." In brisk sentences Blade told the tale of his adventures in this Dimension. He left out nothing, including Twana and the encounters with the Shoba's men. He merely implied that all of these things had happened after he'd reached Mak'loh with an exploring party.

As he talked, Blade noticed the woman's face turning pale and her breath coming more quickly. As he told of his encounter with the androids on the city wall, she shivered. When he told her of how he'd walked freely through this House of Peace and seen all that went on there, she put her hands over her face.

"I could have slain every man and woman in this building between sunset and dawn," Blade finished. "I did not, because I call them my brothers and sisters. Would the men of the Shoba be so kind, if they pa.s.sed the Wall?"

The woman's voice came out m.u.f.fled by her hands. "Blade-are you of the Authority, in England?"

"No. I am sent out by the Authority, as are the other explorers." To increase the pressure on the woman, he added, "I am no more than a common fighting man of England. It was a great honor for me to be chosen by the Authority, for there are many thousands of fighting men and women as skilled as I am."

"Th-th-thousands, like you?" the woman said, her voice starting to break. Blade nodded. "I'm surprised that you c-c-call us brothers and sisters. We-" and at that point her voice failed her completely. She turned over, buried her head in the pillows, and wept.

Blade said nothing but quietly moved closer to her and laid a hand on her shoulder. She didn't seem to notice it. Finally she wiped her eyes and rolled over, her hands clasped behind her head. Blade carefully kept his eyes off the slim white throat and the firm b.r.e.a.s.t.s thrusting up beneath the black coverall.

"I see Mak'loh has few secrets left from England," she said wearily. "The only way we could change the situation would be to kill you. You did not kill us, when you could have easily done so and perhaps thought we deserved it." There was a note of bleak despair in her voice. "So we will not kill you."

"Thank you," said Blade. He would have said it sarcastically, except for the genuine emotion in the woman's voice. Something about the situation of her city moved her deeply.

"Yet in England you seem to have forgotten where you came from," she went on. "So you will not understand Mak'loh until I tell you how the Cities of Peace came to be. Then perhaps we can understand each other better."

Blade smiled. "By all means, tell me." He'd be more than happy to sit and listen while the woman revealed all the secrets of Mak'loh, this city of the living dead.

Chapter 14.

The woman's name was Sela, and she was one of the Council of the Authority of Mak'loh. The Authority consisted of several hundred selected and trained men and women. They were the only people in Mak'loh who led anything that might be called a normal life by Home Dimension standards. They were responsible for everything that might be needed to keep the city running and had to be done by human beings rather than by robots or androids.

They were a few hundred men and women. The total human population of Mak'loh was somewhere around a hundred thousand.

When Blade learned that, he felt he knew half the answer to why the city was slowly falling apart. He still needed to know how Mak'loh had ended up in this situation.

After listening to Sela for about five hours, Blade felt he knew.

A long time in the past-at least several thousand years ago-there had been a war in this Dimension. It had been an immensely destructive war, fought with nuclear weapons, bacteria, gas, and all the other resources of a highly technological civilization. A large part of that civilization had simply vanished in the war.

Part of it had somehow managed to survive, in spite of the destruction. There were comparatively few people left, but a large part of the Dimension's technological skills and resources still existed. This included the robots, the early models of android, and the very earliest models of the Inward Eye.

The Inward Eye was a method of directly stimulating the human brain to give all the sensations of an actual experience while the individual slept. An enormous variety of incredibly vivid experiences could be recorded on tapes and reproduced with total fidelity, every sensation intact down to the last and smallest detail. All one needed to make one's sleeping hours more exciting than one's waking hours was an Inward Eye machine and a sufficiently large variety of tapes.

The black boxes with the wired helmets Blade had seen in the rooms above were Inward Eye machines. The early ones had been used both as a high-society hobby and a method of therapy in mental hospitals. Both high society and mental hospitals vanished during the war. The survivors were much too busy putting things back together to have any time for socializing or developing mental illnesses.

No matter how hard the human survivors worked, there still weren't enough of them. So the robots and androids became more and more essential. They became so essential that the manufacture and programming of robots and androids was one of the first industries to be revived. By the time civilization had recovered, the robots and androids outnumbered the people at least three to one.

It was then that a psychologist and scientist named Hudvom had a brilliant idea. At least it had seemed brilliant at the time, although Sela admitted she now very much doubted this. Blade was certain Hudvom's idea was the worst disaster to happen to this Dimension, except the Great War itself.

Hudvom counted the robots and androids. He observed that Inward Eye boxes and Inward Eye tapes were once again being made and used. He concluded that together they were the solution to the greatest problem facing his people.

That problem was preventing another war. War was the result of aggression. Aggression was the inevitable result of the amount and kind of physical activity that people performed. If they would limit themselves to the physical activity necessary to get work done, the problem wouldn't be so serious. But people were always in search of excitement, new sensations, pleasure, and variety. That search too often led them over the edge into a pattern of increasingly aggressive behavior.

Now there was at last a chance to break this deadly pattern. Much work was already being done by the robots and androids. More could be done. Meanwhile, people who wanted to could seek out a variety of sensations through new Inward Eye tapes. By this combination, the danger of people developing aggressive patterns of behavior would be greatly reduced. The danger of another war would be practically eliminated.

Hudvom was a brilliant and persuasive arguer, and people were already more than half ready to listen to him. There had already been small wars between some of the revived city-states. There were thousands of armed androids on hand. Many of the weapons that had made the Great War so terrible had already been rediscovered. Another major war seemed near, and this one would leave nothing alive in all the world.

So Hudvom was heard by thoroughly frightened people, and they thought him a great and wise man. The work began, to put Hudvom's ideas into effect.

The work was done slowly, over several centuries. Gradually the cities came to be inhabited by those who followed Hudvom's theories, who rejected the Physical, sought their sensations from the Inward Eye, and left everything else to the robots and the androids. Gradually those who thought Hudvom's theories were dangerous nonsense, or who simply couldn't adjust to the new way of life, left the cities. Some of them were forcibly expelled. All who left soon sank back to barbarism, as the cities kept a rigid control of all advanced science and technology.

In spite of their primitive weapons, the barbarians were numerous enough to be a danger to the cities. So the Cities of Peace slowly drew into themselves, building their walls and setting up force fields and robot sentinels to guard those walls. The building Blade had stayed in by the Wall had been built to house the human garrison of the Wall, in those distant centuries when such a garrison was needed. It had been abandoned by everyone except robots for more than a thousand years.

Gradually the cities became invulnerable to the attacks of the barbarians. Within five hundred years their life had settled down to a routine. Or at least the life of Mak'loh settled down to a routine. Sela knew practically nothing about what might have happened in the other Cities of Peace. Only three of them had ever sent visitors to Mak'loh, and none of these had come in Sela's lifetime. That lifetime, incidentally, had already lasted some four hundred years, and would probably last another five hundred.

In Mak'loh the routine became simple. The hundred thousand human beings in the city spent two-thirds of their time using the Inner Eye. There were millions of different tapes, and they could be mixed and varied by the computers. The other third of the time, they spent going languidly through various mild Physical activities that still helped to maintain a person's good health and good looks. Sometimes they even made love, although not often enough to produce very many children. At the moment there were in all of Mak'loh only seven nurseries and no more than three hundred children in all seven put together.

Meanwhile, computers, robots, and androids did everything else. The computers controlled the power supply, the protective force fields, the synthetic food factories. They programmed the robots and trained the androids.

The robots mounted guard on the outer Wall and took care of all the heavy maintenance. The androids in the red coveralls were soldiers, pure and simple, produced and trained to be nothing else. They lived in underground caves, connected with tunnels that ran under the whole city and up into the towers along the city wall.

The androids in blue did the thousand and one essential jobs in the city itself. Robots and androids together numbered over half a million, or about five for every human inhabitant of Mak'loh.

The Authority watched over everything. They had been created when the city built its Walls, as a force of trained people, capable of Physical activity, capable of aggression if necessary. They would be too few to use these qualities to endanger the city or themselves. But they would be enough to keep watch for minor accidents and failures and correct them. They would also be able to wake up the whole population of the city in an emergency, turning off the Inward Eyes, reprogramming the robots, retraining the androids, and so on.

At least that was the theory, and with the original thousand-man Authority, it might have worked in practice. Unfortunately, the appeal of the Inward Eye seduced away many members of the Authority. Old age took others. As the birth rate shrank, it became impossible to train enough new members of the Authority to replace those who'd gone. Century by century, the strength of the Authority shrank.

Eventually it shrank to the point where it could no longer do its job properly, and the slow decay of Mak'loh became more rapid. Errors crept into the programming of the robots and the training of the androids. This explained the mad soldier Blade had encountered on the city wall, the simple-minded responses of the Watchers, the deterioration of the gardens. Machines wore out and could no longer be replaced quickly, then could not be replaced at all. The power supply was sometimes erratic. Sometimes an Inward Eye machine would go wild, producing such intense sensations that a person hooked into it would be driven mad.

"At one time, about a century ago, it seemed that things were about to fall apart all at once," Sela said. "But all of us in the Authority made a tremendous effort and did much of the necessary work."

"It wasn't enough," said Blade.

The woman sighed. "This we know. We have known it for fifty years. But we were not strong enough to do any more. We are even weaker now. The only thing we could do to make any real difference would be to declare an emergency and turn off the Inward Eyes. We would have to cast aside all of Hudvom's teachings to do that. I fear the people would not accept that."

Blade suspected this was an excuse, rather than a reason, to justify the Authority's refusal to grasp the bull by the horns. The real problem was the pleasure the people of Mak'loh took in their carefree, sensual life of Inward Eye and android servants. They would continue to prefer their living death, even as their city fell apart around them. They would probably panic if they were awakened.

Blade didn't blame the Authority for not wanting to grab this bull by the horns. It was a large and ferocious bull. But if they didn't quickly do something drastic, Mak'loh was doomed. It would become a city of the dead who no longer lived, even through the Inward Eye.

"This is true, I fear," said Sela. "But we of the Authority have given up hope. Even if we had hope, we lack the strength."

"Perhaps you lack the strength," said Blade. "But that does not mean that the strength does not exist or cannot be brought to Mak'loh."

"Will-will your comrades from England help us?" said Sela.

"Why not?" said Blade. "As I have said before, you are our brothers and sisters. From us you can learn how to bring Mak'loh back to life. From you we can learn our history and some of the science we have lost."

"That seems to be a fair bargain," said the woman, frowning. "But I cannot make promises for the whole Authority or speak for them all."

"I cannot do that for my comrades either," said Blade. "I shall have to see much more of your city before I can even speak to them. Show me Mak'loh, Sela. Take me everywhere in it, tell me everything you know about it, let me speak to the others of the Authority. Conceal nothing.

"When I have learned everything I can, I shall return across the Wall, to where my comrades wait in the Warlands. I shall speak to them and tell them what I have seen. I think they will agree to help your city. If they are not enough to do all that is needed, we will send word to England. That will bring more of our people to help Mak'loh."

Blade had never bluffed quite so extravagantly, and he wasn't entirely sure he'd be able to carry it off in the face of sharp wits like Sela's. Yet it was certainly his best chance of learning everything about Mak'loh, and perhaps in the end he could learn enough to actually give them some help.

Sela reached out and caught Blade's right hand in both of hers. There were tears in her eyes as she said, in a voice not entirely steady: "Blade, we shall do what you wish. Mak'loh must live."

Chapter 15.

Sela was as good as her word. She started by getting Blade the black coveralls of the Authority, as well as a combat helmet, boots, and gloves. She got him a new shock rifle and taught him how to use it more effectively. It could be set to either stun or kill, depending on how much power one wanted to use. She also warned Blade that some of the power cells could be unreliable, since the factory that made them was not working very well.

She also showed him the other main weapon kept in Mak'loh-one that was not given to the soldier androids. It was a grenade thrower that looked very much like a large-bore shotgun with a single, stubby barrel. Blade was familiar with similar weapons in Home Dimension, but this one was lighter and much more powerful. That explained why it was not given to the androids. Some time in the dim past, some wise man in the Authority had realized that the androids might not always be completely reliable and therefore should not have weapons as powerful as those of the Masters.

There were only about five hundred of the grenade throwers in Mak'loh, all of them firmly held by the Authority. Each thrower could fire a fist-sized grenade more than five hundred yards, and each grenade could blow a large tree to splinters or reduce a Watcher to sc.r.a.p metal.

"There is not much ammunition for the throwers," said Sela apologetically. "The factory for the grenades has not been working for many years."

Blade sighed. "What were you planning to do if somebody did get in over the Wall and past the Watchers?" he asked irritably. "Spit at them?"

Sela had the grace to blush.

The last thing she gave Blade was not quite a weapon, although it did have warlike uses. It was a metal box to be slung on his belt, with controls and directional antennae that fastened onto his helmet. With a box he could neutralize the Watchers over a wide stretch of the Wall, or order them to concentrate and attack something they might otherwise ignore.

Blade was particularly careful to learn how to use the Watcher control. If necessary, the box would give him an easy pa.s.sage over the Wall. Blade never minded having a line of retreat open, although he had no intention of retreating from Mak'loh.

After equipping Blade, Sela called up an escort of two soldiers and two workers. Then the two human beings and the four androids climbed into Sela's truck and rolled off on Blade's guided tour of Mak'loh.

They didn't bother with any of the Houses of Peace where most of the people lived. Blade had seen enough of those, and as he said, "When you've seen one House of Peace, you've seen them all."

What he wanted to see was the factories for weapons and machinery, food and clothing and furniture, robots, and trucks. He wanted to see where the androids were produced and trained for war and work. He wanted to see the sources for power, water, and the protective force fields. He wanted to learn how everything in Mak'loh worked or didn't work.

Sela showed him everything he asked to see, and the other men and women of the Authority were just as cooperative. The three people on duty at the force-field generators even showed him how to operate the master control panel.

"This controls the Dekim Field," a woman said, pointing at a quartet of dials set around a large switch. "The Dekim Field is radiated by coils set within the outer Wall, to give it strength to resist any explosions or sharp blows."

That explained why the Wall had stood firm against the exploding gunpowder, but not against the slow a.s.saults of living plants. Blade couldn't help wondering what would happen if the Dekim Field were turned off.

There was also the Entesh Field, which produced the golden shimmering above the Wall. It gave warning of intruders who reached the top and summoned the Watchers to deal with them. Once it had also been strong enough to keep out storms like the one that had covered Blade's and Twana's escape from the robots.

"That must have been quite a long time ago," said Blade drily.