Slade walked slowly along, examining his position. His automatics were gone, but his knife was still in its holster. His handkerchief had been left in his-pocket as well as a small case of fishing tackle and a box of morphine tablets, which he had brought along in the event of a violent accident befalling him.
Abruptly, he discovered that the side street he was on was not quite so deserted as it had first appeared. An old woman sidled hurriedly out of an alleyway, and muttered:
"Blood! Or I'll murder you tonight." Slade brushed her aside, thinking: Why had they released him? What did they expect him to do? Do! That was it of course. Geean thought he knew about the plotting that was going on, and somehow the great man of Naze expected him to lead his forces to the plotters.
Slade laughed grimly. There was a great deal of cunning common sense in Geean's plan, but it had a basic fault. Geean was wrong in his belief that Slade knew anything.
But that didn't matter now. His purpose before the fall of night must be to find the apartment that had once been occupied by Caldra and Amor. And since Geean was aware of its location, he didn't have to be the slightest bit stealthy about it.
He must assume for the moment that he couldn't escape from Naze, and that Geean would arrest him whenever it pleased him.
The sun was high in the heavens when he reached the fifth columnist part of the city. He recognized a street, then another, then he realized that he was near the apartment. As he hurried eagerly forward, a young woman's familiar voice whined:
"Your blood, mister."
Slade was walking on, when a gasp escaped the girl. He whirled, and stored at her. Her face was already stiffening to the encounter.
"Well," she said with a faint sneer, "if it isn't the man who was going to destroy Naze."
Slade said, "Amor!" Then he remembered Geean, and that his movements were probably being observed. "Quick," he said, "meet me at Caldra's apartment. I'll give you some blood then. But now-slap my face as if you're mad at me."
She was quick. Her hand came up and dealt him a stinging blow on the cheek. She swaggered away, and he walked on, for the first time beginning to realize the implications of what had happened. Amor-on the streets.
He had a sudden sense of personal degradation. Then anger against Leear. She was responsible for this.
He wondered bleakly if the girl would turn up at the apartment.
She was there ahead of him. She opened the door for him, and began to talk even as he crossed the threshold. She chattered with a mad speed. Her face was flushed, her eyes wide and staring. Her hands shook. She looked on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
She had escaped death the night Caldra was killed because she was not in the apartment. She had spent the night with a girl friend.
"I was afraid that I would go to your room if I stayed."
The feverish way in which the words were spoken reminded Slade. He climbed to his feet, and went into her bedroom. The syringe and the cup lay on the table beside her bed.
He thought sickly, To such depths can the potential Homo Superior sink.
He took the syringe into the kitchen, boiled some water on one of the curious energy elements, and then sterilized the syringe needle. He inserted the needle into a vein in his left arm. The blood glittered darkly as it flowed into the transparent syringe. When it was full he squirted it into the cup. The liquid hissed a little as it touched the metal, but there was no other reaction. With a steady hand, he set the cup down on the table beside her.
The girl licked her lips, but she did not look at the cup. Her face was stiff, her body rigid. Her eyes were looking fixedly at the floor. She said in a monotone:
"Why have you come back to the city?"
So she was beginning to think things over. It was a good sign. Slade began to talk. He was completely frank, though brief. When he had finished, Amor's eyes were gleaming. She stood up. She was suddenly enormously excited.
"This is it," she said. "This is it!" She looked at him, wide-eyed. "Don't you see, it's not an accident your being here. Everybody's being terribly clever but determined. Geean has let himself fall into the trap. Why? Because he feels safe behind his silver belt, but he's desperately anxious to find out how Leear thinks she can use you to destroy him. And in his bold fashion, he'll take risks now so that he'll know in the future."
She had started pacing the floor, as she talked. Now, she stopped, directly in front of Slade. She said in an intense voice:
"Go straight to him. That will baffle him. He's expecting you to do something. He's expecting somebody to tell you to do something. Very well, I'll tell you. Leear has said that only you can kill Geean. That means that nothing can happen until you are present.
"That means that you, under the present circumstances, have to seek him out. You can't escape it in the long run anyway. There is no escape from Naze except through Leear. And you may be sure that she'll keep you here now until you do what she wants. Besides, Geean will have you brought before him sooner or later anyway and-Here!"
She had raced off across the room. She came racing back carrying the cup of blood. She held it out to him. She said in feverish tone:
"Take a sip of this. It will give you courage. The effect of a sip won't last longer than an hour."
Slade took the cup curiously. He felt overwhelmed. He had always intended to taste the stuff, though the idea of drinking his own blood was repellent. Nevertheless, he was not going to be rushed so swiftly into putting himself into the clutches of Geean. His impulse was to temporize.
He brought the cup to his lips, hesitated. And then he took a little swallow-
"Get in there," the officer of the tower guard said insolently. "If his excellency Geean decides to speak to you, he'll let you know."
The door shut with a bang.
Slade staggered as he moved farther into the room. The sense of ecstatic, almost unbearable pleasure that had burst along his nervous system within seconds of his swallowing the blood, was gone now. What remained was a blurred memory of mad pleasure-dreams, and a gathering fury.
That little wretch, he thought, that scoundrel, Amor. She knew what would happen.
A sort of hypnotism it had been, driving him resistlessly through a mist of streets on wings of joyous excitement straight to the central tower of Geean. Blood drinkers must give their brains directional thoughts just before they drank. His directions had been to go to Geean, and here he was.
Still dizzy, Slade looked around the room. There was a bed in one corner, and a large window slashed across the opposite wall. Slade peered shakily out of the window, and blinked. He was looking down into a depth of distance. He estimated seventy stories, and he was leaning forward to verify the height when the realization struck into his brain that he was able to lean forward. There was no glass in the window. He retreated back into the room, shocked by his mental condition that had made it possible, however briefly, for him to be unaware that the window was a hazard. Better lie down, he thought shakily.
He dreamed a miserable afterdrug type dream. In the dream, his body was flung out of an open window, to fall seventy stories to the ground below. He awakened, shivering, and then grew rigid:
A nith was standing beside his bed, its long powerful head projecting above him. Its three eyes staring down at him were pools of unnatural light. It saw that he was awake, but made no effort to move away. It said:
"Who told you to come here?"
It stood there waiting.
Vagueness. Slade's brain had been tensed for almost anything. But not language, not speech. The surprise was too great for ordinary adjustment. Caught completely off guard, his conscious mind temporarily suspended function.
It was not funny. His metabolism was affected. There was a rush of loose nervous energy through his body. Nausea came, followed by an inability to perform certain normal releasing reflexes like swallowing and blinking. The blood seemed to congeal behind his eyes, and his vision blurred sharply.
He had an acute conviction, not a thought but a fear, that he was going to be precipitated back to the other earth. The fear grew so monstrous that his first thought was able to come through. His dream- He would fall seventy stories if he was knocked out of this plane. The picturization of that fall almost petrified his reason.
But the seconds passed, and nothing happened. His confidence returned. The nith's bear-cat head was only a foot away from his face, as it said:
"What is the plan to destroy Geean?"
There were several things about the speech that almost got Slade going again. It was not a speech. There - was no sound at all. The creature was thinking at him. This was mental telepathy.
Slade lay stiff, striving to grasp the implications of a beast that had a better than human system of communication. Memory came of the wild animals that had watched him, and the wariness of the birds near the cave-Was it possible that they were all mind readers?
The thought ended. The nith was snarling threateningly. A great paw came up.
"What is the plan?"
In a synchronized jerk, Slade flung himself to the far, side of the bed, and snatched his knife. Horribly afraid, he tumbled off the bed. Then he was on his feet, knife ready, backing towards the nearest wall.
"Careful," he said, "I'll sink this knife into you six inches at least."
Afterwards, Slade was not clear as to what happened then. He was partly facing the window when a second nith walked in from the empty air of seventy stories above ground. It carried a foot-thick transparent weapon, which cast a pale reddish radiance towards the first nith. The beast must have died instantly, but it took more than a minute for the radiance to dissolve its great body into nothingness. The newcomer looked at Slade. It thought at him urgently:
"A traitor. We've been waiting patiently for Leear to give the word to kill him. But now, there's no time to waste. First, I'd better get rid of this-" Slade didn't get the word it used to describe the weapon.
He watched as the animal dexterously split the instrument in two. Inside was a simple set-up built around a loose strip of metal about an inch by three inches by four. The nith's paw clutched the small object.
"Quick," it said, "put this in your pocket. Like this." It was not something about which Slade had any say. The animal bounded towards him. Before he could decide whether he was going to resist, it had slipped the metal strip into his left coat pocket. Slade watched as it jammed the two sections of what remained of the weapon under the bed.
It came erect with a jerk. "They're coming for you," it said tensely. "Remember, there's no victory yet. What we have done so far we could have done years ago.
"This is the crisis."
The door opened, and half a dozen soldiers came in. Without a word they led Slade out into a long, dim corridor and into an elevator. The nith followed. The elevator creaked upward about ten floors. Another corridor, then a door that opened into a spacious apartment.
A tall thin man with a powerful physique was standing looking out of a glassless window. He was dressed in the silver shining clothes of a hunter of Naze, and until he turned Slade had no sense of familiarity. It was that that made terrific the shock of recognition.
Geean was Malenkens.