"Jeffrey Lord - Blade 29 - Treasure of the Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lord Jeffery)

If he was, he was in danger. The rulers of Russland were an iron-fisted military elite called the Red
Flames. Their policy toward strangers was shoot on sight-unless they wanted to ask a few questions, in
which case the stranger was better off being shot. If he was in Russland, by some quirk of the computer
or the unknown forces governing Dimension X, he might actually be better off playing Tarzan in the
wilderness until the time came for him to return home.

However, three mysterious jet planes did not make a Russland. Blade laughed at his own overactive
imagination. He couldn't afford to spend too much time worrying about unanswerable questions. This
Dimension had a civilization, that civilization was technologically advanced, and he was going to find it.
He was also going to keep out of sight as much as possible on his way to find it.

That was enough for the moment. Blade found a branch lying on the ground, large enough and sound
enough to make a good club. He shouldered it and set off, still heading downstream.

Chapter 3

For the next three days Blade tramped steadily downstream, never more than a hundred yards from the
riverbank and never that far from the cover of the trees. He didn't risk a fire, but there was plenty of food
to be eaten raw. He found berries, edible mushrooms, a small reddish fish, and something like a
rabbit-sized squirrel with long floppy ears. None of them tasted very good, but together all of them kept
him alive. After the second day he had enough skins from the squirrel-rabbits to make himself sandals
and a loinguard.

The winged-disk jet planes passed low overhead at least once each day. Sometimes they carried the
gray cylinders, at other times large yellow tanks. Twice Blade saw the vapor trails of other jets flying too
high to be identified, and once he heard something that sounded vaguely like a helicopter. Once he heard
a more ominous sound in the distance, a series of echoing roars like explosions.

On the fourth day Blade reached a point where the river broke through the foothills of the mountains,
forming a rugged canyon. He had an all-day struggle to get through the canyon. Several times he ended
up clinging by fingers and toes to sheer rock faces with long drops to the rapids below him. Both his grip
and his luck held. By late afternoon he was out of the canyon, facing the wooded lowlands beyond.

A plane flew overhead as Blade made camp that night, lower than usual and cruising slowly so he was
able to make out the insignia. The plane bore a green triangle with a red border and golden wings, not the
insignia of the Russlanders or any of their allies. This was a new Dimension with a new, unknown people.
Blade slept better that night than he'd done the first three nights, because of the good news and because it
was warmer down here in the lowlands. Sandals and a fur loinguard didn't do much to keep off the night
breezes.

He was on the move before dawn the next day. As it grew light he bathed and caught three fish for
breakfast. An hour after breakfast he reached open ground. An hour farther on, much of the relief he'd
felt at learning he wasn't in Russland suddenly vanished.

In front of him lay a crater, half a mile across, more than a hundred feet deep, outlines softened by
erosion and long grass but quite unmistakable. Once, long ago, an atomic bomb had exploded here.

How long ago? The grass was thick and looked healthy enough, while bushes and even small trees grew
on the very lip of the crater. Long enough for most of the radioactivity to be gone, it seemed.