"Jeffrey Lord - Blade 36 - Return to Kaldak" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lord Jeffery)

by worrying or blaming Lord Leighton.
Without leaving cover, he ate a chocolate bar and watched dawn break over the river. Several small
boats passed slowly down the main channel, trailing fishing nets and lines. The fishermen wore
broad-brimmed hats, and both men and women were bare to the waist.

From farther upriver a whistle sounded. Then a stern-wheel steamboat appeared, trailing a thick cloud of
gray smoke. Her decks were crowded and she towed several heavily loaded barges. A boat the size of a
large cabin cruiser followed in her wake, gliding along silently without noise or smoke. The fishermen
waved as the two larger craft plowed past. The people aboard the steamer waved back.

Blade knew it was time to start moving. He wasn't going to find Cheeky or learn much about the
Dimension by sitting here. The mix of technologies-steamboat, hovercraft, and rowboat-was odd but not
unbelievable. He might be in some developing country or a land recovering from a nuclear war. Neither
would be anything new.

He emptied one canteen, then headed for the stream to ref-ill it. He was bending down when he heard
the drone of propellers from high overhead. He looked up, and stopped with the empty canteen dangling
from his hand to stare at what was approaching.

You could call it a flying train, if you had to find a handy name for it. The locomotive was a squarish
metal box with a wedge-shaped nose that was mostly tinted glass. It looked rather like the cabin section
of a helicopter with the rotors and tail cut off. Two large propellers whirled on outriggers near the nose.
Two more were mounted aft, blowing over large rudders.

From between the rudders a long cable stretched astern, to the nose of a large sausage-shaped balloon.
Three more balloons followed, tied nose to tail like railroad cars. A long gondola hung from each one.
Blade saw shrouded piles of cargo, men moving among them, and guns at the bow and stern of each
gondola.

The whole train made a weird sort of sense, if you assumed the "locomotive" was held up by some sort
of antigravity. Certainly the propellers could never have done the job alone, nor could the balloons, which
were brightly colored, in checkerboard patterns of yellow and green or blue and white. Each of them had
what looked like a number on its bulging flank, and there was lettering on each gondola. It looked like the
same tantalizingly familiar lettering Blade had seen on the hovercraft. It was also out of sight before Blade
could get a good look.

On any previous trip, it would have been common sense for Blade to go where the balloon train was
going. That way probably lay civilization-there, or along the river. On this trip, needing to think about
Cheeky was changing all the rules.

Blade wouldn't even guess what the chances were that the feather-monkey was still alive. He'd made the
transition into Home Dimension with Blade, but had he made it out the other side? And if he'd reached
the same Dimension, had he landed anywhere close? Even if he'd landed only a few hundred yards away,
he might have drowned in the marsh or the river.

Nonetheless, Blade was going to search at least the immediate area, if only because he would find it hard
to live with himself otherwise. In fact, he was ready to spend most of his time in this. Dimension hunting
for Cheeky. The trip would be pretty much wasted if he didn't find Cheeky!

Even the immediate area along the riverbank was a pretty good-sized haystack, and he was looking for