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.

Blade walked in a wide circle around the crater, finding bits of metal, black, twisted, half-melted, chunks of stone and concrete, blobs of glass, slabs of what might once have been a road leading down to the river. He couldn't even guess what might have stood here before the bomb. Whether or not it hit its intended target, it did a thorough job where it struck.

Blade wondered if the rest of the bombs that must have gone off in that long-ago war had done an equally thorough job. Probably not-this civilization still had enough sophisticated jet planes to fly them over this wilderness every day. However much they'd mangled themselves, they weren't a bunch of cavemen.