Corpses in a plastic park?

Blade crept to them. He had been assuming, from the situation, that they were lovers. He could be wrong about that. Have a look, he thought, but first try speech. What in the hell did you say in a situation like this?

He whispered: «Don't be afraid. I don't harm you.»

His whisper sounded as if it were roaring from an amplifier. Damn this eerie silence.

No answer. He had not expected any. He was beside them now, vague forms in the silver light that was leaking through a canopy of tree branches. Now he could see them plainly. It was a man and a woman and they had been making love. They still were, in a way, though they did not move. They must have died in the very act.

Blade crept closer and studied them carefully. Were they dead or in some strange coma or trance? They looked alive in every detail but one-they did not move. They were unaware of his presence. They were like store dummies arranged in the act of love.

Dummies? Manikins? Blade reached out and touched the woman's leg. It had the texture of real and living flesh and yet not quite. She did not move at his touch, she did not breathe, she was dead. Yet there was no sense of real death, no stench, no corruption.

Blade looked about. Nearby was a path canopied by the high plastic trees. There was light enough to see and yet not be seen from that terrible moon that looked as though it might come crashing down any moment. He grabbed the man by the ankle and dragged him to the path. Always the gentleman, Blade thought grimly, even in Dimension X.

He stretched the body full in the light and began to study it carefully. The first thing that struck him was the beauty, for mere handsome would not do in this case, of the man. He was small in build, but perfectly proportioned. He looked about thirty in HD years and his skin was fine and beardless, his features perfection with a straight nose, well-formed mouth and small ears set close to his head. His eyes were open and staring at Blade, and for a moment life seemed to flicker in them. Blade put his ear to the man's chest and could have sworn that the smooth and hairless flesh was warm. Blade hunkered back in absolute puzzlement. He had run into some weird things in the various dimensions he had visited, but this one was-

Blade saw it then. Light glinted from something just behind and slightly above the man's right ear. Blade reached to touch it. It was a metal stud, thickish and about a half-inch long. Cold to his touch. An antenna. Obviously a means of receiving power. This was not a true man. This was a robot.

Richard Blade laughed, the sound loon-like, maniacal in the silence, and went back for the lady. No need to be a gentleman now. These were not dead people but merely depowered robots. Robots that had been making love in a park and had been cut off in the act.

The woman was lovely, a bit smaller in stature than the man, slim, well fashioned and with a fresh clear skin. She was about the same age as the man, thirty or so. She wore a miniskirt of plastic and a bra of the same material. The bra had been slipped up, still clipped at the back, to expose her fine small breasts. Nearby lay a pair of brief underpants. Behind her right ear was the same metal stud he had found on the man. Surely a means of receiving power, Blade thought, but more and more he was doubting the robot theory.

It was the small bandage and the wound beneath it that confused him. When he dragged the woman back to the path and stretched her out beside the man he spotted the bandage and removed it. The wound had been stitched and was beginning to scab over. Blade plucked away a bit of the scab to reveal pink new tissue. What sort of robots could be wounded like any mortal and heal the same way?

He began to go over the bodies again, this time with extreme care. The hair, brown in both cases, was silky and fine and had the same texture as his own. Goddamn it! Blade grew more puzzled and exasperated. Robots or humans… something between the two?

He could not figure it out. They were dead and not dead, human and not human, robots and not robots. Time to get on, to look elsewhere, to explore and seek for answers.

The man wore a light sleeveless jacket and a pair of what in Home Dimension would have been called Bermuda shorts. Both of the garments were of the same plastic material, as was the sandal-like footgear. Blade stripped the jacket from the man, tried it on and then tossed it away in disgust. It was far too small. He would have to look elsewhere for clothes. The man, he noticed, had no trace of chest hair.

Blade stared down at the couple with his chin in hand. They were both beautiful people-that had to be admitted; he wondered what had happened to them. If they were dead it was indeed a strange death, without corruption or decay, for the dying had not dimmed their eyes or distorted their faces. He shook his head. Perhaps they only slept.

Sleepers. The word suited. He nodded again and went on about his dangerous business.

A few moments later be discovered that he had been living in a minuscule world while all about him was macroscopic reality. In the little sheltered bower by the path there had been only the three of them, Blade and the two stilled lovers, and reality was what Blade made of it.

He now pushed cautiously through the rubbery brush and came to a spot from which he could observe a lake, and all sense of Home D reality fled away. He saw what he saw and did not understand, but it did not frighten him. He had completed his adaptation to this new dimension. He was a different creature well equipped for survival, and he did not bother to ponder it. He was by now hungry and thirsty and he still needed clothing and weapons; he examined and noted and filed the information automatically in his expanded memory files.

A path circled the lake. There were benches, food stands, a dock and boats on the lake. And everywhere the sleepers. Hundreds of them. All of them beautiful, all of them with the same antenna behind their right ear, all of them halted in the very act of whatever they had been doing when death came, or the power had been cut off, or whatever it was that had stilled them. It was, he thought as he walked among them without fear, as though one gigantic heart had beat for them all and had stopped without warning.

They were all dressed much alike, similar to the lovers he had stumbled over, and he sought for a jacket and shorts that would fit him. Most of the men were too small. As he was about to leave the park he found a news-vendor, paper upheld and still standing outside his kiosk, who was bigger than any of the men he had seen yet. Blade disrobed the man and slipped into the clothes and, after bursting a few seams, found they would do.

He now had clothing and a weapon-a short knife picked up at the stand of a food-seller. The food was dry and stale-and there remained his thirst. He tried a fountain. It was dry. A thought struck him. He went back to the food-vendor's, searched and found a bottled drink. It was tepid and too sweet, but it quenched his thirst. He quickly drank one bottle, took another and went back to the park entrance.

All this while he had remained under cover as best he could. He began to doubt that his solitary figure could be spotted from that baleful moon, but it was best to take no chances. From the shelter of an archway he studied the moon again, with the ever-blazing spotlights like lesser moons, and saw that the illumination was far from perfect. There were shadows aplenty if he made crafty use of them. He set out.

All that night, or so he thought of it at the time, he crept through the giant city like a furtive rat, a scavenger for information. He had not gone six blocks before the obvious parallel struck him-it was as if Blade, a stranger and alone, had entered London or Manhattan to find every soul plunged into this strange, deathless death.