Blade parachuted in on his mission to help Rilla Haran defect. His rendezvous, with the geneticist lay in the satellite country of Rodzmania, on the shore of an inland lake three hundred miles from the nearest coast.

So Blade crossed into enemy territory at twice the speed of sound, fifty thousand feet up, aboard a strategic reconnaissance plane of the Imperial Air Force. He sat on a folding seat in the electronic warfare officer's compartment, watching the enemy coast scribble itself in glowing white across the dark radar screen, then slowly drift away behind them.

Twenty miles inland alarms bleeeeped fiercely, warning of enemy missiles on the way up. With the unpretentious coolness of an old hand at this sort of game, the pilot waited calmly as the six missiles closed at nearly three times the speed of sound. Then he launched the Number One decoy. The decoy was a miniature jet plane, as fast as the bomber for short distances and equipped to give off the same radar signal. The decoy raced off toward the missiles. Blade watched it go on the screen.

It met the missiles. Six proximity fuses activated six warheads. Decoy and missiles vanished together as explosions laced the frozen stratosphere with flame and flying metal.

The shock wave threw Blade from his seat to the floor. Before he could recover, the pilot was twisting the controls, sending the big plane plunging down through ten miles of sky to level off just above the treetops. Through the windows, Blade had a good look at the forests of Rodzmania hurtling toward him at six hundred miles an hour.

The pilot grinned. «We started down right after the explosion and went down fast until we went off their long-range radars. They probably think they got us. Even if they're wondering, it'll take them half an hour to organize a low-level search of the area. By that time we'll have dropped you and be on the way out. They don't have a really good radar network for tracking low-altitude intruders, so we shouldn't have too much trouble.»

«Good luck,» said Blade, with feeling. «I'm glad I don't have to do this for a living.»

The pilot's eyebrows rose in wry amusement. «You could say that, I suppose. But then we could say exactly the same thing about your job.»

«I suppose you could,» said Blade, and left it at that. He did not look down on those men of war who fought their battles as part of complex teams of men and highly sophisticated machines. He respected their courage and their skills. But he'd long since recognized that he had very little in common with them. He was a man who fought best alone.

Blade looked at his watch. They would be coming up to the drop point in another ten minutes. He raised one hand in a final salute to the bomber crew, while with the other he opened the door leading aft to the bomb bay. It closed behind him, and he was alone with darkness and the distant thunder of the engines all around him.

Fifty feet aft was the bomb bay. Half of it was taken up by the massive cameras and sensors of the plane's reconnaissance equipment. Most of the rest was filled with racks of parachute flares, boxes of aluminum-foil strips for confusing enemy radar, and less recognizable devices. At one end of the bay was a small folding seat, and above it hung Blade's gear.

He pulled it on, item by item-main and emergency parachutes, helmet, radio, survival pack, knife. He was jumping only with what he needed to take him to the rendezvous with the Rodzmanian underground. Even so, he was carrying an eighty-pound load by the time everything was in place.

The moment after he stood up, he felt the floor tilting under him as the plane banked to the left. They would be turning now, to make their approach to the valley where Blade would land. Then he felt the plane beginning to climb. The plan called for a jump from three thousand feet. The hills on either side of the valley rose five to seven thousand, so they would effectively shield the plane from enemy radar.

A sharp whistle sounded, and a light just above the seat flashed red. Blade climbed up on the seat, gripping handrails on either side. Light suddenly filled the bay as the doors swung open, and the roar of air passing at hundreds of miles an hour followed the light. Blade pulled his goggles down over his eyes and stared down at the panorama of pine forests and rock-strewn meadows passing below.

Suddenly his mark was there, the twin-peaked hill with the little lake nestling between the two peaks and the stream flowing silver out of the lake. Blade watched it sweep past and out of sight, counted to five, then let go of the handrails and plunged forward into space.

The air thundered deafeningly around him and the roar of the jets joined in. Then he was clear of the plane, falling free toward the ground below. He spread arms and legs to guide himself, watching the trees crawl past below without seeming to come any closer. For a long moment he was in the timeless, noiseless, weightless world of the skyjumper.

Then he passed two thousand feet, and the ground seemed to leap up at him. It seemed that he dropped a thousand feet between one breath and the next. He looked down again, saw that he was on target, jerked the rip cord on his main chute, and felt the reassuring, bone-wrenching jerk as it opened. He felt himself lose speed as the canopy filled, and then he was drifting down slowly, safely part of the world again.

He looked up. There was no dome of white or camouflaged fabric drawn taut above him. The parachute was made of an experimental material, almost completely transparent. Only the faint blurring of a circle of blue sky told Blade that he was not held up by magic. From a distance there would be nothing at all to see, either now or after he landed.

Far away to the north, he could see the fast-diminishing dot that was the reconnaissance plane. Even as he watched, it vanished completely. He knew that in about another ten minutes the plane would break out of the shelter of the hills on either side of the valley. Then it would register on enemy radar, and so would the decoys that it would be dropping.

Man-sized, man-shaped, dropping at the same speed as men, the decoys would leave any radar operator or ground observer firmly convinced that he was seeing a landing of spies or saboteurs. There would be an alert. There would be helicopters, armored cars, and infantry patrols rushing about, using up fuel, wearing out machinery, losing sleep. There would be a tremendous flurry of activity, none of it closer than a hundred miles to Blade's landing point, none of it anywhere near any of the underground's bases or any part of its network. There was nothing in the area where the decoys would be landing except mountains and forests and the mountain herdsmen and lumberjacks who lived in them.

Blade looked down again, saw that he was approaching a clearing, saw also that he was likely to drift right over it into the trees beyond. He pulled the shrouds on one side to spill some air from the canopy, and felt his descent quicken for a moment. That was enough. He came down two-thirds of the way across the clearing, landing so gently that he felt as if he were doing everything in slow motion. His parachute brushed against the branches of a pine tree and whispered down to the ground behind him. Then everything was still. Only the clouds crept across the sky above him, and only a faint breeze made small sighs in the treetops.

Quickly Blade gathered up the main chute and took off the emergency one. He carried both into the forest until he came to a small gulley drifted full of pine needles. He buried both chutes in the needles and brushed the surface over them as level as possible.

Then Blade walked back out into the clearing, took one bearing from the sun and another from the compass in his pack, turned his face toward the southeast, and started walking.