Blade had seen the main computer as often as he had the supporting equipment in the outer rooms. Unlike the supporting equipment, the main computer remained interesting, even awe-inspiring. It was monstrous-ranks of towering consoles with gray, crackled finishes, rising almost to the rock ceiling of the room.
Its creator was already on the spot, as he usually was. Lord Leighton came bustling out of the shadows as Blade and J entered. In spite of a hunchback, polio-twisted legs, and eighty-odd years, he moved with surprising speed and agility, wiping his hands on his filthy lab coat as he came.
«Greetings, gentlemen, greetings.» There was little age or feebleness to be heard in his voice. «We can proceed any time Richard is ready.» He looked at the attach case Blade was carrying. «You have the knife?»
«I do. I also brought the sheath and a belt I've had for some time.»
«Very good. I fear I cannot report much progress in our research into the matter of the ring. What about you?» he said with a glance at J.
«Nothing worth your time or mine to discuss at the moment,» said J. «I'm afraid I've been rather heavily committed in this blasted 'mystery hero' affair.»
«I quite understand,» said Leighton. «Very well, Richard. If you would care to change, I will see about activating the main sequence.»
Blade nodded and headed toward a small door in one wall, taking the attache case with him. Inside it was a commando knife he'd carried on a good many field missions over the years, along with its sheath and a belt he'd owned since he left Oxford. They all showed signs of wear and age, but the knife was as lethal as ever and the leather as tough. They had been good friends to him in Home Dimension. Perhaps they would survive to be equally good friends in Dimension X.
«Perhaps» was as far as Blade would go. The whole business of how to get something beside his own naked body from Home Dimension into Dimension X was still very much guesswork. All the hard data they had came from the transportation of one single solitary ring. It was being examined by every known method with a few techniques being made up on the spot. The examination had as yet revealed nothing.
Meanwhile, there was the theory that something Blade had owned, used, or carried for a while might have a better chance of making the trip. Lord Leighton normally hated relying on guesswork, but he made an exception for Project Dimension X. He was too good a scientist not to recognize the limitations of his own knowledge, and he did not want to see Blade endangered unnecessarily. Lord Leighton might have a computer instead of a heart where most people were concerned, but not with Blade or J.
The end result was that this time Blade would be hurled off into Dimension X with something that might help him stay alive there. That was good news, by any standard.
The routine in the changing room had been the same ever since the project began. Blade stripped naked, smeared himself all over with smelly black grease to prevent electrical burns, and pulled on a small loincloth.
Next Blade opened the attache case. The knife was already in its sheath. Blade drew it out and watched the play of light on the steel, then sheathed it again. He hooked the sheath to the belt, strapped the whole belt around his waist and drew it tight. Finally he stepped out into the main room again and headed toward the glass-walled booth in the center. Around him the lights on the consoles and control panels were already flickering and dancing in the familiar patterns of the main sequence.
Blade sat down in the metal-framed chair inside the booth. The black rubber of the back and seat were chill and clammy against his bare skin. After a little shifting about, he found that he could sit naturally, in almost his usual position, even wearing the belt and knife. Good. The fewer variations from the routine on any one trip, the better. He remembered his trip through two different dimensions, when everything seemed to be going wrong or at least becoming gruesomely unpredictable. He didn't want that to happen again.
Lord Leighton took a final look at the main board and turned away with a satisfied expression. Even by his exacting standards, everything was going smoothly. He could leave his computer to its own devices for at least a few minutes and wire Blade up.
«Wiring up» was another routine that hadn't changed in a long time. Lord Leighton worked with the speed and agility of a monkey, attaching cobra-headed metal electrodes to every part of Blade's skin. From the electrodes colored wires ran off into the bowels of the computer consoles. When the job was done, Blade and the computer were a single unit, ready to be activated whenever Lord Leighton pulled the master switch.
Lord Leighton chose to wait a few moments, his eyes scanning the controls. J was perched in his usual place, on the small fold-out spectator seat on the wall by the main controls. On his face was the sober expression he usually wore as the time approached for Blade's leap into the unknown. In those moments J could cease to be an urbane, poised gentleman. He could openly show the concern he felt as someone he cared about headed into danger.
Seconds ticked past, turning into minutes. If Blade hadn't known better, he would have suspected Lord Leighton of prolonging the suspense for dramatic effect. Lord Leighton had been known to do that elsewhere. He'd never done it down here at this time and never would.
Suddenly Lord Leighton's right arm shot out and the fingers of his right hand closed on the red master switch. Lord Leighton's aged and misshapen body seemed to take on a grace that it never had at any other moment. The master switch slid down its slot and reached the bottom.
Between one heartbeat and the next, Blade's senses twisted in the computer's grip, and the world around him dissolved.
The floor gaped open, the walls split apart, the ceiling fell in. From some unimaginable outside a greenness swirled and boiled and roared into the room. It was not a liquid, a solid, or a gas. It was a color from some place where the laws governing nature were like nothing that Blade had ever met in Home Dimension or Dimension X.
The greenness poured down on Blade like a waterfall, rose up around him like lava bubbling up out of a volcano, roared past him like a river with a noise like an express train. The computer's consoles and controls, Lord Leighton, J and his seat-all vanished.
There was nothing around Blade now except the greenness, the color that behaved like a liquid, a gas, a solid, and many things that were none of these and should not have existed in any sane or healthy universe. The more Blade saw, the less he liked it. The less he liked what he saw, the more a chilling thought battered at his mind. Had his luck finally run out? Had some malfunction of the computer, some error of judgment by Lord Leighton, even the effects of the knife and belt, brought him to the end of his road? Was he going to live out the rest of his life in some nightmarish nowhere between the dimensions?
It was possible. It always had been possible. His mind had never recoiled from that possibility into raw panic. It did not do so now. Grimly Blade fought his way back to a disciplined awareness of what seemed to be going on around him.
The greenness was now turning steadily into a liquid, a rushing torrent of liquid that was hot and cold at the same time. It chilled parts of Blade's body, scalded others, filled his nostrils with fumes that had no odor and yet choked him, stabbed at his joints and groin with piercing daggers of icy cold, tormented him in a hundred ways. It carried him along as it did so, as if it wished to prolong the torment. It carried him on at a steadily increasing speed, until he felt that he was being whirled along like a log through rapids in flood.