«Very,» said J, matching Blade's tone and expression. «He's going to try some experiments to get the computer adjusted properly for the survival kit. But they'll take quite a while, along with everything else he has to do. So for the time being you'll be going into Dimension X-ah-in the altogether again.» Blade nodded.
They passed through another door, and the scrutiny of its electronic watchdogs, and then they were in the computer rooms themselves. Blade nodded and smiled to the white-coated technicians manning consoles and working on breadboard layouts. By now all of them knew him by sight, and he knew most of them. The turnover among the staff of the underground complex was slow. Once Lord Leighton got hold of a qualified man, he was reluctant to let him go.
Finally the last and smallest door slid noiselessly shut behind them. They were in Lord Leighton's inner sanctum.
It was also the place where Lord Leighton seemed most at home. Almost anywhere in the outside world, he was an unimpressive, even grotesque figure-hunchbacked, whitehaired, scuttling about on polio-twisted legs, his wrinkled and mottled face showing his eighty-plus years with brutal clarity. He looked like an aging and unfriendly gnome, with only the bright dark eyes showing any signs of health and vigor. But among the computers he had created, he looked different-very normal, very much in command.
There was a brief exchange of greetings and pleasantries as Blade and J entered. But Lord Leighton was obviously impatient to get things moving. From the pattern of lights on the master console of the central computer, Blade realized that the main sequence was already underway. Within a few minutes the computer would be ready to hurl him into Dimension X.
With no survival kit to worry about, his own preparations were no different from what he had gone through a dozen times before. In fact, the preparations had become a drill, like field-stripping a machine gun or making a parachute jump. He had learned both during his commando training. But it was easier to be careful with the gun or the parachute. With them, how much care one took could make a big difference, even the difference between life and death. With the trips into Dimension X, nothing in the preparations seemed to make any difference. He always arrived naked as a baby, his head throbbing.
But why take chances? With as much care as ever, he stripped off his own clothing. Then he smeared every inch of his skin with the foul-smelling black gunk that was supposed to prevent electrical burns. Perhaps it actually did. Then he knotted a loincloth around his middle, no doubt as futilely as all the times before.
He stepped out and walked to the chair in the center of the room. The seat was cold against his bare thighs as he sat down. His head almost brushed the glass roof of the cubicle that held the chair, while his feet rested on the rubber mat where it stood. Around him the huge consoles of the main computer rose to the rock ceiling of the chamber. In their gray-crackled finish the consoles seemed almost as ancient and solid as the rock of the walls and roof.
J stepped back and sat down in the observer's chair, while Lord Leighton went busily to work. If there was anything slow or aged about his hands, one would never know it to watch him putting the electrodes on Blade. There were scores of them, in the shape of gleaming metal cobra's heads, leading into scores of wires in a dozen different colors, the wires linking Blade to the computer.
Now Blade was fully wired in place, with electrodes hanging from every part of his body that they could grip. Lord Leighton finished his visual inspection of all the readouts. He never omitted this, no matter how many automatic controls and monitoring devices he installed in the computers. «The human mind is still the best monitoring device when you can't be sure in advance of what you're going to find,» he often said. Then he turned to Blade, ran one hand through his scanty white hair, and poised the other over the red master switch.
«Are you comfortable, Richard?»
Blade would have shrugged if the straps and electrodes on him had permitted. «I'd have to say I'm as comfortable as I could expect, under the circumstances.» Not that his discomfort or comfort would make any difference in another few seconds, when he was whirled off to Dimension X. But Lord Leighton obviously wanted to hear that his guinea pig was comfortable. So why not humor the man?
Lord Leighton smiled thinly. Blade fixed his gaze on the gnarled hand as it drifted down to close over the switch. He kept it fixed as the switch slowly moved down in its slot, toward the red line-and over it.
Sudden, terrible, total disorientation struck Blade, all his senses blacking out at once. There was an instant when he was not even aware of his own body, and barely aware of the workings of his own mind. There was just enough self-awareness left for him to feel a stabbing, numbing fear.
He was dying.
The computer had finally run amuck and destroyed his mind.
This was the last moment of awareness he would have, before he went out forever like a snuffed candle.
If he had had a throat, he would have screamed in that moment. But he had to scream inside his mind. And then the moment passed.
Light and sound and the sensation of movement returned to him in an explosive rush. For a moment he wanted to scream again, as the sensations poured down on him like a waterfall, making his mind reel. Then his mind reacted and stabilized itself, sorting out all the impressions tearing at it into something coherent.
He was sliding down an immense shimmering black slope, whirling around and around as he did so. Overhead pulsed a glaring sky filled with terrible silver light, so brilliant that he had to narrow his eyes to keep from being dazzled. There was no feeling of air rushing past him as he plunged downward, no feeling of friction with the blackness under him. It was as though the black surface was so perfectly lubricated that he slipped over it as effortlessly as a bit of dandelion fluff.
Then the air around him began to grow thicker, seemingly trying to wrap itself around him and slow his passage. He began to feel as if he was falling ever more slowly into a bottomless mass of thin, watery dough-sticky, clammy, and cold. He found himself holding his breath, then discovered that the dough was growing thicker and beginning to tighten around his chest. Each time he breathed out, he found it harder to breathe in again. Then he could not breathe in at all, and once again he felt a moment of panic. And then there was blackness.
Chapter 2
Being able to breathe again told Blade that he had made the shift into the new dimension. For a time he did not try to move, except for the muscles in his chest. He lay where he had landed, savoring the luxury of cool air flowing in and out of his body. He did not even bother to open his eyes.
When he did, bright sunlight stabbed into them, which did not make his throbbing head feel any better. He closed his eyes again and turned his head to one side and kept it in that position until the headache had faded. Then he opened his eyes, lifted his head, and looked around him.
He first saw mountains-high mountains, snowcapped, rearing jaggedly against a blue sky. For a moment the mountains seemed so close that he thought he could reach out and touch them-or they could rise up and topple over on him.