Dimension Of Dreams

Chapter Two

Lord Leighton's message caught up with Blade the next afternoon at the Sailor's Head Tavern in Folkestone. On all his Channel trips with Annie the eighteenth-century pub on the waterfront had been Blade's message drop. The pubkeeper, a retired Royal Navy petty officer, knew him well and could be trusted to keep his mouth shut about Blade's comings and goings. Besides a discreet landlord, the Sailor's Head also had good beer.

It was over a glass of that beer that Blade read the message. Simple, straightforward, familiar. As he read it, his senses seemed to sharpen until everything in the room seemed to have extra force and vividness-the smells of beer and tobacco and lemon-scented floor cleanser, the sounds of glasses clinking and darts plunking into the board at the back of the room, the stray gleams of watery sunlight wandering in through the windows and striking fire from the copper trays hanging above the bar.

He was going into Dimension X again, and this might be the last time he'd ever see any of these familiar English sights: So far he had always returned, often battered and bruised and lame, but there was always the possibility of something going wrong with either the computer or his own skills. He might be trapped; he might be killed. The lust for adventure was strong in him, but as he looked around the pub, it occurred to him that his Dimension X travels might be too much of a good thing. Then he paid his bill and went outside to where his MG was parked, his equipment already in it. Annie was on her way back to London, so there were no good-byes to be said before he fired up the engine and trundled the little sports car onto the motorway for London.

During his absence the cleaning lady had whirled through Blade's West End apartment like an orderly hurricane. All the carefully cultivated clutter of his bachelor life had been swept away and rearranged in appropriate places-or at least what Mrs. Griggs thought were appropriate places. Blade could not help laughing at the sight. The guerrilla warfare between bachelors and their cleaning ladies had been raging long before he was born and would be going on long after he was dead. Undoubtedly, it would go on until cleaning ladies became reconciled to clutter or bachelors became tidy-neither of which would happen this side of the Day of Judgment.

It was certainly more than silly to worry about Mrs. Griggs' peculiarities, when within another twenty-four hours he was going to-well, what was the correct word for moving into Dimension X? Lord Leighton himself was still trying to pin down the exact relationship of Dimension X to Home Dimension. Were the two dimensions completely parallel. . with only the state of Blade's brain and therefore of his senses standing between them? Or were they merely parallel in some ways and divergent in others, each with some sort of independent continuity? Since their times could get out of phase, Blade suspected the latter. Lord Leighton also suspected the latter and had nearly had kittens about it more than once. However, he had also adjusted the computer so that Dimension X time and Home Dimension time stayed in phase.

In fact, Project Dimension X was developing all sorts of complications that not even Lord Leighton had anticipated the first time he plugged Blade's brain into what now seemed like a primitive and remote ancestor of the computer around which the project centered. There was a search for other suitable men who could survive the trip into Dimension X. . a search so far unsuccessful, although J was making discreet inquiries of American intelligence agencies, the prime minister himself, the British intelligence services, and the armed forces. The stresses of passing into Dimension X were enormous, and once there, a man also had to have the wits, reflexes, and muscles to cope with an environment that might threaten him with anything from Stone Age ape-men to nonhumans from interstellar space.

One other man had passed into Dimension X, to be sure, and had even survived there-until he encountered Blade. But that one man had been Blade's Russian Doppelganger, a carefully trained and carefully chosen twin of Blade himself, created by the KGB. Now he lay dead in Sarma. Finding another twin for Blade among the ranks of the free world's trained soldiers and agents was improbable-and creating one was unacceptable. They would just have to keep on searching and hope for good luck.

There was also a project for finding a way of repeating trips into one dimension, so that it could be explored thoroughly. Now they could only fire Blade off more or less at random. Such a development would also mean that materials could be brought back from Dimension X in large quantities instead of tantalizingly meager samples that turned the scientists assigned to analyzing them green with envy. This had only been done once before, when they had been able to send Blade after his Russian twin into the strange intrigue-riddled world of Sarma. Lord Leighton in particular was consumed by a passion to send Blade back into the world of the Ice Dragons to resume contact with the alien Menel. The prime minister, however, was consumed with an equal passion not to go on pouring out money on Leighton's whims, money that would sooner or later have to be accounted for to Parliament. The Controlled-Return Subproject had finally gone through, but Leighton was predicting that at the present rate of nonprogress, ten years might go by before any major breakthroughs.

And there were other subprojects by the handful, all of them the result of bees that had buzzed into Lord Leighton's white-thatched bonnet some time in the past and given him ideas for new avenues to explore. Not surprisingly, this constant stream of requests for funds to underwrite Lord Leighton's new notions gave the prime minister screaming fits, and constant guerrilla warfare rumbled and muttered between the two men.

All this took place far above Blade's head, much to his relief, and did not affect his own role in the project one way or the other. Of course, if some other man thought equal to the trip turned up, he might have a rest-or possibly a partner. But for the time being, his part in each mission began when he presented himself at the Tower of London and descended to the underground complex to be prepared for his excursion. Which was fine with him-he was an adventurer by temperament. He found the dangers of Dimension X, which he could meet by his own resources of strength and skill, more tolerable than he would have ever found the strain of sitting where Leighton sat, where all his hopes and dreams would be more or less at the mercy of the whims of several million pounds' worth of electronic wizardry. Blade had never been very good at sitting and waiting. He had forced himself to have some tolerance for it; otherwise he wouldn't have lasted very long as an agent. But he knew that he would always be happier in the middle of the action. He would have a real problem of adjustment the day-a good many years off, the doctors told him-when declining physical powers would force him to the sidelines for good.

Blade spent the next twenty-four hours in no particularly useful way. He scrounged dinner, reducing the kitchen to chaos again. He dipped into books from his increasingly well stocked shelves, slept, and scrounged breakfast.

It was a damp, chilly morning, the kind that makes one wonder whether spring is real or just a story to encourage children, when Blade climbed into a taxi and gave the driver directions for the Tower of London. He took no equipment, because so far he had arrived in each new dimension naked as the day he was born. Now if Lord Leighton really wanted to do something useful, Blade thought, he could put his mind to work on a method for sending some gear through the computer. The computer had dropped Blade smack in the middle of battles more than once, and he would much rather have something besides his sheer strength and unarmed combat skills to rely on in a situation like that. A gun would be risky, of course. The current passing through his body might affect the cartridges. But a survival suit with built-in flotation and fragmentation protection, a couple of fighting knives, some emergency rations. . Blade went on mentally listing the items for an ideal Dimension X survival kit and became so involved in the task that the driver had to announce their arrival at the tower three times before Blade heard him.

Neither Lord Leighton nor J was at the surface entrance to the complex. There was only the quartet of sober-garbed and even more sober-faced Special Branch men, who emerged from the shadows and took position around Blade as carefully as if he had been the crown jewels of England. Then they asked for his identity card. They would have done that even if they had recognized his face, and they probably did not. The Special Branch men who provided the above-ground security for the project served only a single one-year tour, then returned to regular duties, forever bound by the Official Secrets Act as tightly as Blade himself.

Blade wondered at times what impressions the security men or the scientific and technical experts on the staff might have formed about the project, impressions that might be dragged out of them by a sufficiently comprehensive interrogation. It might be a good idea to have one or two of the men interrogated, just to check. Unless J had already had that done? Blade grinned. He would have been very surprised if J hadn't already thought of the same thing. And if he had thought of it, he would have had it done. The head of MI6 had a reputation for covering all his bets. That reputation went back to his work in the First World War, long before Blade was even born. Blade knew that the old spymaster would leave nothing undone to guard the project. And also to guard Blade, whom he loved like the son he had never had.

When the elevator had dropped two hundred feet to the level of the complex and the heavy bronzed doors had slid noiselessly open, J was waiting for him. They walked through the long corridors, with the subdued lights gleaming on polished stone and metal, to the entrance of the computer rooms. There were sounds of human activity-voices, the clatter of a typewriter, the whine of a recording device-from behind the closed doors of the corridor, but there was not a living soul in the corridor itself. No human guards were needed down here. Each step of Blade's and J's progress, each passage through a door, was monitored by electronic devices that represented the latest in Ministry of Defense design. The devices never slept, never got tired, and could never be bribed or blackmailed, even if they might be jammed.

The computer rooms were a complex within a complex, a series of linked chambers hewn from the solid rock. But most of that rock was hidden behind the looming bulks of the computer consoles and auxiliary equipment. From the sullen gray faces of the computers, covered in a crackled plastic finish that made them look diseased, a fantasy of multicolored lights flickered and winked down at Blade. He found the computer rooms the only part of the whole underground establishment that really oppressed him, but he had never had to spend enough time there for them to really bother him.

Nor would he have to this time, either. Lord Leighton popped out the door to the central room. His eyes gleamed behind their thick glasses in a way that, Blade knew, meant the main computer was all ready to go.

«Good morning, good morning, Richard. I trust you're ready to go? The computer certainly is. I don't like to keep it on the line at maximum level for very long now. All these new attachments increase the current drain by over forty percent. One of these days Richard is going to find himself caught between Dimensions by nothing more exotic than a blown fuse. We've got to convince the PM that the supporting equipment for the power plant has to be replaced, and soon.»

«No doubt,» said J with an urbanity that Blade recognized as a hidden mischievous impulse to indulge in a little verbal fencing with Leighton. «But most of those new attachments were provided for your subprojects. If you hadn't insisted on installing them, there wouldn't be any problem. And the PM didn't balk at providing the money for that.»

«Oh, quite. But if politicians had any scientific training, they'd logically realize one can't really install new equipment without providing for all the consequences. And the PM is a politician, for better or for worse.» He, turned his hunched back on J and Blade, as if the term politician were a hitherto unutterable curse consigning the prime minister to the nether regions. Then he began the visual check of the master control panel, which he would never delegate to any subordinate.

«Well, Richard,» said J with resignation in his voice, «I suppose his Lordship's right. Time to go.» With a precise motion he thrust out a hand and strongly shook Blade's. Then he stepped back to the small recess beside the main control panel. There was a stool in it, which Lord Leighton had provided so he could sit and watch Blade flicker out of his Home Dimensional existence. Such a gesture from Lord Leighton assured Blade that the scientist possessed an actual, genuine, real heart, lurking somewhere behind that searingly brilliant intellect and the brusque, cynical, eccentric manner.

For himself, however, there was no softening or modification of the familiar routine. He went into the dressing room, stripped off his street clothes, and reappeared naked except for a loincloth and a head-to-toe covering of blackish cream intended to prevent electrical burns. Whether smearing himself with that foul-smelling gunk was really necessary he didn't know. But considering the amount of current that flashed through his body each time he was shifted into Dimension X, it was probably a reasonable precaution. He had no desire to wind up barbecued to a turn in the chair; that chair in its glass cubicle already looked rather too much like an electric chair.

He sat down in the chair, and Lord Leighton went to work, darting about the chair with his once white laboratory smock flapping and making him look like some energetic and untidy bird, attaching the gleaming cobra-headed electrodes all over Blade's body. The gnarled hands were amazingly steady and sure in their movements. In a few minutes Blade was sitting festooned with electrodes, and the multicolored wires leading from them like some abandoned building overgrown with vines and fantastic fungi. He found that his breathing had increased and that his stomach felt tight and cold. He forced himself to breathe more slowly and flexed as many of his muscles as he could to relieve the tension. Save the adrenaline for Dimension X, where you may really need it, you idiot! Then he turned his head to where Lord Leighton stood at the master panel and nodded. The gnarled right hand lifted in salutation, then came down, pulling the red master switch with it.

This time it happened with explosive suddenness. Lord Leighton whipped out of sight between one heartbeat and the next. The computer consoles charged in on him from all sides with a single gigantic lurch. For a second he felt like a man standing at a four-way rail crossing and watching runaway locomotives thunder toward him down all four tracks.

Then the hurtling gray bulks struck, and he dissolved into a fine mist that still retained sensation as the impact of the computers hurled it upward into the black sky. The mist coiled and dissipated as it rose but never lost sensation. He felt a deadly cold seep down from the sky and attack each separate microscopic particle that he had become, felt all sensations heightened by this new and terrible dispersal, which was spreading him across cosmic distances.

He rose farther, farther; the cold continued to envelop and chill him, and soon; he began to lose sensation in some of the more remote particles, as though they had fallen into ice water and been engulfed altogether in its numbing chill. His brain was it functioning more slowly now that it was dispersed along with the rest of him? — tried to send out pulses to those remote particles. But they were dispersed and chilled beyond his ability to reach them. And he continued to spread across space with more and more of his particles being enveloped by the chill..

What had been his limbs were gone now; the chill was spreading inward. It no longer lay passively waiting for him to drift into it but reached out for his body and mind. He felt the cold gulp up half his body in an instant. It was a living and hungry thing now, seeking to devour him.

The rest of his body went in the next instant. Now only his mind remained, neither sending nor receiving messages. There was nothing sending or receiving out there in the blackness around him-only the cold, the hungry cold. It crept up on him still further; he felt a tangible pulse of icy wind. Then cold and complete blackness swallowed him, swallowed all sensation.