Master Of The Hashomi

Chapter 27

The supersonic Concorde was leveling off at its cruising altitude of sixty thousand feet. Richard Blade loosened his seat belt, slid his chair back into a more comfortable position, and relaxed while waiting for the stewardess to take his drink order.

Behind him lay Britain, a safe return from Dimension X, and all the debriefing and interrogation that always followed such a trip. Ahead lay a month's working vacation in the United States-soaking up the sun and sea air in Florida, but also training in underwater sabotage work and looking over a few possible candidates for Project Dimension X.

Blade had ceased to be optimistic about finding another person who could make the trip, but he hadn't given up hope yet. He also hoped that the new man's first trip would be as successful as the one he himself had just finished.

He'd defeated a vicious, gifted madman and helped a good and wise ruler keep his throne and save the lives of his subjects. He'd killed a good many people, but all of them had been trying to kill him. The people he cared about-Esseta, Mirna, Kubin Ben Sarif, Giraz, the Baran himself-had all survived. He did not have the lives or sanity of a single one of them on his conscience. Blade's conscience was a tough one-it had to be. But he was always happier when people who'd trusted him, who'd been his friends, who'd become involved in his adventures without wishing to, did not end up gruesomely dead.

Finally, there was the grand joke that Dimension X itself had played on all of them. The Master's staff had made the return trip with Blade, in fine condition-except for the vials of drugs in the silver bell.

The drugs were gone-not physically removed, but chemically changed. Blade didn't understand precisely what was involved, since the description for each drug involved several pages of totally incomprehensible chemical formulas. What he did understand was this: Somewhere, somehow, during the transition from Dimension X to Home Dimension, the drugs had ceased to be drugs. Not one of them now had, or ever could have, any effects whatever on the human system.

Transmutation of the chemical elements? Lord Leighton was asking that question, and when Lord Leighton started asking a question like that, he would spend a lot of time looking for an answer. Certainly it added one more mystery to the long list of mysteries surrounding Dimension X.

That was the bad side of what had happened to the drugs. There was also a good side, as far as Blade was concerned. The Master did not care about healing. His staff carried nothing but the killing or mind-warping drugs of the Hashomi. They had not been added to Home Dimension's arsenal of lethal chemicals, and Blade was perfectly happy about that.

Again, this wasn't a tender conscience, it was practical common sense. The Hashomi drugs would be too dangerous in the wrong hands; and there would have been too great a chance of them getting into those wrong hands. As it was, the secret of the Hashomi's drugs would die with the Hashomi, and not live on in Home Dimension.

That was just as well. Home Dimension was even more vulnerable to terrorism than Dahaura-and few of its rulers enjoyed the Baran's combination of good sense and absolute power.