Slave of Sarma

Chapter Five

So far it had been total disaster. Defeat. J was wan and haggard, close to a nervous breakdown, and even Lord Leighton was subdued. J insisted that there was not a minute to lose and briefed Richard Blade on the run, as it were, preparing him for his trip through his computer into some new Dimension X.

They were far below the Tower, in the computer complex. Blade was naked again but for the usual loincloth. Lord L smeared some tar smelling ointment on him against computer burns.

Blade, immediately after meeting the two other men, pointed out the obvious.

"So he got through, this phony me. My alter ego. So what? You sent him out, Lord Leighton, right? So forget him. Don't bring him back. Takes care of everything."

Lord L was inclined to agree with Blade. Not so J. J was feeling guilty and inadequate. He had let them all down. The blame was his, and his alone, and he could not rest until he knew the fake Blade was dead.

"Go after him, Dick, lad. Find him. Kill him. That's the one sure way of knowing that he won't somehow manage to get back with the secret."

Lord L poo-pooed this. "You aren't thinking clearly, man. How could he get back - unless I bring him back through the computer?"

"Because," snapped J, pacing the lino-floored preparation room, "because we don't know where he has gone. We have no idea how many hundreds, or thousands, even millions of X Dimensions there are. Suppose you sent the phony Blade into an XD so far advanced in electronic science that our stuff looks like kindergarten? If he survives, and he is smart enough to, all he has to do is explain to the right people and they will send him back. Build their own machine and pop him right back into our dimension. Right into the Kremlin more than likely. Then where are we?"

They headed through the rooms housing lesser computers, walking in single file through the buzzing, scanning, light flashing machines. Men in white coats, all cleared for highest security and representing some of England's best brains, paid them little attention. Blade thought that Project DX had come a long way since that first afternoon when Lord Leighton had sent him to Alb by mistake.

As they approached the master computer, where even J must leave them, Lord L said: "Blade is scheduled for this trip anyway, J, so I am not objecting to that. But you realize that there is no guarantee, absolutely none, that he will land in the same Dimension X as his counterpart! The Russian may be in another dimension entirely."

"I know that," snapped J. "How well I know it! But we must try, take the chance. You haven't changed the computer settings? We agreed, you know - "

"The computer settings are exactly the same," His Lordship said tersely. "That is still no guarantee. There are many factors to be considered and I cannot possibly calculate them all in the short time we have. But we can try."

They reached the final security station. Blade and Lord L were photographed and fingerprinted by automation. J lingered in the back with a burly guard. As Blade vanished through the last door J flipped a hand at him and called out, "Find him, boy. Kill him."

Blade smiled and waved. If he could he would. If he could -

Lord Leighton led him into the entrails of the giant master computer. To the small glass booth sitting on the square of rubberoid, to the chair that so resembled an electric chair. Lord L, his parchment skin stretched drum tight over his fine old bones, was busily applying the shiny electrodes to Blade's body. A web of red and blue wires began to enmesh the big man.

His Lordship said. "J blames himself too much for all this. It worries me, how hard he is taking it. Could have happened to anybody, you know. Just bad luck and, give the devils their due, a lot of bloody guts on their part. Who would have thought the man to be so bold?"

The fake Richard had gone to J's home at three in the morning. He had been wearing a long heavy coat. Beneath the coat he wore a harness containing enough high explosive to level six city blocks. A single wire connected the HE to a simple push button in the man's hand. One squeeze, even in dying reflex, and how many innocents would die?

J had obeyed orders. Carefully and exactly. They picked up Lord Leighton and went to the Tower, and with the threat of total devastation hanging over them, passed through all security and into the innermost sanctum. No wonder, Blade thought now as Lord L taped the last electrode into place, no wonder J was a wrecked man.

The fake Richard Blade had insisted on being shown everything. "As like you," J told Blade, "as if you came from the same egg."

Even the old scientist was forced to concur. "If I didn't know the truth," he admitted, "I would say that you and the other Blade are monozygotic twins. And not only in physical likeness - the Russian had your speech, your coolness and flair, your - "

J said it. "Your sheer guts. Brass, if you will. That daredevil quality of yours, Richard. I - I still don't quite believe it."

"I do," the old man said grimly. "I believe it. He sat in the chair and laughed at us and dared us to experiment with him. He hadn't believed a word of our story. He sat with his finger on that damned button and made me put on the electrodes as best I could and he laughed, just like you, Richard, and he said now send me someplace. I did, of course."

"And I," said J, "became an old man! The explosive, you know. We had no way of knowing what the computer current would do to it."

Lord L tapped Blade on the shoulder. "Ready, son?"

Blade nodded. He had doubts that he would ever find his double, that he would land in the same Dimension X - that, and the fears thereof, were products of J's guilt and overwrought nerves - but he still had a job to do. This was his fourth time out, the pitcher's fourth trip to the well. In the strain and intensity of the moment he forgot the imposter. To hell with that. The man had overplayed his hand and was gone. Probably forever. In the meantime -

Lord Leighton smiled at Blade and pressed a switch.

Electricity bubbled in Blade's body. Current flowed in his veins, moving sluggishly at first like stagnant canal water dammed and held. Then the dam burst.

BURST!

Blade, still conscious, saw his body change into a rocket. His brain flared and exploded and there was a scream of power. He left the pad and was launched and flared high into black space. He felt his mind melting, drooling, running into shiny liquid puddles that formed and reformed and melted and remelted.

He soared. He was alone and the universe not yet made. He soared forever because there was no beginning and so could be no end.

Fear. The total potential of terror. Cold and heat and light and dark. Gone. Nothing - nothing - nothing -