by Джеффри Лорд
J did not become infected with Leighton’s high spirits. Instead he looked around once again at all the new equipment, and his sense of impending disaster returned stronger than ever. New equipment? That meant untested equipment, hazardous experiments made more hazardous. Again and again Lord Leighton’s demonic device had hurled Richard into other universes, other dimensions that no one before had dreamed existed. Somehow it had dragged him back each time, sometimes seconds before some particularly unpleasant death. The very names of the places he’d been rung with a shimmering occult sonority. Tharn! Sarma! Jedd! Patmos! Royth! Zunga!
Where were these places? In the distant past or the distant future? On planets that circle other suns in this galaxy or some other? In divergent or parallel time tracks, worlds that might have been? In universes that coexisted with this one, but which we could not see? J had no idea. With each trip the whole bloody business had become harder to understand. Even Lord Leighton, full of glib explanations at first, had gradually become as baffled as Blade and J.
Yes, though nobody honestly knew what they were doing, the experiments went on. Perhaps the time had come to halt, to stop doing and start thinking.
But Leighton was clutching J by the arm, saying, «Come along, old chap. The best is yet to come.» J allowed himself to be half-dragged toward the innermost computer room, the place where the impossible had happened already so many, many times.
J hung back when they reached the massive entrance door. «Perhaps it would be better to wait, to be careful… «
It was Blade, surprisingly enough, who answered, «No! I want to go.»
J studied the younger man a moment. It’s said one can become addicted to anything. Was Blade addicted to the machine? Here was a possibility they’d never considered, a dangerous possibility. And what if Blade found on the «other side» a world he liked better than stodgy old England? Could the computer bring Blade home against his will?
The door opened.
Blade and Lord Leighton went in, J trailing behind.
Lord Leighton had been chattering on all this time, and Blade, listening intently, had been nodding at intervals and asking questions in a low voice.
«As you see, the most drastic changes are the ones I’ve made in here,» said the hunchback proudly, gesturing toward the place where once the familiar electric-chairlike device had stood. With alarm J noted that a new contraption occupied the center of the room, a sort of upright Iron Maiden or Egyptian mummy case, but with a tangle of wires attached to it.
Lord Leighton was explaining, «This case is molded so that it fits you exactly, Richard my boy. No one else can use it. And all the electrodes that I used to attach to you, one at a time, are now pressed into positive contact with your body automatically when the box closes.»
«Interesting,» said Blade. «A definite improvement.»
«A part of an overall plan,» said Leighton. «The replicator, you see, is not a separate unit to be plugged into a preexisting whole. It is a strategy for the organization of the entire process. When I put the electrodes on by hand, there’s no way I can ever put them on exactly the same way twice. I, myself, was inadvertently introducing variation into something that must be exactly the same every time. And look here.» He gestured toward a completely remodeled control console. «I have eliminated the red sliding switch you’ve so often seen me throw an instant before you-er-departed.»
«Then how do you start the final sequence?» asked Blade.
«I don’t. Once the program is fed into the computer memory banks, only two switches remain active: Program Start and Program Stop. And when Program Start is pushed, the preliminary sequences begin and run themselves out, one after the other. That’s nothing new. The innovation is that the impulse that starts the final sequence comes directly from the computer, automatically, when it comes to the end of the prelims. I never touch the controls unless I think something is going wrong. Then I hit Program Stop. Normally everything is completely automatic, including the closing of the box. The computer even turns itself off after you’ve been launched»
Blade asked, «What’s the point of that? Oh wait, I see. The machine repeats every step exactly the same way every time, and thus should produce the same result, so long as nobody changes the program.»
Leighton beamed up at him. «Exactly! You should have been a scientist, my boy. You have the mind for it. What we had failed to see was that no human being could do things as perfectly as a machine, not even a human being as unusual as myself.»
Blade smiled at Lord Leighton’s unconscious egotism. The scientist continued, «The only variation that remains is your thoughts. You must try to think of the same things every time you’re going to the same place. Do you think you can do that?»
«I can try.»
«Excellent! Tonight we’ll only do a quick one. We’ll send you through for ten minutes, no more. Then the computer will bring you back. Do you think that in ten minutes you can somehow make note of where you are well enough to recognize it again?»
Richard nodded. «There’s always a moment of wild dreamlike disorientation before my mind focuses on the other world, but I don’t think that takes up much objective time. There used to be an undetermined period of unconsciousness after I passed through, but I think that’s dwindled down to nothing or next to nothing. I believe I made the trip to the Empire of Blood without blacking out at all, and the customary headache passed away very quickly. As Dostoevsky once said, ‘Man is the only animal who can get used to anything.’ Is that all you want me to do? Look around and see where I am?»
«That’s all.»
«Then ten minutes should be quite enough.»
«Good. We’ll bring you back and, when you’re ready, we’ll send you through again with exactly the same program. Unless I’m sadly mistaken, you should go to the same place both times, and if you do… «
Blade finished, «… all our work will not have been in vain. We’ll have ourselves a means of transportation, not an unusually expensive form of Russian roulette.»
«Exactly. Any questions?»
Richard shook his head. «No. Compared to my previous missions, this one looks like a piece of cake.»
«Then I’ll activate the preliminary sequences.» Leighton’s forefinger moved toward the Program Start button. «Richard, if you’ll strip down… «
J burst out. «Confound it, you two! Can’t you listen to me for a moment?»
They turned to look at him with mild surprise. «What’s wrong, J?» Richard asked, puzzled.
J understood that puzzlement. Blade was not used to seeing his superior upset. Normally J maintained a facade of British reserve and imperturbability that made him seem hardly human. «I don’t know what’s wrong, but something is. I feel it!»
Leighton said coldly, «Feelings have no place in a laboratory.»
Blade laid a hand on J’s arm, saying softly, «I know there’s danger, sir. There’s always danger. But when you’re pushing into the unknown, you have to obey the unwritten law of science.»
«Which unwritten law?» asked J.
«The law that says, ‘If you can do it, you must do it,’» said Blade. He turned away from J and headed for the changing room. This time J made no attempt to stop him. Richard had missed the sarcasm behind J’s remark. Leighton pressed the button. A green-glowing digital clock lit up and began the countdown.
Stiffly J asked Lord Leighton, «What generation computer is this now?» J did not really want to know. «Tenth? Eleventh?»
«A new series,» said Leighton.
«Really?»
«I call it the KALI Mark L»
«Kali? Why do you call it that?»
«That’s what the initials of its scientific name spell out. Kinematic Analog Leighton Integrator.»
«Kali is the name of a Hindu goddess.»
«You don’t say! What sort of goddess?»
«A goddess of destruction!» said J grimly.
«Coincidence, old boy. Pure coincidence. Doesn’t
mean a thing.»
Richard Blade emerged from the changing room, naked. In times past he’d worn a loin cloth into the machine, but the cloth had always remained after he’d departed. Even the coat of black grease smeared all over his body to prevent electrical burns was no longer needed.
With a glance at the rapidly changing countdown clock, Leighton said sharply, «Quick, Richard. In you go. We don’t want to have to abort the mission, do we?»
Richard stepped into the upright case and stood in the gleaming copper-colored many-segmented interior, saying, «Like this?»
Leighton’s finger hovered over the Program Stop button, but he said cheerily, «That’s it. Now lean back slightly. Perfect!»
The three men waited.
The clock flickered. It was into the low numbers now. Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. On the count of six, without warning, the heavy curved door of the case swung shut with a thump. Five. Four. J became aware of a low hum. Three. Two. One. Zero.
There was no sound to mark Richard’s departure, but J was almost blinded by that mysterious golden blaze of light he’d seen so many times before, a light that seemed not to come from the case, but from everywhere and nowhere, as if a giant rip had opened in the very fabric of space, letting some unknown sun shine for an instant into the underground room.
The case swung open, and J saw, with eyes that had not yet adjusted back to the normal intensity of light, that Richard Blade was gone.
He turned to Lord Leighton and commanded, «Start the sequence to bring him back.»
«No, no. I can do nothing. KALI will bring him back. It’s all in the programming,» said Leighton. J noticed that Leighton’s mottled face was pale. «Sit down. Try to be comfortable. This goddess, as you call her, is on our side. She can count out ten minutes far more precisely than either you or me.»
In a daze J pulled out the folding spectator seat, installed for his benefit on one wall, and sat down. The digital clock, he noted, was counting down again.
J and Lord Leighton carried on a trivial, absent-minded conversation punctuated by long silences during which J often pulled his pocketwatch from his waistcoat pocket and compared it with the digital clock on the instrument panel, as if the upstart electronic timepiece might require correction from an older, more reliable source.
As the flickering green numbers began counting the final thirty seconds, even this conversation ceased. Both men turned an expectant gaze toward the open case.
Nine. Eight. Seven. Six.
The case closed.
Five. Four.
The humming had begun. Three. Two. One. Zero.
Again the searing golden light filled the room, fading almost instantly, but an odd bright blue-white haze remained, unlike anything J had seen before. The haze, glowing and pulsating, appeared to be seeping rapidly out from the seams where the cover joined the case, and there were tiny glittering points of light in the haze, like dust motes in sunbeams. The haze could have been steam except for its color, yet it did not move like steam. It moved purposefully, independently of any current of air in the room.
J sprang to his feet, alarmed.
The case was opening.
The cloud of haze, with a speed J would not have believed possible, streamed out of the case and off toward the exit with a curious high rushing sound, like an indrawn breath but much louder. As it passed, J felt a curious tingling sensation, like static electricity on an exceptionally dry day. Glancing at the back of his hand, he saw the hairs rise like a nest of charmed serpents and sway as if they had lives of their own.
Half-turning toward Lord Leighton, J blurted, «What… what was that?»
The little scientist did not answer. His attention was entirely on the case, which now stood fully open. In it stood Richard Blade, but a Richard Blade inexplicably changed. Though he had been gone only ten minutes his angular chin was shadowed with at least a day’s growth of stubble.
Blade had often returned from the X dimensions dazed, unconscious or even dying, but never before quite like this. His eyes were open, but fixed and staring, and his expression was one of abject terror, every feature contorted into a mask of fear, the flesh pale and gleaming with sweat, the muscles in his neck standing out like cables.
J took a step forward. «Richard?»
This could not be! Richard had always been the one man in all humanity who could not be frightened by anything.
«Richard?» J called again.
Blade did not reply, but went on staring blindly at nothing.
Lord Leighton advanced carefully, right hand clutching an air pistol, loaded, as J knew, with tranquilizer darts. It had been standard equipment in the laboratory for some time now. «Easy does it,» Leighton said gently. «Everything’s all right, Richard. You’re home.»
At last Richard moved, leaning out of the case like a huge falling tree, landing on his hands and knees with a force that must have been painful.
Lord Leighton took aim.
«Wait,» J said, raising a restraining hand. «I don’t think he’s dangerous.»
Richard’s head lifted, tangled black hair dangling over his glistening forehead.
«What’s wrong?» J asked gently. «You can tell us, Richard.» Leighton had not lowered the pistol. «He’s a big man, J. If he gets rough. «
«He won’t get rough.»
Richard raised a tightly clenched fist.
«Get back, J,» Leighton warned.
The fist came down, striking the floor with an alarming thud. When the fist raised Richard’s knuckles were bleeding.
Then Richard began to scream, frightful howls, more animal than human, that echoed and reechoed in the hardwalled cavern room. Again his fist crashed down, and again and again, each time leaving a red stain on the floor. At last he half-turned, as if about to attack the delicate structure of the device from which he had emerged.
Leighton squeezed the trigger.
Chapter 2
The tranquilizer took a surprisingly long time to take effect, though the dose was literally enough to stop a horse. The dart pistol had originally been brought into the project when Blade had returned from one of the X dimensions with a horse. This animal, perhaps the largest thing ever brought back from the «other side,» had nearly wrecked the laboratory before the tranquilizer gun had arrived, and Leighton had reasoned that Blade might someday return with another horse, or something worse, and had kept the pistol, never dreaming that he would have to use it on Richard.
When Richard’s fit of violence finally subsided and he lay in a crumpled, semiconscious heap, Leighton made a hasty inspection of KALI’s components in the immediate area, but found no damage. J looked on, stunned.
Leighton pressed the button on the intercom and summoned a squad of technicians with a stretcher and a straight jacket. Blade’s powerful body, such an asset in the field, had become a liability, even a danger.
Still unable to speak, J followed as Blade was carried to the elevator and transported to the hospital complex an additional hundred feet below the computer rooms. Lord Leighton hobbled at J’s side, keeping up with difficulty on his stunted legs, but J was only dimly aware of him.
As the elevator door hissed open at the bottom of the shaft, they were confronted by a red-faced fat little man in tennis shoes, white slacks and an appallingly flowery short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt. This was Dr. Leonard Ferguson, Principle Psychiatric Officer for Project Dimension X.
The doctor raised an eyebrow. «A straight jacket? We’re not following our standard operating procedure, are we?»
«Obviously not,» Leighton snapped.
J shared Leighton’s dislike of Ferguson. Neither could he forget that Ferguson had once attempted to force Blade’s retirement from the project on the grounds of an «impairment of decision-making powers.» In a certain Report 97, Ferguson, with the support of his team of consulting psychiatrists, had predicted that Richard’s mental condition would «in the future lead to some dysfunctional withdrawal at a crucial moment.»
/> J had overruled Ferguson, but now…
J glanced at the fallen giant on the stretcher and thought with anguish, Perhaps Ferguson was right!
J’s gaze swung to the fat man’s face in time to detect the faintest trace of a triumphant smile.
«This way,» Ferguson said crisply, starting down the hall. «His bed is ready.»
J slept and woke again, there on the couch in the Staff Lounge. In the underground hospital there was no night, only an endless artificial day. When he awoke the second time, J took out his pocketwatch and inspected it with bleary incomprehension for a considerable period before realizing that it had stopped.
He dragged himself to a sitting position and looked around. The room was empty at the moment, but he harbored dim memories of doctors and nurses coming and going, conversing in low voices so as not to disturb him.
He groped in his pockets for a cigar or one of his well-loved pipes, then realized he had left every form of tobacco back at his office in Copra House. He muttered a curse, remembering his own words. «I understand it won’t take very long.»
With a sniff of mock self-pity, he stood up and brushed himself off, then slipped on his gray suitcoat, which he had carefully hung over the back of a chair to avoid wrinkling it. After tying his Cambridge tie as neatly as he could without a mirror and generally straightening himself up, he went in search of someone who could tell him what was happening.
After prowling up one door-lined passageway and down another, he finally came in sight of Dr. Ferguson, who was coming out of one of the rooms, deep in worried conversation with a burly white-clad orderly.
«Dr. Ferguson!» J called out, breaking into a trot.
The fat little man looked up and smiled without warmth, at the same time dismissing the orderly with a gesture. «Ah, there you are, old man. Before you say another word, I’ve been instructed to tell you to call Copra House. Your secretary is rather worried about you, I think, though I told her you were… «
«Copra House can wait, Ferguson. How is Blade?»
Ferguson’s smile wilted slightly. «Come along to the Lounge, there’s a good chap.» He took J gently by the elbow. «We really must have a chat, you and I.»
