Джеффри Лорд: Ice Dragon

There was J-tall, craggy-faced, slightly stooped now with his sixty-plus years, as always exuding an air of imperturbability and urbanity. He might have been a successful stockbroker or a Harley Street practitioner, at least to anybody who didn't know his record. He had been surviving Gestapo interrogations when Blade was still in diapers. Even after age had finally brought him behind a desk he had remained a partisan of the field operatives against the office types. Add to this the fact that he had never married, and it was not surprising that J loved Blade like the son he would never have.

And there was Lord Leighton. If J was a father, Lord L reminded Blade of the gleefully wicked old grandfather, waving aside all the father's prescriptions and proscriptions as he cheerfully led his grandson astray. The scientist was not always cheerful, of course. Sometimes in fact he could be downright maddening, since he never bothered about conventional good manners. But how such a buoyant spirit could dwell in Leighton's hunchbacked body, how he could overcome his eighty-odd years and his polio-twisted legs and his deformed spine to create computers beyond anything the rest of the world dreamed possible-this was a continuing miracle to Blade. It left him a little in awe of the old man; Blade hoped (not very optimistically) that he could cope with age and declining powers half as well when they came upon him.

Blade waited until the door had shut behind them and the elevator had begun its plunge to the level of the computer complex, two hundred feet below the Tower, before asking any serious questions. Then he turned to J and said, «How is the search for a replacement coming along, sir?»

J frowned. «Not at all well, unfortunately. The psychologist who was in charge of developing the testing program for new candidates also developed a few-ah, personal vices-which required his being taken off the project. Nothing nasty, you understand. We just sent him back to private practice, carefully wrapped in the Official Secrets Act. But this does mean bringing in somebody new, and by the time he has been cleared and briefed, three or four months' work will be gone. So it will be that much longer before we can test out anybody who might come forward to replace you as thoroughly as Lord Leighton insists be done.»

«No helping it, I'm afraid,» said the scientist. «Rather a silly proposition to send somebody through the computer and have him come back insane or not at all. Waste of effort.» The offhand manner, Blade strongly suspected, concealed very real scruples about endangering a man's life or sanity. He also suspected that Lord Leighton would sooner have admitted to burgling Buckingham Palace than to the possession of anything so unscientific as a conscience. But Leighton was hurrying on to another topic.

«No new people, I'm afraid. But we do have some new circuitry that should cope with the time distortion we suffered last time. The installation required some alteration in Modules A2 and A4, but-«and Leighton was off into one of his interminable technical discussions that neither Blade nor J ever pretended to understand. Blade gathered only that Lord Leighton had developed (or thought he had developed) some method of coping with the problem that had suddenly popped out of nowhere on the last trip-Dimension X and Home Dimension time getting badly out of phase with each other. On that last trip, to the Ocean world and its beleaguered Kingdom of Royth, nine months spent there had been only a little more than four months to Lord Leighton and J. It was obviously something to be eliminated or at least brought under control. Blade could not have agreed more heartily with Lord Leighton's notion that the fewer wild variables in the project the better, particularly when he was going to be left holding the baby if one of these variables came up spectacularly the wrong way.

The technical lecture took them all the way down to the computer room itself. Once they had entered the main room, jammed full from floor to ceiling and almost from wall to wall with the huge gray crackled-finish bulks of the computers and their hanging festoons of riotously colored wiring, Lord L at once returned to the business at hand. He ushered J to a chair, then went over to the main control console and began taking readings from the dials, while Blade went to the dressing chamber to begin his personal preparations.

In spite of the fantastically complex and still not completely predictable processes involved in shifting him into a new dimension, Blade's own preparations had long since become a stereotyped, monotonous routine. He went into the dressing room. He took off all his clothes. He smeared himself all over with a black greasy goo with the consistency of liquid tar and the smell of greatly overaged turpentine, supposed to prevent burns from the electrodes that would be attached all over his body. He put on a loincloth. This was largely a symbolic gesture; he had arrived nine successive times in Dimension X naked as a newborn babe. He stepped out of the dressing room and walked over to the glass booth in the middle of the room, the booth with its rubber floor and its chair that looked remarkably like an American electric chair. He sat down in the chair and waited while the cobra-headed electrodes were attached to every possible and impossible portion of his body until he sat in the middle of an insane tangle of multi-colored wires, radiating off in all directions into the guts of the computer that loomed over him on all sides.

Then, finally, the routine was broken as Lord Leighton turned from the master console to look at him and raise a gnarled and bony hand in a final farewell.

«Ready, Richard?»

«Ready, sir.»

The hand came down and closed the master switch. There was a long moment in which Blade began to wonder if somewhere in those infinitely complex guts of the computer a circuit had failed and nothing was going to happen. Then he felt the chair shudder under him and begin to sink. It sank and sank, down into a black shaft, until Lord Leighton and J were only tiny white faces looking down an immensely deep shaft at him, then still farther down until they were gone and there was nothing above him, around him, or below him except blackness.

Now the blackness faded to gray, to silver, to a searing blue, and he found himself still in the chair, but now the chair stood in the middle of a vast yellow sandy desert, with a raw blue sky overhead. It was perched on some sort of metal rack, and looking down he saw that the rack itself rested on two parallel metal rails that stretched away only a few inches above the sand to the distant horizon.

He had just long enough to absorb all the details, then the chair began to move with a sibilant moan, building speed rapidly, the sand flashing past, the wind tearing in an oddly painless fashion at his body. He felt the acceleration building, and knew that he was racing across the desert at a speed that would soon take him through the sound barrier. In fact, he saw it looming up on the horizon ahead of him, clearly indicated by neon letters-Sound Barrier. He passed through it in total silence, but with a sensation of having been hurled at tremendous speed through a miles-thick wall of jellied soup.

Then all at once there was a sharp and audible jolt, two, three-and the hurtling chair suddenly whipped forward with a tremendous bang and flung him out into space. He was conscious of spreading out hands and feet to stabilize himself as he tumbled wildly through a sky that was no longer blue but gray, then once again black, feeling the tumbling ease, feeling himself flatten out as though he were swimming, still moving forward, endlessly forward, through the blackness.

Blade came back to consciousness lying flat on his face, his nose and mouth pressed into damp cold earth that smelled of mold and moss and old evergreen needles, his head throbbing with the inevitable searing headache that always followed a transition. Yet the discomforts were the most welcome thing possible, telling him that he had indeed made the full transition safely, and not wound up somewhere in the limbo of distorted sensations that lay between Home Dimension and wherever he was now. The possibility of ending up in such a limbo was the one thing that bothered him more than any possible form of death or mutilation he might suffer in any new world he might reach.