Джеффри Ллойд - Liberator Of Jedd

Lord L sat very still. He picked up his teacup, stared at it for a moment, then hurled it across the room to smash on a wall. «Of little significance, J? Ogar of little significance?»

The storm broke. Blade sat in silence and admiration. He had long known, and appreciated, the old man's command of billingsgate, but now his Lordship surpassed himself. He cursed J and the Prime Minister for five minutes and did not repeat himself once. J, like a clever old tree, bowed to the wind and was not broken. He gave Blade a saturnine smile, winked, and listened unperturbed to comments on his ancestry.

In the end Lord L went stomping off to see the Prime Minister. Hours later he returned, bitter and somewhat chastened, but unforgiving. J had won. Blade, and Ogar, were to go out first thing in the morning.

J had been sure of the outcome. After Lord L limped out, pale with rage and near to frothing, J said: «The boffins in Scotland are very near to a breakthrough on teleportation. A year. Two at the most. That means we will be able to achieve large-scale transport from X to Home Dimension. It bears very heavily with the PM. And with me, for that matter. I used it as a fulcrum to move him to my way of thinking.»

He gazed fondly at Blade. «And it will be a great help, Dick. For once you won't be going into Dimension X as a total stranger. Ogar should be of immense value back in his own world.»

Blade nodded slowly. The plan did have its advantages. What the disadvantages were, if any, he would have to wait and see.

«We'll have to drug Ogar tonight, then,» J continued. «A light dosage. Enough to get him to the computer and through it before he wakes up. It's the only way.»

So that night Ogar was treated to an especially delectable hunk of raw meat, saturated with a powerful sleeping potion. Ogar wolfed it down, rubbed his hairy belly, gibbered at Blade in appreciation — and soon dropped off into a deep slumber.

As dawn was breaking over London, Blade carried Ogar up the stairs, into the elevator and finally to the tiny room nestled in the penetralia of the gigantic computer. Lord L, who was not speaking to either of them, this time allowed J to enter the sanctum, something he had never permitted before. It was, J thought, an obverse gesture of contempt for all stupid and pragmatic minds. Lord L had not been persuaded by J's argument that if they could get Blade back from Dimension X they could also recover Ogar.

«It doesn't work that way,» Leighton said tartly. «Blade's brain has been conditioned. Ogar's has not. It was sheer lucky chance that we got Ogar in the first place. No. Ogar will never come back.»

His Lordship wasted no time. He set about his task as grimly as any executioner. He had devised a technique in half an hour, when he knew he must, and now he bound Blade and Ogar in a reticulation of wires and electrodes that practically made them one. Blade, sitting in the chair with Ogar clasped in his arms while J looked on uneasily, noticed an odd fact: he was hardly aware of Ogar's smell.

They were ready. Lord Leighton stepped to his instrument board and made a complicated series of adjustments. He had not spoken since they entered the compartment.

J cleared his throat. He was actually seeing it for the first time and he felt a renewed sense of the terror he had experienced in Reading. Sweat trickled down him and his knees felt quavery and there was an enormous painful lump in his stomach. Fear for Blade, and even for Ogar, lanced him. They were all mad, he told himself. Mad. And no help for it. None at all. Too late. Lord L, without warning, was pressing the red button.

A steady pillar of white flame began to build inside Blade. He was being scooped out, burnt hollow, eviscerated. His eyes left his skull and became separate entities attached to his body by long stalks. The ceiling slid down at him, about to crush him, then a rift appeared and he went soaring up and through the rift into blackness.

Not for long, the blackness. Blade went swirling through it on a long curving vector, the force and velocity of which were so complex that Blade, as he riddled the answer in neon chalk on a celestial blackboard, marveled at his own acumen.

The equation slipped away, torn from his bleeding brain by a mauve wind that blew between the spheres. Blade did a wingover, adjusted the fleshy rudder on his coccyx and became aware of a rude knocking on the tiny door in his belly.

A hairy little doll with a macrohead was demanding to be let in. A horrible stench sifted into the corridors of Blade's nostrils and drifted through him like decayed smoke.

Knock-knock-knock — the stinking little mannequin was demanding to be admitted into Blade's guts. Why not? Plenty of room. Was he not disemboweled? He reached down and opened the door of his belly and watched the small figure disappear within.

Immediately the pain began. Pain made more dreadful because Blade could not scream. His lungs were full of fetid smoke.

The universe screamed for him. One cosmic shriek of agony. The pain went on and on.

He was falling now, dropping into the midst of a bloody sun. Red incandescence licked at him. He was consumed. Ashes — ashes— Nothing — nothing—

Blade, after four trips through the computer, had learned his lesson well — lie still. If you were fortunate enough to be under cover, stay there. Look and listen. Begin the adaptation to a hostile environment.

He was lying naked on marshy land, a sort of tundra that moved and quaked beneath his weight. But not so barren as tundra. Quite the opposite, in fact, for he lay in coarse grass that grew close-spaced and towered over him. This strange grass was a reddish-brown in color and the blades half a foot across; by looking straight up he could see the tops, some thirty feet high, and beyond them a fast darkening sky.

There was violent movement somewhere out in that sea of grass and great trumpeting sounds of combat, a violent threshing about, a final roaring and a death screech. Then the sound, unmistakable, of enormous cruel jaws and teeth devouring something. Blade huddled in his grassy niche, unmoving. The noises were very like those played on Lord L's tapes.

Ogar! Where was Ogar?

Blade's altered brain began to function at full capacity. Already, like the chameleon J had compared him to, Blade was beginning to adapt to this new Dimension X. But where was Ogar? Strange that they had been separated, but then you never knew what the computer would do. He rose cautiously and peered about. Suppose Ogar had gone to another Dimension X? Or that this dimension in which Blade now found himself was not that from which Ogar had come. In that case Ogar was not likely to be much of a help. More a liability.

It was growing darker. All about him, in the giant swamp grass, the feral sounds continued. It was feeding time. Life or death time. To Blade's left something vast went crashing and staggering through the grass. To his right a sound of slithering and a long, drawn-out hissing. Blade realized that unless he found some sort of shelter, some protection, he would not last through the night.

Where in hell was Ogar?

Blade was taken by surprise. The grass parted and Ogar rushed at him. He had found a stout stick somewhere and he aimed a terrible blow at Blade's head, his fangs flashing as he snarled deep in his throat. Blade had found Ogar. But godhood was dead. Ogar did not remember him.

Blade took the blow on his forearm. It hurt and numbed the arm, but the bone did not go. Blade caught the stick and wrenched it away from Ogar. Ogar snapped at Blade's throat with his long teeth. Blade hit him squarely between the eyes with his fist, a terrible blow that would have felled a horse. Ogar slumped into unconsciousness.

Blade recovered the heavy stick, then knelt beside Ogar. He was not too surprised. Ogar's brain was that of a man-thing of 600,000 years ago on Home-Dimension scale; his cortex was primitive, lacking the thousands of convolutions of Blade's own, and Blade had noted the short attention span. The trip through the computer had completely obliterated Ogar's memory, such as it was. Blade made a wry face. Now he had it all to do over again. He dug with his hands into the marshy earth and found water six inches down. He began splashing it into the brute face.