He started toward the closed circular door to the Chamber of the Innermost Self. He wanted to run, to hurl himself at the thin brittle bone of that door, but suddenly a terrible weariness swept over him. He staggered. His eyes closed.
Richard Blade awoke with a vicious headache.
He sat up, rubbing his eyes, and turned off the alarm clock on his bedtable. The headache was probably a hangover. Blade was not much of a drinker, but last night, in order to convincingly play the role of his cover ident.i.ty, he had had to swallow one, and more than one, too many.
As he prepared a hearty breakfast of bacon and eggs, his eye lit on an article in the London Times. The headline announced, "What"s Ahead in Technology."
He folded the paper neatly at the place, and sat down to enjoy a feast for mind and body. He was a skeptic, but not about science. It was what men did with science that was a cause for concern and cynicism. Blade had been a top man in British espionage for nearly twenty years and held no delusions about the human animal.
He was between jobs; spring had come to London and his chief, the man known as J, was leaving him alone as he had promised. Zoe Cornwall, the sloe-eyed beauty he eventually meant to marry, was waiting for him at his cottage in Dorset. When he finished breakfast he would drive his little MG down to the channel coast and spend the weekend with her.
For a moment the image of Zoe, her expectant body awaiting him on a crisp and fresh-smelling bed, interposed between Blade and the paper. He banished the image with resolution and read that as early as 1990 the scientists expected to establish direct electromechanical interaction between the human brain and a computer.
Direct electromechanical interaction! Blade, who had always had a vague distrust of computers, wondered what it meant. Would they make a man into a computer, or a computer into a man?
The phone rang.
Blade, a fork halfway to his mouth, stared at the offending instrument. He had two phones and the wrong one, the red phone connected to J"s desk in Copra House, was ringing. It had to be J. Simple logic. That meant a job. Blade swallowed, cursed and considered not answering.
On any other morning he would have finally, fatalistically, picked up the receiver and said, "h.e.l.lo."
This morning his headache made him stubborn.
J had promised him this little vacation. And Zoe was waiting.
Richard sat and counted fifteen rings, then, when the phone had at last fallen silent, he collected his dishes without haste, washed them, and left the apartment.
The MG, not always reliable, performed beautifully on the drive to Dorset, and Richard was in an excellent humor as he roared down the winding country lane to his cottage. The headache had vanished, as such headaches often did when he took them out for a run in the cool morning air.
Zoe heard him coming and met him at the gate.
She wore a kind of white sailor suit that clung delightfully to her small pointed b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and her long dark hair blew in the wind off the sea.
"There was a phone call for you, darling," she said.
With a sinking feeling, Richard asked, "Who was it from?"
"From your boss at the Bureau of Economic Planning."
The Bureau of Economic Planning was a Special Services front, part of Blade"s cover story.
"Was it J?" he demanded.
"That"s right. He wants you to call him back. Said it was important."
"d.a.m.n and blast!"
After he had parked the car beside the house he came stamping in, muttering to himself. Zoe stood near the phone and watched him.
"Do you love me, d.i.c.k?" she asked blandly.
He looked at her with surprise. "Of course I do."
"Then don"t phone."
There was a hardness in her voice he had never suspected until now. What was she up to? There was no clue in those wide-set dark eyes that now regarded him so calmly, so firmly.
"Don"t phone?" he said. "Why not?"
"I know what the Bureau of Economic Planning is. I"ve looked into it. Father has friends, I have friends, and all our friends have friends. They tell me you have an office there, in Whitehall, and a pretty little thing as a secretary, and you spend about an hour a week there, signing papers that mean nothing. What"s your real job, darling?"
Blade closed his eyes. Wait until J heard about this! The plumbing was leaking. It had, of course, been a hasty setup. "I can"t tell you," he said softly.
"You"re some sort of secret agent, aren"t. you?"
"I can"t tell you. I can"t tell you anything at all."
"Not even yes or no?"
"Nothing."
"I can"t live like that, Richard." He was no longer d.i.c.k, but Richard. In a moment, if he didn"t play his cards right, he would become Mr. Blade.
"Listen, Zoe. Let me make the call. Then we can talk."
She shook her head. "You asked me to marry you. I can give you my answer now. I will marry you, but on one condition."
He knew what the condition was, but he asked anyway, "What"s that?"
"You must quit your job."
He collapsed into the overstuffed couch, thinking faster than he had ever thought before, even in the field. He"d been with Special Services a long time. He could leave now with no dishonor. There were other, younger men who wanted his job, and he was slowing down. He knew he was slowing down. Someday he would be slower than someone in the MVD . . . . Zoe a widow? Perhaps with children? It was not a pretty thought. And it must have been a thought that had crossed her mind more than once.
Finally he said quietly, "Agreed."
She was surprised. "No argument? You agree just like that?"
"Just like that. Now can I make the call?"
"All right." She kissed him lightly on the forehead.
The switchboard at Copra House put him through to J immediately. He leaned back in the sofa while Zoe ran her fingers through his hair.
J was saying, "A little something has arisen. Nothing to do with your line of work, really, but they seem to want you. I don"t have much of the picture myself, except that it"s terribly top secret and urgent. I understand it won"t take long-say a few hours at the most. If you"ll drop by the House, Richard, I"ll tell you more about it. Which, as I say, isn"t a great deal. I can expect you?"
There was a long pause, then Richard said, "No, I think not." It was the hardest thing he"d ever had to say.
"What"s that? Are you all right?"
"Yes, quite all right, and I hope to stay that way. I want to . . . leave the Service."
There was another long silence, then J said stiffly, "May I ask why?"
"I"m getting married and ... "
"I see, I see. Family responsibilities and all that. The Cornwall woman? Yes, of course. She comes of excellent family." He laughed raggedly. "I"ve been looking into her background, in a manner of speaking. You understand what I mean." Blade understood well enough. J had been running a security check on her, keeping it to himself. "You"re quite sure about this-?" said J.
"Quite sure." Blade"s arm encircled Zoe"s waist.
"I"ll have your things sent to your flat," said J.
"I can come down to Copra House and pick them up"
"No, no, there"s no need for that." The old man"s voice was shaking. "I"d rather you didn"t come around. We"re awfully busy here, you know. I wouldn"t be able to see you."
Blade was astonished. "Not even to say goodbye?"
J"s voice rose with a flare of anger. "Don"t be a sentimental fool, Richard. d.a.m.nit! You made your choice, now live with it."
Before Blade could reply, he found himself listening to a dead phone. He hung up slowly, pensively.
Zoe leaned over to whisper in his ear, "You are a brave man, Richard Blade."
He looked up at her over his shoulder. "Then why do I feel like such a coward?"
"It will pa.s.s," she murmured. "We have another choice facing us, and I hope you will be as quick in making this decision as you were in making the other."
"What decision?"
She nibbled at his ear. "Which shall we have first, the marriage or the honeymoon?"
"The honeymoon." He reached up and pulled her down to him, but even as he kissed her his mind was racing.
I shall need a job. Put what can I do? What am I good for? Perhaps, with a bit of night school, I could qualify for C.P.A.
Zoe"s face filled his eyes, but it was oddly blurred. He could see through her, as if she were transparent. Behind her appeared a puzzling scene.
There was a nurse lying on a white floor in a strange dim light in front of a kind of altar. She did not seem to be breathing. He looked closer.
My G.o.d, it"s Zoe!
The dead woman snapped into sharp focus. Blade whirled toward the circular entrance to the Chamber of the Innermost Self and shouted, "Is that your final offer, Ngaa? Is that it? You"ll let me live out the rest of my life in a dream of what might have been if I"d never entered Dimension X?"
"You"ll be happy, at peace, no longer lonely," pleaded the Ngaa. "Please . . ."
With a howl of berserk rage, Blade hurled himself through the door in a shower of bone fragments.
The Chamber of the Innermost Self, illuminated by a pulsating dim blue light from the fleshy walls, was circular and domed and rumbled with the thunder of the mighty matter-antimatter engines beneath the bony floor. At the hub of the room, towering almost to the ceiling, stood the Mind of the Ngaa, a seemingly infinite number of intertwined serpentine strands of gla.s.s tubing, some thick, some thin, some tapering from thick to thin, all glowing with a subdued and everchanging multicolored light. The thinnest of the tubes were like strands of fine white hair, the thickest were heavy pipes through which gusts of bubbles ceaselessly rose, pipes which occasionally hissed and gurgled loud enough to be heard above the din of the engines.
Ebbing and flowing, swirling, drifting and billowing, the Ngaa"s cloud of glowing blue-white energy hovered around it like a defensive shield, like a garment covering the Ngaa"s naked body, and in the cloud tiny points of light winked and twinkled like stars. The room was hot and filled with such a strong, stinging stench of ozone that Blade found himself half-blinded and coughing. The Ngaa slipped in and out of focus, now clearly seen, now hardly more than a blur.
It was because of his impaired vision that he did not see, when first he stumbled forward into the room, the crowd of silent naked people gathered between him and the Ngaa. When he did see them he stopped, stunned and horrified.
He had seen them before, on his first visit, but only in a trance, a trance that blunted his perceptions, prevented him from understanding what he saw. These were the Ngaa"s human slaves, the sons and daughters of some of those citizens of Home Dimension, of Earth, who every year vanish without a trace. At last he saw them as they were, dirty, gaunt, unshaven, with fishbelly-white skin that had never known the sun and wasted bodies that had never been nourished by anything but chemicals. Their eyes were the worst; their staring, dilated, mindless eyes.
And these slaves now stood between Blade and his enemy, ready to defend their master with their lives. They watched Blade from expressionless skeletal faces, young faces, old faces, male faces, female faces, all alike. They did not move or speak, only waited.
So he hesitated, unwilling to fight the Ngaa"s innocent victims, but then he realized it was the Ngaa who had done this to them, and he advanced to meet them, telling himself they would be better off dead than living if they must live like this.
But before he could come to grips with them, he felt an invisible force s.n.a.t.c.h him into the air and hurl him against the wall.
Stunned but still conscious, for the wall was not hard, he tumbled to the floor.
In his mind the Ngaa said, "We do not want to kill you. Don"t make us kill you." The tone was like a whimper. Richard thought, Without me, you"ll be trapped here.
Abruptly Blade felt a stabbing pain in his head. The computer was groping across the dimensions, trying to drag him home. He realized with anguish that he must complete his mission in minutes, perhaps seconds, or he would no longer be here.
He would be in the computer room under the Tower of London.
And the Ngaa would be with him!
The pain faded. He lurched to his feet. In his mind he could feel the Ngaa"s mood change, could feel the hope that suddenly transformed the creature. The Ngaa had felt KALI"s probe, and knew what it meant.
Blade charged a second time, and a second time the invisible force s.n.a.t.c.hed him off his feet and hurled him against the wall. He tried to rise, but could not. He was not seriously hurt, but he had had the wind knocked out of him.
The crowd of naked mindless slaves came shuffling toward him. He sucked air into his lungs, ignoring the stench of the ozone, ignoring the other stench that now reached his nostrils, the sour smell of human flesh that has never been washed.
The pain of KALI"s probe struck again, then pa.s.sed. One more probe and they"d have a fix on him.
One of the slaves bent over him.
With the sudden fury of an exploding bomb, he launched himself into the heart of the mob!
In his mind the voice that was many voices cried out in panic, "Kill him! Kill him!"
The crowd closed in, still expressionless, still silent, yet with fists that pounded him, long dirty fingernails that clawed him and searched for his eyes, feet that kicked him, yellow rotten teeth that bit him, hands that clutched at his arms, his ankles, his hair. His fist lashed out. Bone gave way with a crack and blood flowed. His fist lashed out again, and there was a shower of broken teeth. He kneed someone in the groin, punched someone else in the stomach, rabbit-punched yet another.
Then he saw, just beyond his reach, the head of one of the slaves twist at an unnatural angle, then rip free of the shoulders and go spinning overhead.
Instantly he understood what that meant.
You"re looking for me, Ngaa, but you can"t find me! You can"t tell me apart from all these other struggling naked humans.
The glowing blue cloud swished past and a woman nearby burst into flame. She did not scream, did not even change expression, but the stench of burning meat made Blade feel like vomiting. His universe seemed filled with black, oily smoke and fists, and claws, and clutching fingers and the stink of sweat and the taste, the salty taste, of blood.
A child burst into flame and was hurled through the air, a hideous living comet that smashed itself to a shapeless blazing ma.s.s against the wall, a ma.s.s that stuck there, bleeding.
The sheer weight of the slaves was dragging Blade down. Individually they were no match for him, but their ma.s.s brought him to a standstill, then crushed him to his knees. The Ngaa"s terror pulsed in Blade"s head, wordless, insane. The blue cloud darted here and there, searching without pattern, burning and tearing without sense.