J pressed the rewind b.u.t.ton, waited a moment, then pressed first the stop, then the play. For the fifteenth time the ca.s.sette player began again. A peculiar animal-like wheeze and snort issued from the loudspeaker.
"Reginald"s snore," J commented.
Lord Leighton nodded abstractedly.
"Our agent is to be commended," J said. "It took considerable presence of mind to think of s.n.a.t.c.hing that ca.s.sette and taking it with him when the building was bursting into flames around him."
"Yes," Leighton said, but the little hunchback"s mind was obviously elsewhere.
J and Leighton had locked themselves into one of the electronics laboratories near the central KALI unit to discuss the morning"s hotel fire and what they should do next. The two men were seated, in the diffused bluish light of the overhead fluorescent tubes, on either side of a black enameled-steel table on which rested the recorder, a delicate machine no bigger than a portable typewriter though it reproduced sound as well as all but the most elaborate stereos.
J went through his usual ceremony of lighting his pipe, the beloved dropstem his doctors a.s.sured him would sooner or later kill him, then puffed meditatively as the recorded snore continued. When all was well J could go for weeks without a smoke, but when the tension was too great he always relapsed.
On the tape there was a rustling.
"Reginald"s waking up," J said, exhaling a cloud of pungent blue smoke.
"Yes," said Leighton.
From the recorder came Reginald"s grunt of surprise.
"He must have noticed Mrs. Smythe-Evans was not with him," J said.
Reginald was grumbling now in a low voice, but J could not make out what he was saying. The bedsprings creaked. There was the pad of bare feet crossing a carpet. A door opened. There was the rustle of clothing.
"He"s at the closet, putting on his bathrobe," said J.
Reginald said distinctly, "Where has that woman gone?" He sounded angry and suspicious.
"Here comes the knock at the door," J predicted.
On the tape the knock sounded once, twice, three times. "Who can that be?" Reginald muttered. He crossed the room, his footsteps pa.s.sing close to the hidden microphone. Reginald opened the hall door. J noted that Zoe had left it unlocked.
Reginald said, surprised, "What do you want, little girl?"
J leaned forward. No, the girl did not speak. J would have given a lot to hear her voice.
"Listen to this, Leighton," snapped J.
Abruptly Reginald cried out, "My G.o.d! Your hand! It"s on fire!"
Then came the roar of flame, a rushing, whooshing roar like a giant blast furnace-then silence.
J pressed the stop b.u.t.ton. "Want to hear it again, Lord Leighton?"
"No, that"s quite enough, thank you," the scientist said.
J turned off the machine, saying, "I"ve known you a long time, Leighton. There"s something you"re keeping from me. I can sense it."
Reluctantly Leighton nodded. "You"re right, of course. But before I tell you, I want you to promise me something."
"What?"
"Promise me you won"t destroy KALI."
J studied the little man intently before saying softly, "You have my word."
"And another thing."
"Yes?"
"Don"t tell the Prime Minister what I"m about to tell you, at least not yet."
"Very well."
Leighton sighed, avoiding J"s eyes. "Richard Blade had another of his fits early this morning. He got completely free of his fetters and smashed his bed into sc.r.a.p iron, all the while screaming that word, "Ngaa, Ngaa, Ngaa." He kicked down his locked door and was some distance down the hall before the attendants could knock him out with the tranquilizer guns. I think our boy is developing an immunity to the drugs."
"I don"t see . . . "
Leighton raised a hand for silence, then went on. "Here"s the point. His fit took place at exactly the same moment the fire started in Mrs. Smythe-Evans"s hotel room."
"Coincidence."
"Really? What if I tell you that at that exact same moment, KALI turned itself on."
J took his pipe from his mouth. "Turned itself on? How is that possible?"
"KALI is not like its predecessors. With KALI I"ve made the final step from manual control to full automation."
"But surely there must be a man to push program start."
Leighton shook his head. "No, not really. KALI can start itself. And it did so this morning."
"Only because some human being put that into its program."
Again the scientist shook his head. "That"s not so. I believe I must explain something to you, something I a.s.sumed you knew all along, though now I see you haven"t grasped it. From the beginning we"ve talked of first generation computers, second generation computers, third generation computers. Do you know what that means?"
J shrugged. "Something like model A, B, and C."
A bitter smile appeared on Leighton"s thin lips. "If only that were all. A second generation computer is programmed by a first generation computer, a third generation computer is programmed by a second generation computer, and so on."
"You mean that KALI has been programmed by another computer, which in turn has been . . . "
"I see you understand."
"How many generations is KALI removed from a human programmer, Leighton?"
"Seventy-five."
"My G.o.d," J said softly.
"KALI is far more complex than any human brain. No human brain can think as fast or as well. No human brain can hope, by any amount of study, to understand KALI. KALI has moved into a whole new order of magnitude. A cat or a dog can watch me at my workbench constructing an electric component, but the poor animal can never actually understand what I"m doing no matter how much he sniffs and paws. KALI"s mind is to ours as ours is to an animal"s! KALI"s actions must remain forever a mystery to us because of the biological limitations built into us."
"So all we can do with KALI is sniff and paw?"
"That"s right."
"There is one more thing we can do. We can pull the plug."
"That is the one thing we must not do, my dear J."
"Really? Why not?" J returned his pipe to his mouth and discovered it had gone out.
"The sort of thing that has been happening-the poltergeist phenomena, the voices, the haunting, if you will-sometimes happens without KALI"s aid. I think the thing that came through KALI with Richard can sometimes manifest itself in our world without KALI"s aid, though in a weaker form. Without KALI this thing Richard seems to call a Ngaa can reach us, but only with KALI"s aid can we reach it."
J relit his pipe and began to pace the room. "d.a.m.n. There"s something in what you say, old boy. KALI is not like other computers. It"s a computer linked to a human mind, drawing on the powers of both, including powers that ordinarily lie dormant, powers we might almost term supernatural. There was a Yank author-some called him the father of psychic research-named Charles Fort. In the early years of our century he wrote a book called Wild Talents in which he advanced the theory that poltergeist phenomena were caused by mental abilities we all possess, but which become active only if something, such as a powerful repressed emotion, provides our psyche with a special stimulation. Fort gathered an awesome ma.s.s of data to back up his idea, and it"s dogma now to some of the leading psychic research societies. If Fort is right, KALI is not the gate through which the Ngaa enters our dimension. Richard Blade is the gate!"
The hunchback was silent a moment, his yellow-rimmed eyes unfocused, his wide forehead wrinkled in thought. At last he said, "it fits, J. When poor Dexter was taken to Scotland, the Ngaa went with him. It didn"t stay here, as it would have done if it had been linked to the computer." He thumped his small bony fist on the tabletop. "By Jove, I believe we are on the verge of a breakthrough."
J halted his pacing and stared gloomily down at the scientist. "Perhaps so, Lord Leighton. We could use one! Do you realize how pitifully little we have learned about the X dimension with all our experiments, with all the time and money we"ve spent, with all the risks we"ve taken? Human beings have died and gone mad in our experiments, and what have we to show for it? Richard Blade has gone somewhere, but where?"
Leighton stared at the floor. "I have no idea. At the beginning I was full of pat explanations, but now . . . "
"He has brought back things," J persisted, emphasizing his points with swift stabbing motions of his pipestem. "Things as big as a bathtub and a horse, and things made of materials so alien our best scientists have been unable to duplicate them. Where did these things come from?"
"I don"t know," Leighton admitted.
"And surely you"ve noticed the same mysterious anomalies I have in the stories Richard has related to us under hypnosis during his debriefings. Somehow he always seems to be able to speak the language of any dimension he enters without a single lesson. How can our supercomputers accomplish such a miracle?"
"I don"t know." There was an undertone of anguish in Leighton"s voice.
"And have you noticed how each and every one of those alien dimensions seemed like a curiously distorted reflection of some era of our own known history? Celtic Britain. Ancient Rome. Feudal j.a.pan. By G.o.d Leighton, where is this machine sending him? Backward in time? To some planet in another star system? To a parallel timetrack where society has evolved in a slightly different way? To a future so distant England has been completely forgotten? Where, Leighton, where?"
"I don"t know," Leighton repeated hopelessly.
J gestured in the direction of the room where KALI stood, waiting. "Could it be that Richard never leaves that room?"
"What?" Leighton looked up, startled.
"Could it be that those X dimensions are actually fantastically complex simulations existing within the computer? Could it be that all of Richard"s adventures are built up out of bits and pieces of his own subconscious and given an illusion of reality by the computer?"
"It can"t be merely an illusion," Leighton objected. "Richard"s body vanishes while he"s gone."
"Hundreds of people vanish every year, and even MI6 can"t track them down, except for those who surface a few months later in Moscow with a briefcase full of top secret blueprints. The strange thing is not that he vanishes, but that he reappears."
"If he reappears, the X dimensions must be real!" Leighton spoke with the air of a man grasping at straws.
"Unless Richard Blade is disintegrated into his component atoms and stored as bits of information in KALI"s memory banks, then reconst.i.tuted with appropriate wounds and souvenirs after a suitable period of time, complete with implanted false memories of adventures that never happened. Can KALI do that?"
Stricken, Lord Leighton could only repeat, "I don"t know."
J began pacing again. "One thing we can be thankful for. If the Ngaa follows the same pattern this time as it did when it came through the computer with Dexter, we can expect the power of the creatures to gradually dwindle."
"I wouldn"t count on that," Leighton said bleakly.
"Why not?"
"This time, when KALI turned itself on, something came through it."
"What do you mean, "something"?"
"I didn"t see it, though I was in the room at the time, but it was recorded on our instruments. I can show you the graphs if... "
"Never mind the graphs, Leighton. Tell me, in plain words. What was it?"
In the blue-white fluorescent light Leighton"s face was that of a dead man. "It was pure energy, J, the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of volts of electricity."
On stepping out of the elevator, J was met by Dr. Ferguson. Ferguson wore an even more flamboyantly floral Hawaiian sport shirt than before, but there was nothing flamboyant about the fat man"s bloodshot, haunted eyes.
"How is Mrs. Smythe-Evans?" J asked.
"She"s taking it well," the psychiatrist answered. "The woman"s got courage. I offered her something to get her over the rough spots, but she turned me down."
"May I visit her?"
"I don"t see why not. She"s lying down, but I don"t think she"s asleep. At least she wasn"t when I looked in on her a half-hour ago. Room Eight, that way." He indicated the direction with a weary gesture.
As J started down the hall, Ferguson fell in step beside him, saying, "The poltergeist nonsense has started again, you know, worse than ever. I thought it would die down if we waited long enough, but . . . " He shrugged.
"What happened?"
"Something picked up the filing cabinet in my office and threw it through the wall out into the pa.s.sage. And did Leighton tell you things have been smashing themselves upstairs too, near KALI?"
"No, he kept quiet about that. He thinks that if I know how serious things have gotten, I"ll take his wonderful electric toy away from him."
"A capital idea, I"d say! I hope you do exactly that."
"I don"t plan to."
"Why not, in G.o.d"s name?"
"I want to try something else, first."
"Do something, J! Anything! I"m supposed to be the great healer around here, but I"m about ready for a trip to Scotland myself."
They halted outside Room Eight.
J said, "Unless I"m greatly mistaken, you"ll have peace in this place tomorrow morning."