The Torian Pearls.
by Jeffrey Lord.
Chapter 1.
A gray mist swallowed the downhill path less than a hundred yards ahead. The big man still came down the path at a steady lope. His eyes were fixed on the mist ahead, but his long legs never broke their rhythm and his feet in their scarred hiking boots always struck firm ground. He carried a heavy pack on his back and a long staff in one hand, while ragged hair and beard suggested that he"d been on the move for days if not weeks.
Richard Blade had indeed been moving across the Highlands of Scotland for fourteen days, living rough, traveling far, sleeping little and eating less, getting steadily more tired but also steadily happier. Now he was covering the last few miles as fast as his legs would carry him. Physically he was weary, but within he felt stronger and readier to face this world or any other world than he"d felt for months.
Richard Blade was a man who had to face many worlds. He was the only man on earth who could travel into other Dimensions and remain alive and sane. Even for him it wasn"t easy. If Blade hadn"t been a nearly perfect combination of mental and physical qualities, he would have long since lain in a grave in some other Dimension far away across infinity.
In fact, if Blade hadn"t been that nearly perfect combination, no one would ever have known of those distant Dimensions. Lord Leighton, Britain"s most original and creative scientific mind, conceived the experiment of linking a computer and a human brain, to form an instant genius. The human brain he chose was Richard Blade"s.
Then came the accident. Instead of becoming the intended superbrain, Richard Blade vanished entirely from Britain. He appeared in a strange, violent, and primitive land where he had to use all his strength and wits to survive. Somehow he succeeded, and in time Lord Leighton managed to reverse the workings of the computer and bring him back to Britain.
It was an accident, but it was one that could be repeated over and over. It could be repeated as long as there was someone able to travel into what they called Dimension X and return alive and sane. So far that meant Richard Blade, and no other living human being.
Project Dimension X was balanced precariously on the life of one man. Such a vulnerable project would normally have never been allowed to grow to anything like the size of Project Dimension X. In Britain research money did not grow on bushes-as Lord Leighton had to be reminded frequently.
There was nothing normal about Project Dimension X, however. Carried far enough, it just might give Britain the ability to draw on the resources of Dimension X at will. Would the end of this be a new British Empire, stretching across infinity instead of across the earth? It could be. Certainly it was a magnificent dream.
So Project Dimension X would go on, whether it had one man or a hundred ready to send out. Meanwhile, the secret of the discovery would be kept, at whatever cost in lies, money, or human lives. It was easy to imagine what Britain"s enemies might do with the secret of Dimension X. It was almost as easy to imagine how some of Britain"s friends might suddenly become enemies if the secret got out.
Project Dimension X would go on its way, and Richard Blade would go out time after time, to face one new and nightmarish world after another. He"d gone out twenty-four times, he"d faced twenty-four strange worlds, he"d returned to Britain twenty-four times.
Over the past two months he"d begun to wonder if he could do it again.
Richard Blade had always survived his adventures in Dimension X. Some of the people who"d been caught up in those adventures hadn"t been so lucky. There were two in particular who preyed heavily on Blade"s mind.
One was Katerina Shumilova, a Russian secret agent who"d made an involuntary trip into Dimension X after being detected trying to sabotage the Project. Lord Leighton decided that making her disappear into Dimension X was the best way of preserving the vital secret.
She survived her original trip into the hands of the savage Ganthi and a meeting with Blade. She even survived a second trip across the Dimensions, to the black jade city of Kano. By that time there was love between her and Blade, and both of them knew it.
Then in the battle to save Kano from the Raufi of the great desert, she died. A little of Blade died with her. She was a woman with all of his own strengths, and that made it seem unimportant that she"d begun as an enemy.
The other woman was named Galina Haran. She came from a Russia that was not Russia, a place called Russland in a monstrously strange Dimension where things were almost as they were in Home Dimension, but not quite. The Red Flames of Russland fought against the Empire of Englor. From Galina Haran"s discoveries in genetics and cloning, they bred flying dragons to swoop down on Englor. In the end Blade led airborne commandos to destroy the dragons in their nest, deep inside Russland. Then the computer drew him home to Britain and Galina came with him, carrying all the notes on her discoveries as well.
That should have been a triumph, for Britain"s biological sciences, for Project Dimension X, for Richard Blade. Perhaps it would be, in time. Meanwhile, the pa.s.sage across the Dimensions left Galina with no more mind than a six-month old baby. Her brain was physically intact, so in theory the damage should not be permanent. But none of the doctors who"d examined Galina had much hope for her recovery. Galina Haran would spend years and perhaps the rest of her life as a helpless idiot. Blade couldn"t escape the feeling that this was his fault.
Blade told himself that he had to go on doing his duty to Britain, at any cost to himself or to other people. Every other possible duty to himself or to anyone else had to take a back seat.
He told himself this every waking minute of the day, and in the daylight it seemed that he made sense. It was different by night. In the darkness Katerina came to him, her face twisted with her final agony, and also Galina, her face blank and drooling. They came so often and so vividly that he began to feel haunted.
He knew he had to get rid of this feeling, or it would sooner or later end his life and therefore Project Dimension X. Nightmares never killed a man outright. They would eventually slow a man"s physical and mental reflexes. He would go off into Dimension X- in that condition, and from that journey he would not return.
Perhaps he could have driven away the nightmares with liquor or women. Too much liquor took the edge off mind and body as surely as any nightmares. As for the women, Blade could not use other people simply as weapons to fight his own nightmares. He would have to fight and win this battle alone.
So he pulled on his oldest clothes, slung a pack on his back, and walked off into the Highlands of Scotland.
Now it was fourteen days later, and he was walking out again. He was walking out with his pack nearly empty, his boot soles worn thin, bruises or blisters or a coat of dirt on every part of his body, and peace of mind for the first time in months. The two weeks in the Highlands had done the job he"d hoped they would do-two weeks of being alone, two weeks of walking himself into a healthy exhaustion every day and sleeping a dreamless sleep every night. He could look himself in the face now, without wondering if he was looking at a murderer. Once more he could face the world and his next trip into Dimension X.
Blade had chosen a part of the Highlands where human dwellings were rare and telephones were rarer. So it took several hours" more stiff hiking before he was on to a decent road. He had two more hours of traveling along the road, with the light fading and the mist thickening around him. At the end of it all lay a country hotel, where the owner and his wife waited for Blade with a hot bath, clean clothes, good whiskey, a meal large enough for two ordinary men, and finally a telephone connection to London.
"Good evening, Richard," said the voice on the line. It was a well-educated, quiet, and supremely calm voice. The man called J was getting very old, but n.o.body had ever guessed it from talking to him over the telephone.
"Good evening, sir," said Blade. "I"m back from the hills."
"Very good. How soon can you reach London?"
"Is His Lordship breathing down your neck again?"
"Not precisely. He hasn"t got another Portal Case in mind. But he would be happier with you on call."
Over anything except a secure line, Blade and J always used language that suggested they were discussing an ordinary business matter to refer to the Project. A "Portal Case" was their name for one of Lord Leighton"s brainstorms, which came at unpredictable intervals and usually left in their wake confusion, extra expense, and gray hairs on both Blade and J.
"I can easily be on call two days after reaching London," said Blade. "I trust His Lordship can wait that long?"
"Certainly," said J. "I"m very glad to hear you"re coming back." His voice was no longer quite so calm.
"It will be good to be back, sir," said Blade. "Good night." His own voice wasn"t quite calm either.
J listened to the line go dead, gently put down the receiver, and stood up. Then he stretched both arms as far as they would go, first to either side and then over his head. A great deal of tension flowed out of him with those movements. He was tall, so that his fingers brushed the ceiling overhead, and still limber in spite of his years. Not as limber as he"d been when he stalked Germans behind the Hindenberg Line in the winter of 1917-18, of course. But one couldn"t expect that unless one found the Fountain of Youth, and so far even Richard Blade hadn"t found that in Dimension X.
Richard hadn"t found the Fountain of Youth in Dimension X, but he"d found something far more important in the Highlands. He"d found the ability to live with himself and his duties, an ability he"d been losing. J had been wondering if Blade would lose it for good, and he"d feared the worst.
In spite of this, he hadn"t been angry with Blade. He loved the younger man like the son he"d never had, and also knew Blade"s ordeal from bitter personal experience.
At some time in his life, every good secret agent realizes that he moves through life leaving behind him a steadily lengthening trail of bodies. It is something he has to face and learn to live with.
J had known agents who could not learn to live with this responsibility. He"d also known agents who never realized that they had any. In different ways both kinds became unreliable and even dangerous. Both kinds tended to end up dead or mad or both if they continued their careers as agents and didn"t retire in time to something less demanding.
There were also those agents who faced their responsibilities in the same determined way they faced enemy guns. They were the good and even the great agents, who could be relied on for almost anything. J had always been sure that Richard Blade was one of those men, who would meet and master his personal crisis when it came. Now he had done so, and J could not help being immensely relieved.
He walked over to the sideboard and drew out the brandy decanter and a gla.s.s. Richard Blade"s latest victory called for a celebration, not just a gla.s.s of brandy. But the brandy was all it would get.
That was nothing new. Blade and J had spent their lives in secret work, winning their victories and taking their defeats in the shadows, never able to either celebrate or mourn too loudly.
Chapter 2.
Four dark-suited Special Branch men barred Richard Blade"s path as he approached the secret entrance to the underground complex below the Tower of London. They checked his identification and looked him over closely. None of them knew exactly who or what he was, but all of them knew that he was someone authorized to enter the complex at will. That made him important, but there was no deference in their manner as they looked him over. A Special Branch man on critical security duty would not defer to the Queen of England without orders.
Blade entered the building that concealed the head of the elevator shaft. It was an old powder magazine, dating from the eighteenth century. The entrance was now fitted with a steel door three inches thick that could slide into place at the touch of a b.u.t.ton. The whitewashed interior was brightly lit and continuously scanned by electronic monitoring devices. At the touch of another b.u.t.ton the interior could be flooded with tear gas.
J was waiting for Blade by the elevator. They shook hands in silence. There was no need to refight the battle Blade had fought and won over the past few weeks. The calm smile on J"s face and the firmness in his handshake said everything necessary. Then he turned and pressed the b.u.t.ton set in the wall. A section of the wall slid aside, revealing the golden bronze of the elevator. The door slid open with a faint hiss and Blade and J stepped into the elevator car.
They stepped out again a few seconds later, two hundred feet below the Tower. The main corridor of the Project"s complex stretched emptily away in front of them. Sometimes Lord Leighton himself was waiting to greet them here, but not today.
The corridor was empty, but it was neither silent or unguarded. The distant purr of machinery, the clatter of typewriters and computer terminals, faint footsteps and blurred voices all combined into sound that flowed along the corridor.
Every foot of the corridor was watched every minute of the twenty-four hours of the day by computerized systems of electronic monitors and sensing devices. Every few yards were archways concealing more sliding steel doors. Like a ship"s hull, the complex was divided into compartments that could be sealed off in seconds against any attack. Trapped and immobilized, the attackers could be dealt with almost at leisure.
They would be dealt with harshly, Blade knew. The defenses of the complex included several of the latest, nastiest, and most expensive security devices. They also included some of Lord Leighton"s own devices, products of his endlessly fertile mind and somewhat gruesome sense of humor. Blade didn"t know anything about most of Lord Leighton"s devices and wasn"t quite sure he wanted to know. He did know they would work, and that was enough.
The two men walked swiftly along the corridor, pa.s.sing through eight successive archways before they reached the computer rooms at the far end. There were five of those rooms. The first four held the steadily increasing ma.s.s of auxiliary equipment and storage facilities for the computers and the technicians to handle it all. Katerina Shumilova had infiltrated the complex as one of those technicians.
As they pa.s.sed through the rooms, it seemed to Blade that every inch of floor had something on it and every desk had at least three people using it. It would soon be time to add another room to the complex.
Blade wondered if the money would be available. Project Dimension X could not draw on regular Parliamentary appropriations for research and development. It depended on the Prime Minister"s Special Fund and the sale of whatever Blade brought back from Dimension X.
When he brought back gold or jewels, that was easy money. Often he brought back materials or devices that defied the scientists" best efforts to duplicate them. Sometimes he brought back only the knowledge of something centuries beyond Home Dimension science. These exciting discoveries were invariably useless without many millions of pounds of additional research and development.
Sometimes luck was with him. From Englor Blade brought home knowledge of several new alloys and a new chemical fuel that could revolutionize aircraft design and performance. With luck they would need only a few years before they were in production, and meanwhile they"d generated a million pounds for the Project. But even a million pounds was only a fraction of what the Project could use.
The two men pa.s.sed through the rooms of auxiliary equipment and reached the door to the main room. Beyond it lay the heart of the whole Project, the immense master computer that hurled Blade into Dimension X and drew him home again. So far it had always done both.
Lord Leighton was confident that it would go on doing so as reliably as it had done in the past. Blade could only hope the scientist was right. Certainly the old man would do his best. He found it hard to care about anyone or anything except the pursuit of knowledge and openly admitted as much. But he did care what happened to Richard Blade. There was no doubt about it, although Blade suspected Leighton would rather be burned at the stake than admit it.
The door slid open as Blade and J approached it. For once Lord Leighton was neither waiting to greet them or bustling about making last-minute checks on the computer. He was sitting calmly in a chair in front of the main control panel, a cup of tea in one hand and a well-thumbed copy of the British Journal of Computer Research in the other. In his stained, ragged, and rumpled laboratory coat and threadbare black trousers, he looked more like the computer"s caretaker than its creator.
J looked at the scientist. Wry amus.e.m.e.nt spread across his face and sounded in his voice. "My goodness, Leighton. Is the pace getting to you?"
Leighton"s bushy eyebrows rose. There was nearly as much white hair left in those eyebrows as there was on the scientist"s head. "On the contrary. Everything is ready and the main sequence initiated. It would be quite pointless to do anything else until Richard is ready to be hooked up. I am not, after all, one of those types who feels obliged to demonstrate his energy by rushing about to no purpose."
That was quite true. Leighton had plenty of other chances to demonstrate his energy. He demonstrated a phenomenal amount of it, considering that he was past eighty and had lived most of those years with his legs twisted by polio and his spine bent into a hunchback. His daily routine often left men half his age unable to keep up with him.
The next move in the familiar routine was Blade"s. He made his way between the enormous gray crackle-finished consoles of the computer to the little changing room carved out of the solid rock of the wall. Inside the room he stripped naked, smeared himself with smelly black grease to guard against electrical burns, and pulled on a loincloth. The loincloth was more a gesture than anything else. He"d always arrived in Dimension X naked, sometimes with embarra.s.sing results.
Once he"d been able to take a ruby ring with him, and another time a knife. This time he was taking nothing, since there was nothing on hand that might have a good chance of making the trip with him. Adding random bits and pieces of gear simply made still more complicated and dangerous a trip that was already complicated and dangerous enough.
He retraced his route to the center of the computer room. A gla.s.s booth stood there, with a metal chair on a rubber mat inside it. The chair looked as if its purpose was executing condemned criminals instead of sending Richard Blade off into Dimension X.
Blade sat down in the chair, leaned back against the cold rubber of the back, and stretched his legs. He began to breathe regularly and deeply, to saturate his system with oxygen and ease any tension as much as possible. J pulled the folding observer"s seat down from the wall and sat on it.
As J sat down, Leighton rose from his chair with a speed and grace surprising in someone of his age and physical condition. He carefully marked his place in the magazine, put it on the chair, set the teacup on top of it, and came over to Blade.
Now Leighton seemed to explode into action, darting around and around the chair with the speed and agility of a whirling dervish. To every part of Blade"s body he taped cobra-headed metal electrodes. Each electrode was attached to a wire running off into the computer. Leighton had once told Blade there were only a hundred and sixteen of the electrodes. Looking down on himself, Blade found it hard to believe there weren"t several times that many.
Eventually all the electrodes were in place. Leighton made a final inspection, untangling a purple wire from a yellow one, shifting one electrode a few inches down Blade"s thigh, putting on an extra piece of tape to hold another one firmly where it was. Then he backed away, wiping his hands on his laboratory coat.
He backed away until he stood by the main control panel, eyes scanning the flashing lights, hand within easy reach of the red master switch. He waited there until the familiar dance of the lights told him the main sequence was finished and the computer ready to do its work. Then the long-fingered hand on the end of the arm darted at the switch and drew it in a single smooth motion down to the bottom of its slot.
The room, the computer, the two men watching, the booth itself all vanished from around Blade in the time it took him to blink his eyes. He blinked again, and a vast cliff of fissured and scarred blue-gray stone reared itself before him and towered above him. He was still sitting in the chair, but now it rested on yellow sand.
Blade craned his neck upward, looking for the top of the cliff. He could not see it. So high above that he could not even guess how far, the blue-gray stone faded into a swirling gray sky. It was as if the cliff itself became the clouds, melting from solid blue-gray rock into gray mist.
Blade stretched his legs and started to rise from the chair. As he did, the ground under him shuddered violently, swaying from side to side and then heaving up and down. The movement was sharp enough to send the sand swirling up in clouds around him. He closed his eyes, but he could feel the grittiness between his teeth as the sand found its way into his mouth.
After a little while the movements of the ground ceased. Again Blade started to rise, and realized that somehow he could not. It was as if the joints of his arms and legs were locked, or his back and b.u.t.tocks were firmly glued to the chair. It was an annoying sensation.
Blade tried harder, and still harder, until the muscles stood out along his arms and thighs and neck in ridges and lumps. He put all of his enormous strength into trying to rise, until his chest was heaving and all his muscles began to ache.
As he tried to relax and gather strength for another effort to rise from the chair, the ground shuddered again. This time the movements were even more violent and went on longer. The sand rose up around Blade in a swirling yellow cloud that blotted out everything more than a foot in front of his nose.
The movements of the ground slowly faded away, and the cloud of sand subsided. As it did, a faint rumble sounded from high above. Blade looked upward, and his eyes opened wide.
A vast section of the solid gray-blue rock was peeling off the face of the cliff and dropping directly down on top of him. As it fell it crumbled and cracked, splitting into three pieces. Each one of those pieces seemed as large as a house, more than large enough to smash Blade like a bug under a hammer when it landed.
He was not in a real world, though, so nothing would happen to him even if the stone landed. Or was he? Was this weird world as real as Britain, and would his death here be as real and permanent? That chilling thought drove him to a still more desperate effort to rise from the chair and somehow get clear of the base of the cliff. He heaved himself upward as if he wanted to leap into the air. The chair quivered, but he did not rise.
There was still one thing he could do. He threw himself violently to one side, and the chair rocked under him. He did it three more times, and each time the chair tilted farther and farther. At last he threw it down on its side. With a tremendous twisting of his thighs and torso he landed on hands and knees, the chair riding on his back like the sh.e.l.l of a crab.
The chair now held his head down so that he could no longer look upward, but he knew he had no more than a few seconds. He heaved himself desperately forward, fingers and toes clawing at the sand.
He"d covered perhaps ten feet when the light above him was suddenly blotted out. He had a tiny part of a second to realize that this was some sort of end, if not the end of everything. Then a slab of stone the size of a small office building landed on him.
In that moment he knew pain that swept away all other sensations, all thoughts, all awareness even of his own body. Then the pain faded, and he knew that he was not dead-at least not except in this strange world he"d just left. He was aware of every separate molecule of his body, hurtling away on its own path into an immense chill dark emptiness. This awareness lasted long enough for relief to fill his mind, relief that he"d survived one more monstrous twisting of the laws of nature in the nightmare world between the Dimensions.
Then both relief and awareness vanished, and everything was blackness and the terrible cold void where his molecules darted about like meteors.
Chapter 3.
Slowly Blade realized that his molecules no longer darted about in the great dark void. He felt them slowly a.s.sembling themselves into the body and mind he knew so well. Then slowly that mind and body began to be aware of more than the void.
His head throbbed as if it really had been crushed and then roughly put back together. Every throb seemed to send a wave of pain through the rest of his body, so that all his bones seemed to shake in rhythm with the pounding in his head.
He lay still and let other sensations join the headache. Wetness was under him and all around him, except for his face. Some of it was a sticky, clinging wetness, like thick mud. Some of it felt more like warm muddy water.
All of the wetness smelled strongly of decaying vegetation. The warm air that blew over Blade"s face smelled even more strongly and far more unpleasantly of dead animals, the foul sc.u.m on stagnant ponds, methane oozing from the black depths of swamps, a faint hint of sulphur.
Blade cautiously opened his eyes and sat up, ignoring the pain in his head. He sat motionless, bracing himself with his arms, until the pain in his head faded. Then he surveyed what lay around him.