«Not exactly wrong,» said Lord L at last. He pointed at the gauge board. «It’s just that I want to try something new, Richard, a new approach to our work, and I think you should know beforehand.»
Blade looked deep into the yellow eyes. «Does J know about this?»
«No, my boy. J does not know about it. If he did he would only object to it. Make obstacles. And without cause. There is not the slightest danger — other than, er, the usual risks, of course.»
«You had better explain it to me, sir. I’ll decide about the risks.»
«Of course, Richard. Of course.»
Lord L flipped open his book and ran a finger beneath a line of what appeared to Blade to be ideograms. Beneath it was a cartouche with a mass of hieroglyphic symbols. Under this was a long column of mathematical abstractions. All Greek to Blade. He waited patiently.
«As you must know,» Lord L said, «I have kept records of each experiment. Extremely detailed and minute records. It has long been in my mind that, if I could achieve a ‘fix’ on any particular setting, I could use it over and over again. That setting would always be valid and I could send you again and again into the same Dimension X. The advantages of this are obvious, Richard.»
Blade nodded. He could see. One of the great disadvantages of Project DX and one over which the Prime Minister was grumbling — mindful of the millions of pounds being expended — was that they could never be sure into which Dimension X the computer would hurl Blade. In his first four trips out he had landed in a different dimension each time. The first three tunes it had not mattered greatly — he had found nothing of tangible value, nothing that could be exploited to enrich Home Dimension. But on his last expedition, into Sarma, he had found mountains of uranium. Enough, and cheap enough, to make England the leading atomic power in the world. All that was needed was a means of getting it back to Home Dimension, and at this moment in the Scottish Highlands a little band of top scientists was working on teleportation.
His Lordship, as though probing Blade’s mind, nodded and showed his long teeth in a smile. «Yes, Richard, I know it is all very much in the future. But the Prime Minister is a practical man. He is a politician, not a scientist, and he has to make an accounting. He thinks it is time we began to show a profit. So with his permission, I might even say his urging, I am trying this new experiment. I am going to try to send you back into X Dimensions that you have visited before. I have selected Alb as the first and have set the computer accordingly.»
Alb! Blade half smiled as he remembered the Princess Taleen. A saucy wench. Lovely and tawny skinned and a savage in lovemaking. It would be nice to see her again. Or would it? She was as dangerous as a barrel of dynamite.
«There is nothing of value in Alb,» he said, and grinned. «Nothing to make the Prime Minister happy. Sarma would be more like it. The uranium.»
Lord Leighton frowned impatiently. «I know, I know! You are missing the point, my dear boy. This is to be only a brief experiment at best. I will keep you in Alb for only a few moments, then bring you back. Because, if I can send you to Alb by choice, by predetermined setting, I can get you back any time I choose. I am sure of it.»
Blade was not so sure. And he saw why Lord L had not confided in J. «You mean, sir, that this is in a very real sense a brand-new experiment and you offer no guarantees?» He gazed at the awesome loom of the giant computer. «This is not really the same computer, sir?»
Lord L jammed his book beneath his arm and clasped his fragile blue-veined hands on his white-smocked breast. He favored Blade with one of his best smiles. As J would have put it, he was being smarmy.
«When did you return from your last trip into Dimension X, my boy?»
«Six months ago.» J had insisted on six-month intervals, time to find and assess any damage to Blade’s brain tissue.
Lord L nodded. «Right. Six months. And during those six months I have been working every day, up to eighteen hours a day, on this machine. Of course it is not the same computer, Richard. How could it be? I don’t intend it to be. Science can never stand still.»
Blade blinked at the old man and pretended to think. Pretended because he already knew what he was going to do, what he must do — go through with it. Never mind that it was a totally new approach and dangerous as hell. What else could he do? Who else was there? It was, after all, his job. His duty.
He nodded curtly to Lord L. «Okay, sir. Let’s see if you can put me back in Alb. Let’s get on with it.»
Lord L hobbled to the red button. He waved a hand. «Good boy. Good luck.» He pressed the button.
Lights flashed on the instrument board. Gauges spun. Blade felt the slow itch of the current pulsing in his veins and arteries. Soon now there would be pain and more pain and then an exploding universe. He would be hurled, flung, not up or down or out, but into a new dimension. He would awaken as naked as a newborn babe in some strange land, and the fight for survival would begin. He would—
He became aware, and because of that very awareness, knew that something had gone wrong. There was pain, yes, but it was only the current clawing at him. Racking him, flowing through the conductors of his bones, twisting him. Pain. Blade wanted to scream and found his jaws locked. He was still in the chair, still in the glass booth, still in Home Dimension. Burning and yet not scorched. There was no smell of burning flesh. Long blue sparks flashed from his toes and fingers, and a crackling halo encircled his head. And now smoke.
Smoke. Dense, greasy brown, it poured into the tiny enclosure from the guts of the machine. Miniature lightning stroked back and forth across the room and in the forked luminescence Blade saw Lord L staggering toward the instrument board. The old man was bent double, coughing and shielding his eyes as he fumbled for switches and toggles and buttons.
Blade made a great effort to leave the chair. The current still bound him. He struggled and threshed about, pitting his great muscles against the current and the tiny wires that held him as if they had been chains.
Lord L pressed a final button. The current drained away. Blade snapped the wires, brushed aside the electrodes and was about to leave the chair when he stopped and stared.
Between himself and Lord Leighton was a spinning vortex of brown smoke. It moved and undulated, writhing, taking form and then it ceased to be smoke and became—
What? What was it? For one of the few times in his life Blade knew the heart-shocking thrill of pure physical terror. Not so much at the man who stood there, if it was a man, but at the manner of appearance. Blade hesitated, his hands braced on the chair arms, wary, and now responsive to the massive dose of adrenaline pumped into his system by fear.
The creature shared his fear. And acted. It let out a high snarl of rage and terror and rushed at Lord Leighton. In its right hand, raised to kill, was a crude stone axe. The old man cowered back against the gauge board, his hands raised to fend off the blow, his voice quavering in a shrill scream.
«Help, Richard! Help me. Get it!»
Blade left his feet eight feet behind the thing and brought it down in a flying tackle. Its legs were covered with hair and it had a rancid animal smell. It was small, hardly half the size of Blade, but wiry and bulging with muscle. And as fast as a cat.
Lord L was screaming something that Blade could not make out. No time. The creature was on its feet and striking at him with the axe. Blade fended it off and got a wristhold and sent the axe flying across the room. The gaping mouth opened and long fangs slashed at Blade’s throat. Blade held it off and struck with a tremendous right cross. He missed the jaw and jarred his hand and arm on an oversize skull.
A constant stream of furious sound came from the throat of the thing. Small deep-set eyes hated Blade. The thing screamed and slashed with long nails: «Orggggghhhhh— Orgggggggg— Ohhrrrrggrrr.»
Lord Leighton’s voice, as from a far place, fell into recognizable words. «Be careful, Richard! For God’s sake, be careful. Don’t kill it! Don’t hurt it! For God’s sake, don’t kill it!»
; The sweating, struggling Blade had no time to appreciate the irony. He was too busy keeping whatever it was from killing him. Again and again he fought the fangs away from his throat and tried to get in a knockout blow, even a killing blow and to hell with his Lordship, but the creature was as fast and as slippery as a greased snake. It kept leaping at Blade, growling its Orggggggggg— orggggggggg—
Then Blade did what he should have done before. He stepped away. The thing stood gazing at him, hunched, long arms dangling, huge jaw thrust forward, looking at Blade in puzzlement and confusion.
Blade feinted with a left.
Orggggrggggggg— It sprang at him again.
Blade shifted his feet and brought the right in level and just right and with all his shoulder leverage behind it. His fist crashed home on the prognathic jaw. The man, animal, thing or creature slumped into a heap on the floor. Blade, panting and bleeding from a dozen scratches and cuts, stood looking down at it.
Lord Leighton leaped forward and caught Blade’s arm. The old man was livid, sweating, shaking all over and in a mingled delirium of apprehension and delight. He literally danced round the supine figure on the rubberized floor of the computer room. The words came tumbling inchoate, hardly understandable.
«Don’t hurt him — you mustn’t hurt him — easy does it. A prize, Richard, a prize! Beyond my wildest dreams! A treasure — a veritable treasure. Must not harm it — by no means harm it— I— Something went wrong — something went wrong and—»
Blade wiped sweat from his eyes. «Yes, sir. Something sure as hell went wrong. What is it? Where did it come from? What are we going to do with it?»
Lord L ignored him. He was kneeling by the thing, examining the hairy body, stroking it like a baby with the colic.
«I don’t know, Richard. Don’t care. No time for all that now. But it must be from another dimension — a time lapse and possible parallel development and millions, maybe even billions of years. I—»
Lord Leighton came suddenly to his feet. He peered at Blade with his hooded eyes. «Top secret from now on, my boy. Absolute top security! No one must know about this. Absolutely no one. You understand that, my boy? Do you? An order, Richard, an absolute order.»
«How about J?»
Lord L grimaced, hesitated, then with reluctance said, «Of course J. I suppose he must know. But no one else. Absolutely no one else. Now you wait here and watch it while I get a hypo and some drugs. I’ll have to knock it out, I suppose. Keep it unconscious for a time. Have to. Otherwise it will only destroy itself or make us destroy it. That must not happen.» He scuttled for the door. «I won’t be a second.»
Blade stared down at the thing on the floor. It was breathing heavily through large, flattened nostrils. There were flecks of foam around the mouth. It did not move.
Blade’s hand and arm ached from the blow he had given it.
Blade sniffed at the burnt-out computer shell. He found that he could grin. The old boy had really fouled this one up. Six months of work gone up in smoke and the old man had conjured up some sort of a hairy demon from somewhere out there in limbo.
Blade shrugged. And laughed.
He touched the unconscious creature with his bare foot The body hair was long and coarse and clotted with dirt and sweat, and the smell from it was fast overpowering the acridity of the smoke.
Blade was still chuckling when Lord L came back with a tray on which was a hypodermic needle and several small bottles containing a clear liquid. His Lordship gave him a reproving glance as he filled the needle and injected the brute thing on the floor.
«This is a very serious matter,» said Lord L. «Not at all funny, Richard. We have probably made the greatest scientific discovery of all time. A serious matter, my boy. Very serious.»
«Yes, sir,» said Blade. «But now what, sir? Where do we go from here?»
Lord L glanced around as though he expected spies to leap from the shattered computer. «We shall have to be very careful and very cunning. And there is much hard work in store for us. All of us. I have already used my authority to clear the outer areas and seal us off. The first thing, Richard, is that you go and fetch J at once. Best not try to explain this matter to him. I will do that. Go now. Hurry.»
Blade pointed out that he could not have explained the matter to J even had he wished. You cannot explain what you do not understand yourself.
Lord L ignored him. All he said was, «Go at once, please.»
«Is it all right if I dress first, Lord Leighton?»
His Lordship did not hear.
Chapter Four
The next month was as frenetic as any Blade had experienced in his thirty years. Lord Leighton, always a martinet and a slavedriver, reached into some hidden reserve of energy and summoned a demonic fury that sorely tried Blade and J, both younger men. All three became master liars. Lord L, as chief Ananias, was a good teacher and was expert in twisting the truth into odd shapes. His Lordship’s great fear, his chief nightmare, was that the world would find out about Ogar — as they had come to call the creature, from the snarling sounds he made — and wrest his prize from him before he could complete his studies.
J, who had a plan of his own, had a blazing battle with Lord L about this. J insisted that the Prime Minister be let in on the secret. His Lordship said no. J insisted.
«He must know,» J said flatly. «For our protection and his. Else how do we explain the delay in Project DX? Be practical, Leighton! Our money is running out. The PM has to go before a committee and beg for more secret funds. He can’t, and won’t, do that unless he knows exactly what is going on.»
J won that argument. It was the only one.
When the massive complex was excavated beneath the Tower someone had thought to include a single large cell, a modern dungeon, in the lowest sub-basement. It was to this cell that Blade carried the unconscious Ogar after Lord L summarily cleared the place of all personnel. It was there that Ogar slept his drugged sleep, fed intravenously, while Lord L did a detailed and loving Bertillon, crooning happily to himself as he made cranial measurements. When J rashly suggested that perhaps a professional anthropologist should be called in, the old man flew into a rage.
The Prime Minister came in the dead of night, spent half an hour viewing Ogar and listening to Lord L, and left in a state of shock, muttering to himself. His position, he told J later, was unique in every sense of the word. No politician had ever had to cope with a situation like this before.
The coming of Ogar did accomplish one other thing. For the time being, at least, it healed the growing breach between J and Lord Leighton. There was no more talk of brain surgery and, as they became less snappish, the two older men regained some of their former rapport. Even so, J, on the first day, could not refrain from jabbing the needle into Lord L.
With a malicious grin he quoted directly from the old man’s computer speech at Reading University: «… we have at least succeeded in eliminating the danger of schizophrenia… when they are built, they function exactly as intended.»
He received a cold glare from the hooded yellow eyes. «May I point out,» said his Lordship, «that some of the greatest scientific discoveries have been made by accident. In any case I have already found the error and the computer will be rebuilt in a month or so. But that is not my chief concern at the moment. I have plans, great plans.»
Both J and Blade left their apartments and moved into quarters far below the Tower computer complex. Here they were self-sufficient, with no need to venture outside. There was no elevator — it stopped on the level above — and the only way out or in was by a narrow stairway. This was guarded by a massive steel door that was kept locked. Above them the lesser computers were humming again, all personnel back at work, and the security had been redoubled.
The stone axe was shipped away, with elaborate security precautions, for an appraisal by experts. Within three days the report was back and his Lordship shared it with them.
HAFT — this wood is unknown to us. Suggest may be
some species of iron-wood believed extinct since Lower Palaeolithic Age. Workmanship suggests culture unknown to us.
AXE — this macrolith also a puzzler. We have seen nothing like it before. Main component is undoubtedly quartz, but with a mixture of greenstone, quartzite and cherty. This is impossible according to present knowledge, yet repeated tests prove it to be so. Possible that meld might be a result of intense heat, in which case heat would have to approach that of inner sun. Workmanship again suggests no culture known to us.
At the bottom of the report was a scribble. Dear Leighton — what goes on here?
The scribble made Lord L most unhappy.
«They’re bound to start nosing around sooner or later,» he told J and Blade.
«All the more reason to start cracking,» rejoined J, who had his plan and was keeping it to himself for the moment. J was in a very good form and biding his time. For the moment the Prime Minister was appeased, if slightly dazed, and matters were going smoothly enough. J kept a steady pressure on the old man to see that the computer was rebuilt as rapidly as possible. This was not easy, but J did it. Left to his own designs, Lord L would have spent every waking hour by the cot on which Ogar still lay drugged.
At the end of the first week Lord Leighton summoned them to the cell and, as they stood around the cot on which Ogar slept, gave his first full report. Blade and J were too impressed to interrupt. The cell by this time was full of the body smell of the hairy creature on the cot.
Lord L, using a ruler as a pointer, poked and prodded and explained. You would have thought, as J said later hi jest, that the old man had himself spawned the thing on the cot.
«Ogar,» said Lord L, «is from another dimension. A Dimension X. It is very important to remember that.»
Blade, recalling the bloody struggle in the computer room, thought that he was hardly likely to forget it.
J said: «Do get on with it, Leighton, and do remember to whom you are speaking. Dick and I aren’t scholars or intellects. Keep it simple.»
His Lordship smiled. «I will try. But remember also that any statement I make, any description, is only an analogue and not an exact statement of fact.
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