by Jeffrey Lord
“Absolute nonsense, I say. He is foxing us.”
“Shhhh - I don’t think so. Not now. He is deep under. He is talking out of his subconscious now.”
“Alb bronze axe jade - warrior horse tharn - tharn - the power gone - the power gone - “
“This is no good at all to us. A waste of time.”
“Maybe not. Get it all down anyway - you can use it as a guide when you question him again under torture.”
“Not me. That is their job.”
“Shut up, man, and do your job. Copy down every word he says.”
Blade groaned deeply. “I slaveface am - the gorge - towers and the gorge - rain pink sun never - kill the head - head ball bouncing into wine - poison redbreard dru drusilla did always did cold lady maiden could suck suck suck life from suck me - “
Voice, querulous: “This is a failure. No point in going on with it. I am not interested in his fantasy life - I want hard facts. We may as well stop now. How long before he comes out of it?”
“Several hours. Four or five at least. And I wouldn’t call it a complete failure. You have some interesting notes.”
“Hah! That’s because you aren’t in my shoes. You don’t have to face them with a dozen pages of insane raving. No - I shall just have to do it the hard way. It’s all laid on. I only have to make a phone call.”
A thick blanket of purple fleece settled over Richard Blade. He smiled and slept. The voices were gone, he was alone in the universe. Peace. Sleep.
Blade came awake feeling weak and sick. Still on the table, still bound to it, still naked though the blanket had been tossed over him. He stared at the oriel window. Dark outside.
A man cleared his throat. Blade swiveled his eyes. It was the same guard, the silent man with the pistol, sitting on a camp chair and nodding a bit, fighting sleep, the pistol drooping into his lap.
Blade felt a surge in his bowels. This would be it, then. The time was as good as any. Night. Sleepy guards and himself coming weak and dazed out of a powerful drug. They would not expect him to give trouble. That might give him just the slight edge he needed.
He strained up against the straps and chains. “I have to go to the bathroom again. Hurry up. And I feel sick - like I’m going to vomit any second. You want me to do it here?”
The man stood up. He had been expecting this. He waved the pistol at Blade. “Hold it, mate. Just hold on to it for a bullet few bleeding seconds.”
He went to the door and tapped on it, then came back to cover Blade with the pistol. A minute or so later the other two men came in, one with a pistol and the other with the familiar Sten gun. Blade noted that the Sten was on safety, the cocking handle in the lock slot. He grinned at the Sten gunner. “That thing hasn’t blown up in your face yet?” His answer was a grunt.
They herded him along the same passage and over the cobbled area to the toilet cubby. A fine rain greased the cobbles and it was so dark that Blade could not see the brick fence to his left. Coming back it would be to his right. He didn’t care about the gate. He would have no time for gates.
As they approached the toilet he began to pray silently that the single rusty razor blade would be on the washbowl. He needed it. He was planning on it. He had spotted it on his previous trip and now all his hopes of success hung on it still being there.
It was there. As he squatted and let himself spew he cast an eye at it. Ancient, eaten with rust, staining the already dirty porcelain, it might have lain there for years. Awaiting this moment.
Blade strained and groaned. He put his head in his hands. “I’m sick at both ends,” he complained. “What did those bastards shoot into me, anyway?”
One man grinned. Another spat. All regarded him like a clinical specimen. Nothing to do with them. They did their job, got paid, and asked no questions. And yet the rhetorical question had value. Patter. Patter to distract the audience.
Blade put his head in his hands again, groaned louder, and” peered down between his legs at the toilet bowl. Nothing. Panic flared in him. Suppose he didn’t pass it? Suppose it was tucked away somewhere in his guts and refused to come out? Then he must find another way.
There it was. A shiny aluminum capsule that shielded yet another inner capsule. Between the two capsules was a thin buffer of acid. Acid that would be activated by air.
Now the tricky part. His three guards were becoming impatient.
Blade got partially up, groaned hideously, then sank to the seat again. He tried to smile at the men. They stared blankly back at him.
“Be just half a mo,” Blade said. “Ohhhhhh - now my guts are cramping. Ohhhhhh - “
He raised, turned, put his hands on the sides of the bowl and began to retch miserably. It was a convincing performance. One of the men said, “He is a sick bloke, all right. Glad it ain’t me.”
Blade reached down into his own excreta and palmed the capsule. Done. He retched for another minute, acting out his part, then staggered weakly to the washbowl. The razor blade lay waiting. This was also tricky. The capsule was the size of three aspirins - he had swallowed it with oil - and he held it between his left thumb and first finger as he washed his hands. His guards watched.
Blade retched again, bent over the bowl, groaned. He brushed the razor blade into the bowl and waited. Had they seen it?
“Get a jump on,” one of them said. “You think we want to fool with you all the bleeding night?”
Blade washed his hands. He gashed the thin shell of the capsule with the razor and dropped the capsule and blade into the bowl. He ran a thin stream of water, saw the capsule vanish down the drain. The acid was at work. Two minutes.
Blade dried his hands on toilet paper as he began to count to himself. Nothing could stop the explosion now. The RXD 1, cyclonite hexogen, T 9, was a liquid plastic that was the latest thing. Only atomic fission exceeded it in fury. In the tight space of the drains it was going to tear everything to hell.
A minute and a half now. The acid was eating away at the inner capsule. It was precise. Two minutes and the acid would eat through and activate the explosive. The explosion, Blade thought, would be mainly upward. But there would be a fringe effect and he would just have to take his chances. He kept counting.
He slowed his steps. Not too fast. He set the training post in the courtyard as his marker. Beyond that he could not go. The rain had thickened. That might help.
Blade listened for the Sten gunner taking the cocking lock off. That he didn’t want. That would mean that he took a burst in the back as he ran for the wall. He did not hear the snick he dreaded. They were approaching the training post now. The rain wept and the cobbles were like dirty glass under his bare feet. He began to pull the blanket around him with one hand, bunching it.
They were at the post. For the first time he thought of it as an executioner’s post. Stop thinking. Time to go.
Blade stopped and pointed. He screamed, “Rat! Look at that big rat!”
The man behind him bumped into him. Blade whirled and flung his blanket at the Sten gunner. It fluttered and folded over the man’s head. Blade butted hard into the man behind him and hurled him back into the third man, who had just raised his pistol. Blade ran.
For the wall on his right. He ducked and he ran, not trying to zig-zag - too slippery for that - and he put on a burst of speed that he had not known he was capable of. Behind him a pistol snapped and the bullet whirred past, smacked the wall and disintegrated. Fragments stung his bare legs. Another shot.
Blade lunged at the wall. It was six feet high and he caught the top with one mighty bound, getting his elbows over and pulling himself up. His spine was an icy rod. Where was the Sten?
A nasty chatter told him. Part of the brick wall exploded at his left elbow. Then Blade was over and falling into the soft earth of a flower bed and running into darkness. Roots and weeds and branches caught at him and clawed and dragged and slashed his flesh. He fell. He got up and kept running into nothing. He held his hands outstretched to keep from brai
ning himself on a tree or another wall. He slipped down an incline and rolled through gravel and rock, punctured himself a few more times and ended up against a thick hedge. Dark. He was as good as blind.
The sky lit up behind him. A huge red flower blossomed in the wet night sky. It turned yellow at the edges and before the blast knocked him into the hedge he saw that a lane ran just beyond it. He was flung painfully into the hedge and half through it, wedged into it, while a great G force slammed at his belly and he watched dark objects rise and Soar over what had been the stable. Strange shrapnel pattered down about him as the first sharp flame began to die.
Richard Blade forced his way on through the hedge, came out on the narrow muddy lane and began to run as best he could. He hurt all over.
Thomas Chatters, of the Salisbury Fire Department, never forgot that night. He was to tell the tale a thousand times in the pubs, while his friends stood him pints, and as an old man he told it to his children’s children.
He would say: “Got this call to Nine Yews Manor, we did. Lord Hale’s place, only the Lord wasn’t living there since his divorce. Empty, it were, or supposed to be.
“Engines from St. Giles got there first, you see, and we come along after. Right when we’re turning into the lane there comes this great bloke walking out of the woods. Naked as the day he was born, I swear. All cut and bleeding, too. I swear, and don’t mind saying he give us all a bit of fright. Great huge lad, he was, and as cool as ice. Walks right up to Ned, as was Captain then, and asks for a slicker to cover him. When he gets that he takes Ned aside and whispers to him. We was all watching, like, and could see poor Ned was puzzled and maybe a little afraid. We see Ned shake his head. Then this big bloke - dark man he was with a stubble, dark, too, and a mean look - this bloke reaches out and shakes Ned like he was a baby and yells something at him and Ned he sudden agrees to whatever it was and the next thing we know Ned puts me in charge. Just like that. And Ned is driving away with the stranger in his own car, turning back to Salisbury. Strangest thing is - Ned never would tell what the stranger said to him.”
Blade was dropped off in Salisbury at a police station near Poultry Cross. He whispered a code word to the Sergeant and was given a private room and a phone. The Sergeant left him to rustle up some hot tea and a drop of something to stiffen it.
J was not at Copra House. The night duty man said that he could be reached in Prince’s Gate.
Lord Leighton answered the phone himself. His Lordship wasted no time. He congratulated Blade on being alive and, he hoped, well, and turned him over to J.
J sounded ravished. Like a man in shock and drawn so fine that he might go over the edge any moment. After listening to Blade’s brief explanation J said: “Stay there. I’ll start a man down immediately for you. Any emergency needs?”
Blade said that he could do with some clothes. All of the local coppers were small men. Or so it seemed.
J would see to it. He sounded so apathetic that Blade said, “I get the feeling that something has gone badly wrong, sir. Aside from the whole plan, I mean. They made fools of us. But there will be another time. And there are a few of them that will never bother us again.”
J was silent. Blade said, “I know something is wrong, sir. You haven’t asked me for positive identification yet. How do you know I am the real Richard Blade?” He laughed.
J did not laugh. He said, “I don’t have to, dear boy. I know who you are. I should, damn it all! We just sent the fake Blade through the computer.”
Blade could think of nothing to say. He was not sure that he had heard correctly. The connection was not too good.
“And you,” J continued, “are going after him. Get up here as fast as you bloody well can.”
Chapter Five
So far it had been total disaster. Defeat. J was wan and haggard, close to a nervous breakdown, and even Lord Leighton was subdued. J insisted that there was not a minute to lose and briefed Richard Blade on the run, as it were, preparing him for his trip through his computer into some new Dimension X.
They were far below the Tower, in the computer complex. Blade was naked again but for the usual loincloth. Lord L smeared some tar smelling ointment on him against computer burns.
Blade, immediately after meeting the two other men, pointed out the obvious.
“So he got through, this phony me. My alter ego. So what? You sent him out, Lord Leighton, right? So forget him. Don’t bring him back. Takes care of everything.”
Lord L was inclined to agree with Blade. Not so J. J was feeling guilty and inadequate. He had let them all down. The blame was his, and his alone, and he could not rest until he knew the fake Blade was dead.
“Go after him, Dick, lad. Find him. Kill him. That’s the one sure way of knowing that he won’t somehow manage to get back with the secret.”
Lord L poo-pooed this. “You aren’t thinking clearly, man. How could he get back - unless I bring him back through the computer?”
“Because,” snapped J, pacing the lino-floored preparation room, “because we don’t know where he has gone. We have no idea how many hundreds, or thousands, even millions of X Dimensions there are. Suppose you sent the phony Blade into an XD so far advanced in electronic science that our stuff looks like kindergarten? If he survives, and he is smart enough to, all he has to do is explain to the right people and they will send him back. Build their own machine and pop him right back into our dimension. Right into the Kremlin more than likely. Then where are we?”
They headed through the rooms housing lesser computers, walking in single file through the buzzing, scanning, light flashing machines. Men in white coats, all cleared for highest security and representing some of England’s best brains, paid them little attention. Blade thought that Project DX had come a long way since that first afternoon when Lord Leighton had sent him to Alb by mistake.
As they approached the master computer, where even J must leave them, Lord L said: “Blade is scheduled for this trip anyway, J, so I am not objecting to that. But you realize that there is no guarantee, absolutely none, that he will land in the same Dimension X as his counterpart! The Russian may be in another dimension entirely.”
“I know that,” snapped J. “How well I know it! But we must try, take the chance. You haven’t changed the computer settings? We agreed, you know - “
“The computer settings are exactly the same,” His Lordship said tersely. “That is still no guarantee. There are many factors to be considered and I cannot possibly calculate them all in the short time we have. But we can try.”
They reached the final security station. Blade and Lord L were photographed and fingerprinted by automation. J lingered in the back with a burly guard. As Blade vanished through the last door J flipped a hand at him and called out, “Find him, boy. Kill him.”
Blade smiled and waved. If he could he would. If he could -
Lord Leighton led him into the entrails of the giant master computer. To the small glass booth sitting on the square of rubberoid, to the chair that so resembled an electric chair. Lord L, his parchment skin stretched drum tight over his fine old bones, was busily applying the shiny electrodes to Blade’s body. A web of red and blue wires began to enmesh the big man.
His Lordship said. “J blames himself too much for all this. It worries me, how hard he is taking it. Could have happened to anybody, you know. Just bad luck and, give the devils their due, a lot of bloody guts on their part. Who would have thought the man to be so bold?”
The fake Richard had gone to J’s home at three in the morning. He had been wearing a long heavy coat. Beneath the coat he wore a harness containing enough high explosive to level six city blocks. A single wire connected the HE to a simple push button in the man’s hand. One squeeze, even in dying reflex, and how many innocents would die?
J had obeyed orders. Carefully and exactly. They picked up Lord Leighton and went to the Tower, and with the threat of total devastation hanging over them, passed through all security and into the inne
rmost sanctum. No wonder, Blade thought now as Lord L taped the last electrode into place, no wonder J was a wrecked man.
The fake Richard Blade had insisted on being shown everything. “As like you,” J told Blade, “as if you came from the same egg.”
Even the old scientist was forced to concur. “If I didn’t know the truth,” he admitted, “I would say that you and the other Blade are monozygotic twins. And not only in physical likeness - the Russian had your speech, your coolness and flair, your - “
J said it. “Your sheer guts. Brass, if you will. That daredevil quality of yours, Richard. I - I still don’t quite believe it.”
“I do,” the old man said grimly. “I believe it. He sat in the chair and laughed at us and dared us to experiment with him. He hadn’t believed a word of our story. He sat with his finger on that damned button and made me put on the electrodes as best I could and he laughed, just like you, Richard, and he said now send me someplace. I did, of course.”
“And I,” said J, “became an old man! The explosive, you know. We had no way of knowing what the computer current would do to it.”
Lord L tapped Blade on the shoulder. “Ready, son?”
Blade nodded. He had doubts that he would ever find his double, that he would land in the same Dimension X - that, and the fears thereof, were products of J’s guilt and overwrought nerves - but he still had a job to do. This was his fourth time out, the pitcher’s fourth trip to the well. In the strain and intensity of the moment he forgot the imposter. To hell with that. The man had overplayed his hand and was gone. Probably forever. In the meantime -
Lord Leighton smiled at Blade and pressed a switch.
Electricity bubbled in Blade’s body. Current flowed in his veins, moving sluggishly at first like stagnant canal water dammed and held. Then the dam burst.