Treasure Of The Stars rb-29

  Treasure Of The Stars

  ( Richard Blade - 29 )

  Джеффри Лорд

  Treasure of the Stars

  Blade 29

  By Jeffrey Lord

  Chapter 1

  The big man on the branch watched the soldiers passing thirty feet below. He watched them as intently as a hawk picking out its prey. None of the soldiers looked up or even seemed to realize there was such a direction. They tramped through the ankle-high grass, crackling twigs underfoot and ploughing through bushes. They made so much noise that the man in the tree could have followed their progress on a pitch-black night. If it weren't for the ugly-looking rifles in their hands, the soldiers would have been almost funny.

  The man in the tree was armed only with a rough club and a rawhide sling. He wore only a barbaric collection of animal skins. No one would have laughed at him, though.

  He was an inch over six feet tall, and weighed more than two hundred pounds. His heavy-boned frame was layered with superbly-conditioned muscles. His skin was darkened by wind, weather, sun, and dirt, and seamed with scars in at least a dozen places.

  The last of the soldiers was passing under the tree and heading off downhill. Their eyes were still fixed on the ground or on the backs of their comrades. The man in the tree mentally noted other details about the soldiers besides their clumsiness and carelessness. They wore round black helmets with narrow white crests, dark green jackets and trousers that looked more elegant than comfortable, black leather boots and belts, dark brown packs on polished metal pack frames. Two men carried fat snub-nosed weapons that looked like giant shotguns-probably grenade launchers. The rest carried heavy rifles with big pan shaped magazines, fixed bayonets, and elaborate sights. Each rifleman also had three or four egg-shaped red grenades hooked to his belt. One man carried a shiny long barreled pistol.

  The soldiers might be overdressed and clumsy, but they looked remarkably well-armed. If they could use their weapons better than they marched, they would be formidable.

  So the man waited until the soldiers were well out of sight before climbing down from the tree. He stood for a moment at its base, listening carefully. The soldiers were still moving as noisily as ever. He could follow them without any trouble. He swung the club in his right hand and set off on the trail of the soldiers.

  He moved with grace and power, putting his feet down with great precision yet still covering ground quickly. Every movement suggested the flawless coordination and reflexes of some powerful animal. Yet the heavy-boned dark face was too alive and aware to be an animal's, and the dark eyes were searching, restless, almost frighteningly intelligent. In this man, mind and body had joined to create a superb fighting machine, one that didn't seem to belong in the same world with those clumsy soldiers in green.

  In fact, the man wasn't from the same world as the soldiers he followed. His name Was Richard Blade, this was Dimension X, and he'd come across infinity by what might be called science but still seemed more like a miracle.

  Richard Blade actually didn't belong in his own homeland, modern Britain, much more than in Dimension X. He was a man whose mind and body were made for the lonely, dangerous, and frequently short life of the professional adventurer. He would have been a tower of strength to Francis Drake raiding Spanish galleons in the sixteenth century. In the safe, sanitary, ordered life of a modern industrial country, he was a man out of place.

  Every so often, though, even the most oddly-shaped peg will find a suitable hole. When Blade left Oxford, a man called J was head of the secret intelligence agency MI6. He suspected what skills this young man might have, and made him a field agent straight out of the university. Blade justified J's confidence by becoming MI6's best field man. Time after time he succeeded in assignments which would have been suicidal for any other agent. He still knew he had nine chances out of ten of dying violently, but accepted this with open eyes. It was part of the price to be paid for doing his duty and living a life which so well suited him.

  Years passed, and in a laboratory under the Tower of London an aging, half-crippled, hunchbacked scientific genius conceived an experiment. His name was Lord Leighton, he was even more brilliant than he was eccentric, and the experiment was to link a sophisticated computer and a powerful human mind, then see what happened. He hoped to create a combined human-electronic intelligence with the virtues of both and the limitations of neither.

  The human mind had to be powerful, and it had to be housed in an equally powerful body. So it was hardly surprising that Lord Leighton ended up with Richard Blade as his test subject. Blade was very nearly the best living example of the ancient ideal of «a sound mind in a sound body.»

  What happened after that surprised even Lord Leighton. The computer did not link itself with Blade's mind. Instead it twisted all of Blade's senses, so that he awoke to live and move about in a strange savage world called Alb. It was a world that might have existed thousands of years in Earth's past, but it was not really Earth. It was-Dimension X.

  Blade faced all the dangers of Alb with the same skill and determination he'd used against enemy agents. Once more he survived, until Lord Leighton adjusted the computer, restored Blade's senses to normal, and brought him home to Britain.

  Blade came home to a crisis. Obviously a whole new world lay out there in Dimension X, perhaps many worlds. If these worlds could be explored and exploited, there could be a new dawn and a new empire for Britain.

  Just as obviously, the existence of Dimension X had to be kept secret. If it was revealed, no one knew for certain what might happen, but everybody expected the worst. Revealing the secret of Dimension X might lead to a nuclear war and the end of this world, rather than the discovery of new ones.

  So Blade found himself caught up in the most vital top-secret project in British history. Lord Leighton continued as scientific head of Project Dimension X, producing larger and larger computers. A staff of hand-picked security-cleared technicians helped him as much as he would let them.

  J added handling the security of the Project to his other duties. Less formally, he kept an eye on Blade, heading off Lord Leighton's wilder schemes when they threatened to put Blade in danger for no good reason. J was nearer seventy than sixty, a man nearing the end of his life, a many who'd been married to his duties all that life. Blade was the son he'd never had.

  Inevitably, money was needed to expand and continue the Project, money by the millions of pounds, which had to be found somewhere. The Prime Minister's Secret Fund helped, and so did selling what Blade carried back from Dimension X-gold and jewels, strange drugs, stranger metals, the secrets of advanced technologies. Project Dimension X never got rich, never even showed a clear, profit, but somehow kept going.

  Blade made trip after trip into Dimension X, and little by little some of the mysteries vanished. No one could call the Project a failure, yet somehow the big successes everyone hoped for continued to be just out of reach.

  None of the technological secrets Blade brought home could be exploited without years of expensive research and development.

  There was no way to predict where Blade would end up, when Lord Leighton pulled the master switch on the computer. He'd visited some Dimensions more than once, but usually he entered a new world on each trip. Dimension X could never be explored or exploited this way.

  Finally, the strain of travel from one Dimension to another was beyond most people's endurance. No one ever came back from Dimension X with Blade and stayed alive and sane for more than a few hours. No one except Blade had ever made the round trip from Home Dimension and stayed alive and sane at all. They'd been looking for another person with Blade's qualities for a long time, without finding one.

  So
the Project rested entirely on Blade's survival, and was horribly vulnerable because of this. In Dimension X Blade faced dangers that made anything in Home Dimension seem like children's games. He survived them all, but the luck of even the most unkillable man will run out sooner or later.

  Blade knew this, hoped for someone else to take over his job, but didn't let the matter worry him. He had to keep going as long as he could. It was a matter of duty, and more than that.

  Blade thrived on the life of a secret agent, but it wasn't a completely free life. He was always part of an organization, even if the rest of it was thousands of miles away. He was always operating under rules and restraints, and he was always operating in a twentieth-century world. In Dimension X he was a man alone, nothing between him and a gruesome death but his own skill, strength, and wits.

  More time passed, and one morning Richard Blade went through a familiar routine for the twenty-ninth time. He went to the Tower of London and was identified by grimfaced Special Branch men guarding the entrance to the underground complex. He took an elevator two hundred feet down to the complex, then walked a long echoing corridor, guarded by a score of electronic sentinels.

  At the door of the computer section J met him, a little grayer than before, perhaps, but still as erect as a sword and quietly concerned about Blade. Together they passed through the rooms full of supporting equipment and entered the main computer room.

  There Lord Leighton waited for them, among the towering gray crackle-finished consoles of his great computer. Blade went into a small room carved in the rock wall and prepared himself for his trip. He stripped naked, smeared himself with foul-smelling black grease to prevent electrical burns, and pulled on a loincloth.

  Then he came back out into the main room and sat down in a rubber-padded chair standing in a glass booth in the middle of the computer's consoles. J watched as Leighton scurried around Blade, attaching cobra-headed metal electrodes to every part of Blade's body-ears, fingers, toes, even his penis. From each electrode a colored wire trailed off into the computer.

  Meanwhile Blade hyperventilated, to fill his system with oxygen. Slowly he felt the tension flow out of him to be replaced by an eager anticipation of what he might find in Dimension X this time.

  Leighton finished his work and gave it a final inspection.

  He walked to the main control panel and watched the master timer as the computer readied itself for the great moment.

  Then J raised a hand in a farewell salute, Lord Leighton's hand came down on the red master switch, and Blade whirled off into Dimension X.

  Chapter 2

  Most of the time Blade traveled from Home Dimension to Dimension X in an explosive psychedelic bombardment of all his senses. Sometimes it was merely spectacular, sometimes terrifying, sometimes agonizingly painful.

  This time there was nothing like that. The computer room and everything in it vanished. In its place was an endless blackness, with silver and golden lights twinkling starlike in a thousand places. Blade felt hints of a terrible cold all around him, felt his skin beginning to prickle-then blackness and all the other sensations vanished. A moment in limbo, then a bone-jarring thud as he landed on a solid surface which seemed to be covered with some sort of padding.

  Blade kept his eyes closed and listened for any sounds that could mean immediate danger. He heard the sighing of wind, the creak of branches, and the twitters and chirps of several kinds of birds. Nothing else.

  Blade continued to lie still while he counted to twenty, allowing his body to reorient itself. His head ached slightly, but no worse than it would have done from a mild sinus attack. He felt none of the blinding agony which sometimes used to leave him immobile and vulnerable for half an hour. The hyperventilating seemed to prevent that sort of headache.

  Blade opened his eyes and sat up. He was sitting as naked as the day he was born on a thick layer of fallen blue needles. He seemed to be on a wooded hillside, surrounded by large trees. Some carried the blue needles and soared up out of sight, while other squatter ones spread wide and trailed long golden leaves. The ground was nearly clear except for fallen needles and occasional patches of waist-high reddish ferns. Upslope Blade caught a glimpse of blue sky and drifting white clouds. He listened again for any sounds except wind and birds, again heard nothing, and headed up the hill.

  The top of the hill was farther than he'd expected. He covered at least a mile before he broke out of the trees onto open, rocky ground. A few yards in front of him the ground dropped sharply away into a rugged cliff. Several hundred feet below it ended on the bank of a twisting little river, clear blue where it flowed deep, silvery where it boiled through a stretch of rapids. On the other side of the river the forest began again, an endless carpet of blue and gold with smaller patches of red. Blade had seldom seen such a lush and colorful display of vegetation outside the tropics.

  Many miles away across the treetops, the ground swelled into a range of green hills, then abruptly leaped upward into a wall of mountains. The sunlight blazed off snowscapes and glaciers twisting down scarred rocky flanks. Blade could only guess how high the mountains rose, but they looked at least as high as the Alps. They cut off the horizon in all directions except for one narrow valley.

  The sky was blue, with faint brownish-gray tinge. Blade sniffed the air. It was brisk and clean, the air of a virgin wilderness a thousand miles from civilization. Whatever tinged the sky didn't seem to be affecting the air.

  With a brisk wind blowing, it was almost chilly in the open. From the position of the sun Blade guessed it was early afternoon. He decided to get under cover or at least out of the wind before nightfall. Up here night could be dangerously chilly for a naked man.

  Blade began prowling along the cliff, looking for a way down. Along the river he'd be out of the wind, and he'd have drinking water and possibly fish. The river might even give him a trail out of this wilderness to whatever civilization this Dimension might have.

  Blade had never landed in a totally uninhabited Dimension and didn't really want to. A Dimension with no intelligent inhabitants might be useful for colonization, but that would need larger-scale transportation into Dimension X. It wouldn't be very useful for Richard Blade, who would have to survive like an animal, with nothing but his bare hands and his wits. There was such a thing as being too alone!

  The shadows were getting long before Blade found a place where the cliff had crumbled away to a slope. A stream breaking out of the fallen rocks made them dark and slick, but he'd climbed barehanded under worse conditions before. With a final look at the forest, he lowered himself onto the upper end of the rockfall and began working his way down.

  The way down was longer and harder than Blade expected. Several times he had to jump down farther than he liked, landing precariously and picking up a growing collection of bruises. Once he slipped, rolled thirty feet downward, nearly sprained his wrist, and came to a stop just short of a vertical drop onto sharp rocks. It was twilight before he reached the bottom of the rockfall.

  In front of him the river swept past the rocks so fast Blade realized it would be suicide to try swimming across here. He moved on downstream, exploring the riverbank.

  He was just about resigned to spending the night curled up among the rocks when his luck turned. Beyond a line of boulders, the river formed a broad, dark pool, deep and slow-moving. Blade plunged straight in.

  The water was icy cold, but after the first shock Blade found it refreshing. It scoured away some of the grime and sweat, eased the aches and pains, and left him feeling a great deal better.

  His feet were just touching bottom on the far side of the river when a hissing scream sounded high overhead. Blade dove forward, getting underwater without making a splash. Then he poked his head above the surface, just as the scream came again, three times in rapid succession.

  Looking up, Blade saw a weird shape sail across the sky. It reminded him of a slim mountain lion with tufted ears and long clawed legs. Heavy ribbed membranes like b
at wings extended between the legs, giving enough lifting surface to support the beast in the air. The creature glided across the sky like an immense flying squirrel, steering with its short fat tail.

  Blade counted nine more of the bat-cats before the last one disappeared. He faintly heard more screams from well upstream, where they seemed to have landed, then growling which slowly faded away. It sounded as if the beasts were feeding. On what, Blade didn't know, but knew he'd better be careful or the next time it might be on him. The bat-cats were large enough to be dangerous opponents for an unarmed man, even if they hadn't hunted in packs.

  Blade headed downstream again, staying in the water for a few hundred yards to avoid leaving a trail. Then he climbed out of the water, exercised vigorously to warm himself up and unkink his muscles, and kept going.

  The sun went down in an awesome display of orange, purple, and red which seemed to cover half the sky. Blade kept moving until the light was nearly gone and even his superb night vision could barely make out the ground in front of him. Then he found a narrow V between two roots of a large tree, drifted full of dead leaves. He crept in on hands and knees, settled himself with his back against the trunk, and piled over his legs and stomach all the leaves he could reach.

  It wasn't much protection, and he could only hope that none of the bat-cats would come by while he slept. It was still better than stumbling on through the night, more tired and chilled with each mile.

  Blade slid lower into the leaves, piled more over his chest, then lay back to sleep.

  Blade awoke when the sky was still a dirty gray, as a familiar sound blasted across the forest and jerked him out of sleep. It was the roar of a low-flying jet plane.

  Blade sprang to his feet, wide awake and looking around for the nearest spot where he could see the sky. A quick look told him there wasn't any nearer than the riverbank. He dashed down the slope, narrowly missing trees, leaping over stumps and fallen logs, reaching the open just as the sound of the jet faded away to the south.