The Forests Of Gleor rb-22 Read online

  J frowned. «Sounds rather like mystical guesswork to me.»

  Blade shrugged. «It could be mystical, and I'll admit it's guesswork. But isn't half the whole Project guesswork?»

  J had to laugh. «You're perfectly right. Only don't let Lord Leighton hear you say that. The man will never forgive you,» he added drily. «Ah, here's the elevator.»

  The elevator took them two hundred feet below the Tower in a few seconds. Then they walked down a long corridor, passing through a series of electronically monitored security doors to the main computer complex.

  The outer rooms of the complex were filled with the supporting equipment and technicians for the main computer. There seemed to be more of both each time Blade came through.

  One face was missing from among the technicians, though. Katerina Shumilova, computer technician and crack KGB agent, lay dead in Kano, killed defending the city against the attacks of the fierce Raufi from the desert. Katerina Shumilova, technician, enemy agent, and a woman Blade had loved. This was the only place in Home Dimension that could really remind Blade of her, and perhaps that was just as well. He could and would fight off all his memories of her, but he would be happier not to have to do so very often.

  Another, more familiar face peered around the last door at them as they approached it. Lord Leighton was already at work in his private sanctum, the room that housed the main computer. He waved Blade and J on in through the door. Silently it slid shut behind them.

  Leighton noticed Blade's ring almost at once. The man was past eighty, his legs twisted by polio, his spine distorted by a hunchback, what little remained of his hair milky white, and his lab coat as rumpled and dirty as an unwashed dish towel. There was nothing wrong with his eyes, however. They missed very little.

  Somehow the ring did not touch off an explosion of Leighton's famous temper. Blade had been half-expecting one. The scientist's ego was as great as his genius. He usually took a dim view of anybody else adding to his experiments.

  Instead, all that he said was, «You've thought it out, I take it?»

  Blade nodded, and repeated what he'd told J. Leighton listened almost politely-another surprise! — then nodded slowly.

  «All this seems compatible with my own data. Certainly if there are any incompatabilities, we can't expect to discover them without going ahead. Very well. Wear the ring, and good luck with it.»

  J went over to the folding observer's chair, pulled it out of the wall, and sat down. Blade headed for the little changing room carved out of the solid rock of the walls of the computer room.

  As he stripped off his clothes, he wondered why Lord Leighton was behaving in such a subdued fashion. It might be simple old age at long last catching up with him, but that was hard to believe. Perhaps Leighton simply felt a little less unsure of himself than before. All the accidents of Blade's last trip had proved beyond any doubt how little anybody really knew about Dimension X, or what went into sending a person there and bringing him back. For all his egotism, Lord Leighton was too honest a man and too good a scientist not to admit ignorance when it was so dramatically demonstrated-or when it would endanger Richard Blade. Blade doubted he'd ever really like the scientist the way he liked J. But certainly he was coming to respect the old boffin more with each crisis.

  Blade finished stripping himself, then smeared every inch of skin with a greasy black cream. It smelled dreadful, but it was supposed to prevent electrical burns when Blade was wired into the computer. Perhaps it actually did. Then he stepped out of the changing room, wearing only the grease, the ruby ring, and a small loincloth.

  He walked over to the glass booth in the center of the room and sat down in the metal chair inside the booth. The rubber seat of the chair felt chill and slick, almost slimy against his skin. He leaned back and let Lord Leighton go to work.

  Lord Leighton bustled about, unwinding long wires in a dozen different colors from the towering, crackle-finished gray consoles of the computer. Each wire ended in a gleaming metal electrode, shaped like a cobra's head. Swiftly but as carefully as a brain surgeon, Leighton taped the electrodes to Blade's skin, one after another, until Blade was covered with them from head to foot. They even hung from his earlobes, his toes, and his penis.

  Eventually there were no more electrodes or at least no more places to attach them. Lord Leighton backed away from Blade's chair. Blade felt like raising a hand in salute to the scientist. But he was so completely covered with electrodes and wires that he hardly dared even take a deep breath.

  By now the computer was through the preliminary phases of the main sequence. It was time for Lord Leighton to take over, as he always did, for the moment that would send the computer's pulses into Blade's brain, twisting his perceptions, twisting and hurling him out of the chair and the room and London, into Dimension X.

  Blade sometimes felt like twitting Lord Leighton about his insistence on manually controlling the huge computer. Did the scientist harbor secret doubts about the computer that was the product of his own genius?

  Hardly. All Leighton was doing was not assuming that the computer was completely infallible, and playing human backup at the decisive moment. Blade knew perfectly well the limitations of automatic systems without human backups. He'd outwitted far too many of them as a field agent for MI6. Lord Leighton would have been a fool not to take a hand. No one, not even his worst enemies, had ever called him a fool, or ever would.

  Leighton stepped up to the master control panel and scanned the lights playing across it. His hand came to rest lightly on the red master switch. Blade's eyes swung toward the switch and focused on it and the long thin hand above it. He saw J do the same.

  Then the hand came down on the switch, the switch slid down in its slot, and Blade's world fell apart.

  Every bit of the room shook and vibrated wildly, with a tremendous deafening roar. Wild lights in a dozen nightmarish eye-searing colors flashed and flared and ran up and down the walls, across the floor, around the booth.

  Cold blue fire played around Blade, long flames jetting out and sparks trailing from his fingers and toes, the tips of his ears and nose, even from his penis.

  The roar grew louder. Suddenly a giant spring seemed to uncoil beneath the chair and the booth, hurling them upward. Blade braced himself to be smashed to jelly against the rocky ceiling of the room. The rock seemed to melt away from the blue fire, like piles of sand washed away by an incoming wave. Blade roared up through the rock and into the gray daylight of London.

  He climbed higher and the Tower of London dropped away below him, shrinking until it looked no larger than a model he'd played with as a child. In all directions London spread out below him. He could make out the dull gleam of the Thames. the spires of Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament, the dome of Saint. Paul's, the haze from factories farther out in the suburbs and farther down the river.

  Still higher. Now the horizon began to curve, and he felt the cold of the stratosphere biting at his fingers and toes like a swarm of icy teeth. Somehow he felt no dizziness, no fading of vision, nothing to suggest that he was short of oxygen even in the thin air around him. It was as if the glass booth was a capsule that kept in the air but could not keep out the cold.

  Higher still. He had seen a satellite picture of London once. The scene below was beginning to remind him of that picture. He could not be a hundred miles high over southeastern England. but he was seeing everything that he could have seen from up there. The part of his mind that was still capable of analysis told him that this was a new kind of twisting of his senses by the computer.

  That moment of analysis seemed to trigger something in Blade's mind. With horrible suddenness all the remaining sensations of being naked a hundred miles above the earth crashed in on him. The cold was a flaming agony in every part of his body, until he wanted to shout out loud. He saw his skin turn snow white, as his sweat turned to ice crystals in a second.

  He wanted to shout, but he couldn't. All the breath in his body was expl
oding out of his lungs. His blood was not freezing, but it was boiling. He felt heart and veins and arteries rupturing, felt pink foam bubbling up inside of him and saw it spew out of his mouth. The pink foam poured out, formed a great cloud around him, blotted out the star-filled blackness above and the earth below. As his vision faded so did all his other senses, until at last Richard Blade felt nothing at all and died alone in his chair high above the earth.

  Chapter 3

  Blade slowly drifted back to consciousness. He felt warm breezes on his skin, long damp crass under him, heard the rippling of water. He also felt his head pounding like a furiously beaten drum. He lay quietly until the pounding bean to fade away.

  He felt surprised at being alive. The sensations of rising high above the Earth and then freezing and exploding in a vacuum had been much too vivid. He had never felt his own death with such gruesome realism.

  But whatever he'd felt, he was still alive. He sat up and began to flex each finger and toe, each muscle of each arm and leg. He was not only alive, but apparently unhurt. As he flexed the fourth finger of his left hand, he felt a stiffness in it that wasn't a torn or bound muscle. He stared down at the finger. The ruby ring seemed to stare back at him.

  Blade gave a shout of delight and sprang to his feet. He sprang up too fast for his still shaky coordination. His feet slipped on the wet grass and went out from under him. He sat down again even faster than he'd leaped up, jarring his headache into life again. He sat and turned his hand back and forth, watching the ruby glow like a hot coal as the sunlight struck it.

  The ring weighed only a couple of ounces altogether, and the ruby only a couple of carats. Yet they represented something monumental and magnificent to Blade. After all the years of Project Dimension X, he had finally succeeded in bringing something from Home Dimension into Dimension X! It looked as if his guess about the ring had been right. He would certainly have something to tell Lord Leighton when he got back.

  Blade realized that the headache was fading away again. Or perhaps he was just feeling too happy and triumphant about the ring to notice minor discomforts. One small ruby ring wasn't a survival kit, or a rifle, or even shorts and a pair of hiking boots. But it could be the start of better things. On his own, and out of his own imagination, he'd made a major breakthrough for the whole Project, and for England.

  More cautiously than before, Blade rose to his feet and looked around him. He wanted to orient himself, and also find something to use as a weapon. The next time he tried to take something into Dimension X, he'd try his old commando knife. It had been around him even more than the ring, since he'd taken it on several missions for MI6. It would also be a bloody sight more useful than the ring!

  Blade saw that he was standing in knee-high grass on the bank of a small river. The bank sloped downward to his left, then dropped vertically about a yard to the water. To his right the ground sloped gently upward. As the ground rose the grass gave way to clusters of bushes and small trees. Towering beyond them was a solid wall of trees that soared upward a hundred feet or more. Some of the real giants thrust their spreading, vine-tangled crowns up twice that high. The breeze blowing from the forest was warm and heavy with the odors of both growth and decay, of flowers, mold, and damp earth that had never seen the daylight.

  There were no fallen branches in sight, at least none that weren't too small or too rotten to be useful. Blade walked over to a limber sapling, about six feet tall and three inches thick at the butt. Gripping it with both hands, he began bending it back and forth, putting all his strength and weight into each heave. The sapling was even tougher than he'd expected, but one by one the fibers of the wood parted. At last one tremendous heave snapped the last few, and the sapling came free in Blade's hands.

  By the time he'd stripped off all the branches, he was sweating in the steamy heat and his hands were turning red and smelly with sap. He had his weapon, though. The stripped-down sapling would make a very respectable quarterstaff.

  That would be good enough for the moment. Blade had been active in the medieval club at Oxford. Instead of rowing or tennis, he'd worked out with mace, broadsword, and other traditional weapons, including the quarterstaff. In fact, he'd become noted for his deadly skill with the quarterstaff, a skill he'd never lost and one which had saved his life in more than one exotic dimension.

  Blade tossed his staff up in the air and caught it with one hand. As always, he felt better with a weapon. Not that he was helpless with only what nature gave him-he held a fifth-dan black belt in karate, and there were very few of the martial arts he couldn't use in a pinch. A weapon, though, always gave him an extra line of defense or an extra method of attack. He could never be sure that wouldn't be important, and in fact it usually was.

  With his staff in one hand, Blade walked down to the bank of the river. He looked around carefully, with the wariness of a prowling animal. There was nothing that looked dangerous anywhere in sight.

  Holding onto a root with one hand, Blade lowered himself slowly down the yard-high embankment into the water. It cooled and refreshed, washing away sweat and the last of his headache. He cupped his free hand, then drank and drank until his throat was no longer dry. Then he gripped the root with both hands, heaved himself up the embankment, and stood on the grass again. Water dripped down off him as he bent to pick up his staff.

  As he straightened up, staff in hand, he heard a shrill, sharp scream from among the bushes that lay between him and the forest. It was a woman's scream-no, two women. The screams weren't fear, though. They held surprise and anger, but no fear. Blade held his staff crosswise in both hands, then stalked toward the source of the noise.

  The screams came and went quickly. Other noises followed-grunts, heavy breathing, a war cry unmistakably from a man's throat, the sound of heavy footfalls and cracking branches as a small battle exploded into action.

  The battle was going on well in toward the forest. Blade slowed his advance. Somebody might need help, but he wouldn't be much good if he barged in blindly, taking out the wrong side or even getting taken out himself.

  A sudden whick of something slicing fast through the air was followed by the thunk of something else smashing solidly into bone. The whick-thunk came again. This time a man screamed in pain. Blade heard the sound of heavy, lurching footsteps, two sets of them. They moved rapidly toward him, branches rustling and twigs crunching as the people staggered along.

  Two men in short leather tunics and sandals burst out of the bushes. One of them hobbled and limped, favoring his left leg. The left kneecap was a smashed, bloody mess. As he emerged into the open the leg gave way entirely, and the man sat down on the grass with a whimper. A short sword dropped from his hand.

  The other man staggered on, his eyes staring blindly about him. One side of his skull was cracked wide open, and blood trickled from his ears and his mouth. He clutched a short throwing spear in one hand.

  The man staggered toward Blade, passing within a yard of him without showing that he knew Blade existed. Blade turned to see the man stagger on toward the river, his dying brain sending its last impulses to his legs. He reached the edge, toppled over the embankment, and vanished from sight with a splash and a gurgle.

  A howl behind Blade made him spin around. The man with the smashed knee had lurched to his feet and was coming at Blade, sword raised. Blade shifted to the right and saw the man do the same, but not fast enough. One end of Blade's staff whipped out and slashed down across the back of the man's sword hand. His sword dropped to the ground again. The man didn't stop or even shake his smashed hand in pain. With his other hand he drew a knife from a sheath in his belt and raised it to throw. Again Blade shifted position faster than his opponent could and launched his own attack. The heavy end of the staff whipped over and crashed down just above the bridge of the man's nose. The thin bone smashed inward.

  The man staggered, lurched, then went forward onto his face. By the time Blade reached him he'd stopped kicking.

  Blade bent dow
n, and with one eye on the bushes and one eye on his job stripped off the dead man's belt. Then he retrieved both the knife and the sword and stuck them in the belt.

  Before Blade could take another step toward the battle, the battle came to him. Bushes crackled and crashed as though an elephant were charging through them. Seven people exploded out into the open.

  Two were women, both dressed in short green leather tunics, caps, and calf-length boots. Each had a sack on her back and wielded a quarterstaff with knobbed ends in both hands. One had a spear with a red point and red feathers on the butt slung across her back. The other had a short bow.

  Four of the five men were dressed and armed like the two Blade had already seen. The fifth wore an elaborate helmet of leather studded with copper plates and a leather tunic reinforced with copper bands. He carried a long two-handed sword with a slightly curved blade and a jeweled hilt, and a bow was slung- across his back. At his belt swung an elaborately carved wooden baton about a foot long.

  Blade had time to see all this before anyone noticed him. When they did, the battle froze for a moment. Then the helmeted man gave a sharp, wordless command, like a dog's bark. The four soldiers swung toward the women, moving in on them in a body. The leader whirled to face Blade, then charged straight at him, sword raised. Light sparked and flared from the polished metal.

  Blade stood his ground. It was obvious that the leader wanted to put the new arrival down fast, then turn back to the women. Blade had to put the leader down just as fast if he wanted to help the women.

  Blade didn't try a straight block with his staff. The green wood would hardly survive a slash from that heavy sword. Instead he shifted his hands toward one end of the staff and held it with the other end downward. The sword slashed down from straight overhead, struck the staff a glancing blow, and was deflected farther downward. As the man whirled his sword back up into position, Blade snapped the lower end of his staff forward. It smashed into the swordsman's unprotected groin, hard enough to make the man wince. He was a little slow with his next slash. Blade shifted his grip on his staff and drove a second thrust into the man's groin. This time the man gasped, dropped his sword, sat down on empty air, and toppled over backward onto the grass. He lay there writhing and gasping, clutching his groin with one hand and reaching for the carved baton on his belt with the other. Blade turned toward the women.