[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
Ice Dragon
Blade Book 10
by Jeffrey Lord
Chapter 1
^»
Richard Blade had the habit of cultivating new physical skills whenever he had the time for it. Therefore it
was not surprising that J's orders to report for a new Dimension X mission found him rock-climbing
inWales . He no longer needed to stay at the little cottage on theDorset seashore, even while awaiting
orders. A modified American two-way survival radio made it possible for MI6's powerful transmitter to
reach him anywhere in theBritish Isles .
So between the intensive sessions of weapons training and unarmed combat, the casual women, the
nights on the town, and the voracious reading, he piled climbing gear into the trunk of the MG and
trundled off to northernWales , to test himself against its crags and cliffs. He supposed this compulsion to
test his body to the limit would pass someday. But although forty was looming on the horizon, he was still
at the peak of his physical powers. The doctors attached to the Dimension X Project had assured him
that he had many years, many more than most men, before his body would start to decline.
The doctors should certainly know. Each of the nine times he had returned from whatever dimension
Lord Leighton's giant computers had hurled him into, he had been poked, prodded, monitored, X-rayed,
and generally examined almost cell by cell. By now the doctors (among them several of England's most
brilliant medical minds, working faithfully without any idea of what project Blade was working on) should
know his physical makeup better than any man's had ever been known before. They also assured him
that so far there were no signs of major damage from all the stresses his brain had endured from those
same computers.
That was a good thing to consider, as the MG purred westward through gray stone, thatched-roof
villages just coming awake, on the last lap toLondon . It was a clear brisk autumn morning, the sky
marred only by the blur of smog over the great city itself, and the trees by the road were beginning to
flame scarlet and orange.
Of course, all the probing and testing hardly stemmed from any disinterested concern for Blade's health.
He was a much-glorified guinea pig, whose reactions were of the utmost scientific interest, and so far he
was the only guinea pig the Dimension X Project had. The only other man who had traveled into
Dimension X had returned permanently insane. J, the head of the special intelligence section MI6, Lord
Leighton, the creator of the computers, and the Prime Minister himself were industriously looking for
other candidates, but even for that the medical probings were vital. What qualities did Blade have that
kept him sane during his other-dimensional adventures? Did other men have them also? If not naturally,
could they be induced by proper training? Blade knew that on the research staff of the Project were at
Page 1
least two of the finest psychologists in the world; would they someday be put to finding ways of
conditioning other men's minds into imitations of his own? That, frankly, was a rather unpleasant thought,
but he knew that Lord Leighton was quite capable of insisting on it to keep the project going—and both
J and the Prime Minister would probably approve. He would have to ask J when they met inLondon how
the search for other candidates was going.
It was nearly eleven before he swung the MG off the highway and plunged into the tangled, traffic-filled
streets ofLondon 'sWest End . A little after noon he drew up into the garage behind the building that
contained his new apartment. He climbed the stairs to the third floor, carefully unpacked and stowed
away his climbing gear, then fixed himself a light lunch. It was usually wiser to go through the computer on
a reasonably empty stomach, but it was nearly six hours before he had to be at the Tower.
The apartment was a new indulgence, five rooms in a newly renovated Victorian building, an indulgence
that absorbed a large part of the two thousand-pound tax-free bonus to his salary that was his only
financial reward for his work on the project. But the new apartment had space for his growing collection
of books and weapons, for fitting up one room as a dojo for his weapons training (walls and ceiling as
well as the floor padded to avoid disturbing the neighbors), for entertaining in the unlikely event that he
ever did so. It also served to support his new "cover" as a young—well, middle-aged-man—about-town
living comfortably if not extravagantly off a fortune made by three previous generations in the jute and
copra trade.
Blade did not find this role entirely congenial. It involved being considered a deplorably eligible bachelor
and fending off approaches made by matrimonially inclined ladies and, even worse, by their mothers.
Also it was an image that his father had always loathed with a purple and loudly expressed passion. His
father, in spite of having all the appropriate money and credentials for a life of gilded ease, had
distinguished himself in forty years of public service, including honors gained in both world wars. And he
had passed on to his only son the firm conviction that those born to wealth and position should work five
times as hard as the ordinary man, in order to be considered deserving of their privileges. Since that son
had grown up with a keen if practically oriented mind, a superb physique, and a taste for adventure, it
had been easy for him to respond to his father's urgings. Blade had been recruited by MI6 while still
atOxford , and had never looked back since.
After lunch he stacked the dishes in the kitchen for the cleaning woman to cope with tomorrow morning,
put himself through a vigorous hour of limbering and testing exercises, then pulled a book from his
increasingly well-stocked shelves and sat down to read for the remaining hours until it was time to leave
for the Tower. He had acquired a habit of voracious reading the year before, when he had been
tormented by an impotence that was eventually cured only by his eighth trip through the computer.
At the time he had devoured books on psychology and physiology like a starving man sitting down at a
banquet, and accumulated a collection that many practicing professionals in both fields might have envied.
Since then, he had been more wide-ranging in his reading habits, covering military history, geography,
geology, anthropology—a dozen different fields.
He wanted to train himself to be the best possible observer of the worlds in which he traveled. Also, he
wanted to understand each one as well as he could, so that if he took action in a situation, he would stand
a chance of doing the right thing. Both J and Lord L had enthusiastically taken up the notion of his doing
something to help the people of each dimension if possible, rather than simply observing, adventuring,
grabbing whatever might be useful to England, and coming home. But this also made his job even more
complex and demanding.
The afternoon wore on; he read with less and less attention, until the clock finally crept around to four
Page 2
 thirty. It was time to leave for the Tower.
He left the MG in the garage and took a taxi. By the time it had battled its way through the evening rush
hour to the Tower, it was nearly six. He left the taxi outside the gate like any ordinary visitor and walked
the rest of the way in, until the escort of grim-faced Special Branch men materialized out of the damp
shadows cast by the ancient walls and took him in tow.
Both J and Lord Leighton were waiting at the head of the elevator shaft. That meant that either the
computer's main sequence hadn't been initiated, or else that Lord Leighton had finally and miraculously
found somebody he trusted to initiate at least its first phase. Blade looked at them closely, suddenly even
more conscious than usual that this might be the last time he saw these two men who trusted him—and
whom he trusted—in a very special way, men who had given him an opportunity to satisfy his craving for
adventure in a way beyond even the imagination of most people.
There was J—tall, craggy-faced, slightly stooped now with his sixty-plus years, as always exuding an air
of imperturbability and urbanity. He might have been a successful stockbroker or aHarley Street
practitioner, at least to anybody who didn't know his record. He had been surviving Gestapo
interrogations when Blade was still in diapers. Even after age had finally brought him behind a desk he
had remained a partisan of the field operatives against the office types. Add to this the fact that he had
never married, and it was not surprising that J loved Blade like the son he would never have.
And there was Lord Leighton. If J was a father, Lord L reminded Blade of the gleefully wicked old
grandfather, waving aside all the father's prescriptions and proscriptions as he cheerfully led his grandson
astray. The scientist was not always cheerful, of course. Sometimes in fact he could be downright
maddening, since he never bothered about conventional good manners. But how such a buoyant spirit
could dwell in Leighton's hunchbacked body, how he could overcome his eighty-odd years and his
polio-twisted legs and his deformed spine to create computers beyond anything the rest of the world
dreamed possible—this was a continuing miracle to Blade. It left him a little in awe of the old man; Blade
hoped (not very optimistically) that he could cope with age and declining powers half as well when they
came upon him.
Blade waited until the door had shut behind them and the elevator had begun its plunge to the level of the
computer complex, two hundred feet below the Tower, before asking any serious questions. Then he
turned to J and said, "How is the search for a replacement coming along, sir?"
J frowned. "Not at all well, unfortunately. The psychologist who was in charge of developing the testing
program for new candidates also developed a few—ah, personal vices—which required his being taken
off the project. Nothing nasty, you understand. We just sent him back to private practice, carefully
wrapped in the Official Secrets Act. But this does mean bringing in somebody new, and by the time he
has been cleared and briefed, three or four months' work will be gone. So it will be that much longer
before we can test out anybody who might come forward to replace you as thoroughly as Lord Leighton
insists be done."
"No helping it, I'm afraid," said the scientist. "Rather a silly proposition to send somebody through the
computer and have him come back insane or not at all. Waste of effort." The offhand manner, Blade
strongly suspected, concealed very real scruples about endangering a man's life or sanity. He also
suspected that Lord Leighton would sooner have admitted to burglingBuckinghamPalace than to the
possession of anything so unscientific as a conscience. But Leighton was hurrying on to another topic.
"No new people, I'm afraid. But we do have some new circuitry that should cope with the time distortion
we suffered last time. The installation required some alteration in Modules A2 and A4, but—" and
Page 3
 Leighton was off into one of his interminable technical discussions that neither Blade nor J ever pretended
to understand. Blade gathered only that Lord Leighton had developed (or thought he had developed)
some method of coping with the problem that had suddenly popped out of nowhere on the last
trip—Dimension X and Home Dimension time getting badly out of phase with each other. On that last
trip, to the Ocean world and its beleaguered Kingdom of Royth, nine months spent there had been only a
little more than four months to Lord Leighton and J. It was obviously something to be eliminated or at
least brought under control. Blade could not have agreed more heartily with Lord Leighton's notion that
the fewer wild variables in the project the better, particularly when he was going to be left holding the
baby if one of these variables came up spectacularly the wrong way.
The technical lecture took them all the way down to the computer room itself. Once they had entered the
main room, jammed full from floor to ceiling and almost from wall to wall with the huge gray
crackled-finish bulks of the computers and their hanging festoons of riotously colored wiring, Lord L at
once returned to the business at hand. He ushered J to a chair, then went over to the main control
console and began taking readings from the dials, while Blade went to the dressing chamber to begin his
personal preparations.
In spite of the fantastically complex and still not completely predictable processes involved in shifting him
into a new dimension, Blade's own preparations had long since become a stereotyped, monotonous
routine. He went into the dressing room. He took off all his clothes. He smeared himself all over with a
black greasy goo with the consistency of liquid tar and the smell of greatly overaged turpentine, supposed
to prevent burns from the electrodes that would be attached all over his body. He put on a loincloth. This
was largely a symbolic gesture; he had arrived nine successive times in Dimension X naked as a newborn
babe. He stepped out of the dressing room and walked over to the glass booth in the middle of the room,
the booth with its rubber floor and its chair that looked remarkably like an American electric chair. He sat
down in the chair and waited while the cobra-headed electrodes were attached to every possible and
impossible portion of his body until he sat in the middle of an insane tangle of multi-colored wires,
radiating off in all directions into the guts of the computer that loomed over him on all sides.
Then, finally, the routine was broken as Lord Leighton turned from the master console to look at him
and raise a gnarled and bony hand in a final farewell.
"Ready, Richard?"
"Ready, sir."
The hand came down and closed the master switch. There was a long moment in which Blade began to
wonder if somewhere in those infinitely complex guts of the computer a circuit had failed and nothing was
going to happen. Then he felt the chair shudder under him and begin to sink. It sank and sank, down into
a black shaft, until Lord Leighton and J were only tiny white faces looking down an immensely deep shaft
at him, then still farther down until they were gone and there was nothing above him, around him, or
below him except blackness.
Now the blackness faded to gray, to silver, to a searing blue, and he found himself still in the chair, but
now the chair stood in the middle of a vast yellow sandy desert, with a raw blue sky overhead. It was
perched on some sort of metal rack, and looking down he saw that the rack itself rested on two parallel
metal rails that stretched away only a few inches above the sand to the distant horizon.
He had just long enough to absorb all the details, then the chair began to move with a sibilant moan,
building speed rapidly, the sand flashing past, the wind tearing in an oddly painless fashion at his body.
He felt the acceleration building, and knew that he was racing across the desert at a speed that would
Page 4
 soon take him through the sound barrier. In fact, he saw it looming up on the horizon ahead of him,
clearly indicated by neon letters—Sound Barrier. He passed through it in total silence, but with a
sensation of having been hurled at tremendous speed through a miles-thick wall of jellied soup.
Then all at once there was a sharp and audible jolt, two, three—and the hurtling chair suddenly whipped
forward with a tremendous bang and flung him out into space. He was conscious of spreading out hands
and feet to stabilize himself as he tumbled wildly through a sky that was no longer blue but gray, then
once again black, feeling the tumbling ease, feeling himself flatten out as though he were swimming, still
moving forward, endlessly forward, through the blackness.
Chapter 2
«^»
Blade came back to consciousness lying flat on his face, his nose and mouth pressed into damp cold
earth that smelled of mold and moss and old evergreen needles, his head throbbing with the inevitable
searing headache that always followed a transition. Yet the discomforts were the most welcome thing
possible, telling him that he had indeed made the full transition safely, and not wound up somewhere in
the limbo of distorted sensations that lay between Home Dimension and wherever he was now. The
possibility of ending up in such a limbo was the one thing that bothered him more than any possible form
of death or mutilation he might suffer in any new world he might reach.
Gradually the headache faded, the disorientation faded also, and strength and coordination returned to
his sprawled limbs. He became conscious of more sensations from the world around him—the chirp of
birds, the squeals and skittering feet of small animals in the shrubbery, the swishing and creak of branches
moving in the wind. He also became conscious of a chill breeze playing over his bare skin. Reaching
upward, he grabbed a conveniently drooping branch and pulled himself to his feet. He had to lean against
the rough trunk of the tree for a moment until a fit of dizziness passed, then stepped out from under the
tree and looked around him.
He was standing on the slope of either a very high hill or a rather low mountain, near the upper fringes of
a forest of pinelike trees that covered its base. Looking up toward the summit, he could see the trees
becoming sparser and sparser, giving way finally to bare rock and gray-green shrubs and creepers. Even
farther up, at the point where the looming slope met the blue sky, there was the glint of unmelted snow
fields.
In the other direction, the forested slopes unrolled themselves downward into a narrow valley before
rising sharply on the other side in a bare cliff that formed the base of another hill, rising as high on its side
of the valley as Blade's did on its. The valley thus formed ran roughly north and south, as far as Blade
could tell from the sun. To the south of the two flanking hills were yet more hills and hummocks,
suggesting a whole range spreading east and west, many miles wide and perhaps many hundreds of miles
long. Through the valley itself ran a fair-sized river; Blade caught its silver-blue glimmer through the
black-green masses of the trees. Then he turned to the north.
Part of the view to the north was cut off by the swell of the hill, but he could see enough to suddenly feel
a chill from more than the breeze. To the north was a flat plain, and far away on the remote horizon of
that plain was another silver-blue hue glimmering in the sky. Not the friendly' glimmer of a river, but the
steel cold glare of endless miles of ice hurling back the sun. He had once seen the same thing from the
deck of a ship approaching theGreenland ice cap. Out there on the northern plain, many miles away but
glaring so fiercely that it was visible here, a vast glacial mass was marching south. For a moment he
Page 5
  [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

zanotowane.pl

doc.pisz.pl

pdf.pisz.pl

mirabelkowy.keep.pl