The Lords of the Crimson River

Blade 35

By Jeffrey Lord

Chapter 1

«Bring it straight back when it's run,» Lord Leighton told the programmer.

«There's a backlog,» said the young man with the long but well-kept hair. «If you'd like me to give this priority-«

Leighton's desire to have the data back right away fought with his equally strong desire not to call unnecessary attention to what he was doing. The first desire won. «Give it priority, then. How long will it be?»

The man looked at his watch. «With luck, I should have it back by four o'clock. Without luck-«He shrugged.

Leighton smiled thinly. He knew everything that could happen to a computer much better than this young man ever would if he lived to be a hundred. Leighton had been working on computers before the programmer was born.

The programmer picked up the briefcase with the «secret» label on it and hurried out. Leighton sighed with relief, then leaned back in his custom recliner as far as his hunchback would let him. After a moment he closed his eyes and listened to the spattering of rain on the office window. He hoped a few minutes relaxing would get rid of his headache, but doubted it. Nothing would do that except learning if his latest scheme for Project Dimension X was all he hoped it would be. The next best thing would be to have the KALI capsule which sent Richard Blade into Dimension X back in operation. If he didn't get either of these, he'd be happy enough to get the Project's master computer back on line. He wasn't wildly optimistic about any of them.

The trouble started with Richard Blade's return from the Dimension which held the city of Kaldak. He returned seated in a complicated piece of electrical equipment: one of the control chairs used for the fighting robots of the Dimension. Somehow, current had surged into the KALI capsule, but circuit breakers failed to operate, and Blade was brought back to Home Dimension in the chair instead. There was no damage to the computer, but with the KALI capsule heavily damaged and Blade's jaw broken when the chair fell over, the Project was going nowhere fast. While both the capsule and Blade's jaw were being fixed, it seemed like a good time to downline the master computer for a major inspection and overhaul.

Things could have been worse, of course. A year ago Leighton would have had to leave all the problems he couldn't tackle on his desk calculator to pile up until the main machine was back on line. That was when the whole top-secret Project Dimension X was concentrated in the complex two hundred feet below the Tower of London. Now things were different, although Leighton wasn't sure they were better.

As the Project grew, the complex got more crowded. The obvious solution was to move some of the Project's work aboveground.

Leighton himself thought this was a good idea. So did J, the quiet gray-haired spymaster in charge of the Project's security. So did Richard Blade, in many ways the most important man of the three. Years after one of Leighton's computer experiments led to the discovery of travel into alternate Dimensions, Richard Blade was still the only living man who could make these dangerous journeys and return alive and healthy.

When Leighton, J, and Richard Blade all agreed on doing something for Project Dimension X, it was as good as done. It took only a few days to find a building for sale in a suburb of London, and only a few weeks to move a good part of the Project into it. They were careful to move only those parts of the Project which wouldn't give away much of the Dimension X secret, although security precautions were as rigid as ever.

Complex Two still needed a great deal of computer capacity. The master computer could not have any terminals outside the underground Complex One without compromising its security. So the new building needed hardware of its own. After a few hundred thousand more pounds were pried loose from the secret funds, Complex Two got its own computer. If Lord Leighton was willing to commute back and forth between the complexes, he could now play with computers twenty-four hours a day.

For a while Leighton nearly did this. His eighty-odd years, his hunchback, and his polio-twisted legs didn't slow him down very much. They didn't slow down his mind at all. It was as quick and fertile as ever, devouring facts and jumping ahead to bold conclusions the same way it had for nearly sixty years. It worked that way when Leighton sat down to consider the problem of Blade's return from Dimension X.

Every time Blade went into Dimension X, he was wired into the master computer so that its electronic mind and his human one were linked. Leighton always took great care to make that link as complete and predictable as possible, and the KALI capsule, which encased Blade's body so that almost every inch of his skin was in contact with wire electrodes, had been a great success. But some of Leighton's experiments along those lines had been less than successful. He still shuddered at the memory of the automated KALI computer, which had unleashed the Ngaa monster on the world. Blade had nearly been killed, more than thirty other people had died, and both the Project and the whole world had been put in a deadly danger, from which Blade had to save them at the risk of his life.

Still, Blade's departure for Dimension X was now pretty much a matter of routine. His return from Dimension X, on the other hand, followed no pattern Leighton could discover. Somehow the computer reached out across space, time, and Dimension to link itself with Blade's mind and twist it back into its normal patterns, so that he once again saw and heard and moved through Home Dimension England. What was more, the computer almost always waited until Blade's work in Dimension X was completed. It seemed as if Blade and the computer remained linked in some way after Blade's departure.

It was even more maddening that the computer also brought back whatever Blade was holding or even close to at the time. He'd seldom been able to take any equipment into Dimension with him. Several times this nearly cost him his life, and it ruled out any idea of really exploring Dimension X. Coming back, however, Blade had brought everything from jeweled knives to a full-grown live horse!

This was the kind of mystery Lord Leighton didn't like at all. It weakened his control over the most vital experiment he'd ever performed, an experiment vital to the future of the whole world as well as to his own career and reputation. Blade's discoveries in other Dimensions, as well as the things he brought back with him when he returned home, provided the knowledge and power to make England a great power once again, to make Leighton a great man, and to make the world better off than it had ever been. But the mysteries still attached to traveling in other Dimensions made Leighton look as if he didn't quite know what he was doing, and he would cheerfully have sold his soul to the Devil to avoid that fate.

Unfortunately the Devil wasn't buying. Lord Leighton had to puzzle things out as best he could, and his best wasn't good enough. There were other problems, too. The Project's budget was generous, but it wasn't infinite. Also, J always made a fuss over experiments and innovations which put Blade in unnecessary danger.

So Leighton was groping in the dark until Blade returned from Kaldak. Unlike the KALI capsule, the control chair that brought him back was nearly intact, ready for Leighton's examination. He tested it every way he knew of and a few more he invented on the spot. All the tests showed the same thing: the master computer not only generated a powerful electrical field matching Blade's brain waves, but projected it to wherever Blade was in Dimension X. The chair, with all its complicated equipment, had become part of that electrical field and had come back to Home Dimension with Blade seated in it.

It wasn't news that the computer generated such an electrical field. It was news that it could project it so far. Could it possibly project the same field, to send Blade? Did he have to be wired into the computer or at least encased in the KALI capsule? Or did he only have to be within reach of the appropriate electrical field?

Leighton started working twelve and fourteen hours a day on this question. At last he reached the point where he needed to run all his work through a computer. By then the repairmen had the master computer down for its overhaul, and Leighton was left with the smaller computer in Complex Two.

That wasn't a problem in itself. The new computer had all the capacity Leighton needed. Unfortunately, in expanding its facilities the Project had also expanded its bureaucracy. There were established procedures for using the new computer, which Leighton himself could only ignore at the price of drawing a good deal of attention. This was the last thing he wanted, at least until after the first few runs. He always preferred to work out at least a preliminary proposal before talking to anyone else. The ultimate solution to that problem would be a personal computer of his own, but that wasn't practical yet.

An adequate computer would cost at least fifty thousand pounds. While Leighton held enough patents to be a fairly wealthy man, he wasn't yet in a position to sink that sort of money into something which would be no more than a convenience.

Leighton cracked his knuckles, stretched, and looked at the clock on the wall. The run was taking longer than the programmer promised. He picked up a notebook and pencil from the table and began doodling rough sketches of a possible electrical-field generator linked to the master computer. It looked rather like an oversized telephone booth, with Blade standing in the middle.