Pirates of Gohar
Blade 32
By Jeffrey Lord
Chapter 1
Lord Leighton was eighty years old. He'd been born a hunchback, and his legs were twisted from polio as a child. Yet the wrinkled hands and long arms were still surprisingly strong and skilled. He easily unlocked the heavy steel door and started pushing it open. Then Richard Blade stepped forward to help the scientist.
Richard Blade was one of those dark men who look older than they are when they're young and much younger than they are when they get older. He stood an inch over six feet, and his two hundred pounds moved with the ease and grace of a hunting animal in perfect condition. He placed one large hand against the door and with a single smooth motion pushed it open.
Beyond the door was a small low room, with a bare concrete floor and whitewashed stone walls. In one corner a gleaming metal ovoid seven feet high rested in a steel cradle. It might have been a lifeboat for a spaceship. On the wall opposite the door was a rack of electronic testing gear, and on the floor in front of the rack a pile of components. Much of the gear and all the components were smoke-blackened, twisted, or half-melted. The ceiling over the testing rack was also black, and Blade detected a faint smell of burned insulation.
«Good God,» said Blade. He'd seen far worse accidents with electronic gear, but not in this top-secret complex. «Who did what?»
Leighton shoved both hands into the pockets of a filthy laboratory smock and grimaced. «As far as we can tell, some idiot installed Circuit 19 backwards.» He shrugged. «It could have been much worse. The circuit breakers kept the surge out of the capsule itself. The automatic alarms shut the door, the fire extinguishers suffocated the fire-«
«And suffocated the technician?» asked Blade with a perfectly straight face.
Leighton gave Blade a gnome's smile. «No, but I wouldn't have minded if they had. All the automatic elements worked perfectly. It was the human element that failed. And people still ask me why I love computers!»
Blade's face and voice hardened. «Perhaps. But I seem to recall that it wasn't a human being who released the Ngaa in this Dimension.»
Leighton's eyes met Blade's-and then the scientist looked away. «Richard, that also was ultimately human error. My error. The KALI computer made only those mistakes I allowed it to make, in my-ah, misplaced-confidence that it was completely self-correcting.»
Blade's face softened again, and he felt a sudden genuine warmth toward Leighton. The old man looked like a cheap horror-movie version of the mad scientist, who will cheerfully risk destroying the world to prove one of his theories. He wasn't. His reaction to the one time he'd actually come close to doing this proved it.
Not that Leighton wasn't as brilliant and eccentric as any man in the history of science. Even his worst enemies didn't deny the brilliance, and his best friends admitted he was eccentric to the point of being maddening. His brilliance had conceived a computer far ahead of anything in existence at the time, and his eccentricity led to the idea of linking it with a human mind. He hoped the resulting combination of human flexibility and machine capacity would produce a super-mind.
For the subject of the experiment he chose Richard Blade, a top field agent for the secret intelligence agency MI6A. Blade was one of the finest combinations of sound mind and sound body in the world, and Leighton expected notable results.
He got them. The computer hurled Blade, mind and body alike, into an alternate reality. They called it Dimension X when he came back to tell them about it. The name was still appropriate, because after years of work, millions of pounds, and many more trips into Dimension X, there were still more questions about it than answers. They couldn't even be sure that all the strange places Blade went to had a distinct physical existence. Could they simply be images his computer-distorted senses fed into his brain?
The unanswered questions piled up, but they didn't stop the research. The value to Britain of such a whole new world, with unimaginable resources, was obvious. Successive Prime Ministers kept Project Dimension X going, even in the face of the country's economic problems.
They also kept it going under the tightest security blanket in British history. Blade's former chief at MI6A, the near-legendary spymaster known only as J, became the Project's security chief. He did his best to keep the Dimension X secret, and his best was more than good enough, until events put not just the Project but the whole world in deadly danger.
Leighton was using a completely automated technique for sending Blade into Dimension X, based on a new computer, the Kinematic Analog Leighton Integrator. The initials also spelled out the name of KALI, the Hindu goddess of destruction-a grimly appropriate acronym, as it turned out.
Blade went into Dimension X, and when he returned, a being called the Ngaa returned with him. It was the collective mind of the ancient inhabitants of a dying world, seeking a new home on Earth. The Ngaa left a trail of death and destruction behind it, and nearly brought Project Dimension X to a disastrous end. Eventually Blade took his life in his hands, returned to the Ngaa's Dimension, and destroyed it, but as J said, quoting the Duke of Wellington about the Battle of Waterloo: «It was a damned close-run thing.»
In fact, it was much too close for everybody's peace of mind. The automated KALI computer was dismantled, and the only component of the system Leighton still used was the transition case-the seven-foot oval capsule now in front of Blade. In it, electrical current flowed evenly through his whole body in the moment of his transition into Dimension X. With the old technique of electrodes placed by hand, the flow of current varied. Using the capsule seemed to reduce the stress of the transition, perhaps enough so that in time other men and women could survive to travel into Dimension X.
That would be an immense relief to everyone, starting with Richard Blade himself. He was still the only living human being who could travel into Dimension X and return alive and sane. Being the Indispensable Man is a rosy dream only for those people who haven't really had to be one. For them, it's a nightmare.
So Leighton was allowed to go on experimenting with the KALI case. Blade took his remarks about «human elements» and «why I prefer computers» as hints Leighton might be experimenting more boldly than that. Blade was the last man in the world to stand by and let this happen.
The nightmarish affair of the Ngaa led directly or indirectly to some thirty deaths. One of the dead was a woman named Zoe Cornwall. Once she and Blade hoped to marry, until the increasing demands of Project Dimension X and the Official Secrets Act, which protected it, drove them apart. Blade hadn't really stopped loving her, and her lonely death on a distant world left scars that he didn't expect to heal soon, if at all. Leighton would start translating his more exotic notions into experiments again only over Richard Blade's dead body.
Now he'd heard Leighton admit that he'd made a mistake-what was more, a mistake involving computers. Some of Leighton's friends would no doubt say this proved the old man was finally losing his grip. Blade hoped it really meant that Leighton was no longer convinced of his own infallibility.
Leighton cleared his throat, and Blade realized that he'd been standing there like a zombie, paying no attention to what Leighton was saying. The scientist started over again.
«Fortunately there's no damage to the capsule, and that saved most of the really irreplaceable components. It would take a year to replace that. The testing gear was mostly off-the-shelf hardware. We'll lose a month and a few thousand pounds, nothing more.»
Blade mentally crossed his fingers. He was comfortable with machinery, but more so with pre-electronic-era equipment than with Leighton's pet computers and similar modern marvels. He knew just enough about them to know how many things could go wrong even under the most favorable conditions.
That thought led Blade on to a specific suggestion. «Do we really need to have all the workshops down here in the Complex? They take up space, and we don't exactly have that to burn.»
«Nor hardware either,» said Leighton with a wry grin.
«Very true. Some of them are a fire and smoke hazard, or could send an electrical surge onto the main circuits and damage the laboratories. Also, having the workshops down here means higher security ratings for all the people who work in them, more paperwork, and more expense.»
Leighton cocked his head on one side and pulled at the tuft of white hair protruding from behind his left ear. «You do have a point, Richard. Possibly a very good one. It would mean more traveling for me, of course-«
«I hadn't thought of that. I'm sorry.»
«Don't be.» Leighton interlaced his fingers and cracked all his knuckles with a sound like a string of firecrackers. «The day I get too old to travel from here to-oh, some suburb-and back twice a week, I'll be too old for the rest of the job as well. No, what concerns me more is security for an outside laboratory. Here everything is behind those damned Special Branch men on the surface and underneath two hundred feet of earth and rock.»
«That's true, sir. But-and correct me if I'm wrong-how much could anyone tell about the Project from simply looking at the components? I couldn't tell if they belong to a stereo set, a tank's range-finder, or a missile guidance system.
