City Of The Living Dead

Chapter 1

Richard Blade sat down in the chair in the glass booth far below the Tower of London. He felt the rubber of the chair's back and seat cold against his naked, grease-smeared body. He tried to relax while Lord Leighton scurried about, fastening cobra-headed metal electrodes to every part of Blade's skin. Twenty, fifty, a hundred of them. Each one was connected to a wire, and each wire led off into some part of the vast computer that filled the whole rock-walled room. The gray crackle-finished consoles towered above Blade, pressing their tops against the ceiling. Blade always thought it would have seemed more appropriate if the computer had been the master here and the men its servants, instead of the other way around.

Lord Leighton was the master nonetheless, the man who had created the computer out of his own genius and many millions of pounds sterling. In a few more minutes he would use it to send Richard Blade hurtling off into Dimension X. Dimension X was a previously unknown realm of existence discovered by a lucky accident and now being systematically explored by Richard Blade-and Richard Blade alone. There was no other living human being in the world who could travel into Dimension X and return alive and sane.

Lord Leighton finished his work and gave Blade a final inspection. Then he stepped over to the main console for the whole computer and stood within easy reach of the red master switch. Blade followed the white-coated figure with his eyes, about the only part of his own body that he could still comfortably move. Lord Leighton's movements were as brisk as ever-astonishingly brisk for a man past eighty with his spine bent by a hunchback and his legs twisted since childhood by polio. But then Lord Leighton had always ignored the limitations of his body, just as he'd always ignored the wishes and preferences of other people. Neither his own frailties nor the opposition of others had ever been allowed to stand between him and what he wanted to achieve.

Blade looked to one side of the console. The spectator's chair was still folded up into its niche in the wall. It didn't look as though J were going to make it down here in time. A pity, and J would regret it, but it couldn't be helped. The old man had always been busy when he was head of MI6 and Richard Blade was one of his crack agents. He was still busy, now that he worked with Project Dimension X. Things were always unexpectedly coming up to drag him away or chain him to his desk.

Blade turned his attention back to Lord Leighton in the exact moment the scientist's hand gripped the master switch. In a single, smooth motion, he drew it down to the bottom of the slot. Lights danced across the control panel in a continuous ripple of color, and pain swallowed up Richard Blade.

He'd felt pain before-wounds, torture, the pain that exploded and thundered in his head when it was time for him to return to England from Dimension X. Pain was never a friend and could never be one, but it was an old, familiar enemy. At least it had been familiar until now.

This pain was different. This was pain that gripped every part of his body from his scalp to his toes in white-hot pincers, rending and clawing, stripping away the flesh from the bones and tearing one bone from another. The pain blinded him, searing his eyes like molten metal. He couldn't look at himself, but he knew that if he did he would see flesh blistering and blackening and his blood boiling away before it could flow, his exposed bones cracking, his fingers and toes curling up like dead leaves and dropping to the floor. Lord Leighton would be staring in horror, torn out of his scientific detachment. Something had finally and fatally gone wrong. The computer wasn't sending Blade into Dimension X. It was slowly and agonizingly killing him.

Then the computer hurled Blade down into blackness, and as he plunged, Blade felt his body shredding apart, until all that was left was a dimly conscious mind hurtling down through darkness. Then the last dim consciousness vanished, and there was only blackness.

Blade drifted slowly back up to consciousness. He felt a yielding surface under him, then something over him slightly restricting his movements. Some unknown time later he realized he was lying on a bed with a sheet and blankets over him. Suddenly he knew that he was lying safely in his own bed in the bedroom of his own West End flat. His pajamas, the pillow under his head, and the sheet under him were all soaked with sweat.

The nightmare of blazing pain had been just that-a nightmare. He looked at his watch. He would really be on his way to Dimension X in another twelve hours. For the moment he was safely at home, in no danger of anything except falling out of bed. The underground room, Lord Leighton, the computer, the electrodes, the pain-they'd all been creations of his sleeping mind.

Blade suddenly found that he was incredibly thirsty. He threw back the covers and climbed out of bed. He was relieved to discover that he was steady on his feet. He wouldn't expect a nightmare to affect his coordination, but it wasn't impossible. Since he'd entered Project Dimension X, impossible was a word Richard Blade refused to use.

Twenty-five times he'd sat down in the chair and been wired into the computer. Twenty-five times Lord Leighton had pulled a switch. Every one of those times the computer had twisted his brain so that all his senses now registered some part of that vast unknown called Dimension X.

The first time it had happened by accident. All the other times it had been deliberate. There was an incredible wealth of knowledge and resources lying out there in Dimension X. If that wealth could be tapped for Britain's use and the secret of Dimension X kept in the meantime-well, all the wealth from the North Sea oil fields would look pitifully small by comparison.

If that wealth could be tapped, if the secret were kept, and of Richard Blade remained alive and sane long enough.

How long would be long enough? Nobody knew. So far there was nobody else alive who could make the round trip. The search for such a person was still going on, but no one expected quick results.

Fortunately, Richard Blade was one of the most perfect specimens of physical and mental development alive. He was very likely the most unkillable human being in the world. He'd faced wild animals and still wilder peoples, both savage and civilized. He'd faced wind and waves, icy cold and searing heat, a dozen kinds of monsters, even an intelligent race of aliens from somewhere far out in interstellar space. He'd survived them all. He was quite prepared to go on pitting himself against the perils of Dimension X as long as he was needed.

Yet what if his own brain were beginning to turn traitor?

Blade knew perfectly well that no human brain was really adapted to being twisted completely around twenty-five successive times. Not even his. The Project had given him psychological problems before-a prolonged period of impotence, a shorter period of excessive drinking. Was this nightmare the first sign of some new problem?

Blade didn't know. He would mention it to Lord Leighton and J, of course. They would pass it on to the Project's staff of psychologists. Meanwhile Blade would be off to Dimension X. One nightmare, however gruesome, wasn't enough reason for canceling a trip. A gamble? Yes, but every trip into Dimension X was a gamble that would have given a normal person not just one nightmare but fifty.

Richard Blade wasn't quite normal. He was too fond of matching his own skills against great danger to be a very comfortable citizen for any peaceful twentieth-century country. Field intelligence work had been the most rewarding career he could find-until Project Dimension X came along.

At times Blade grumbled over Lord Leighton's latest whims and fancies. At times he felt like a beast of burden. He was never happy over the innocent people who got caught up in his battles and adventures to end up dead or mindless. Yet he could never imagine leaving the Project entirely. It was too important to Britain-and too important to Richard Blade.

Blade went to the kitchen, poured himself a tall glass of beer, drank it, and went back to bed. It was several more hours to dawn, and the best thing to do with those hours was sleep: His first few days in a new Dimension were usually rather busy, and it helped to be as well-rested as possible.

Blade's alarm woke him at eight-thirty. The housekeeper appeared and produced the large breakfast that Blade always ate before a trip into Dimension X. Like sleep, food was sometimes rather hard to come by at first in a new Dimension.

Filled with porridge, bacon, eggs, toast, marmalade, and coffee, Blade left the flat and hailed a taxi. The taxi carried him through the traffic-clogged streets of London to the Tower and left him there. The Special Branch men guarding the entrance to the underground complex checked his identification and passed him through. The elevator took him two hundred feet down in a few seconds, and when the door whispered open at the bottom, J was waiting for him. Blade couldn't help blinking. The memory of the nightmare was so vivid he'd half expected J not to be on hand for today's departure.

They shook hands. «You look rather surprised to see me, Richard,» said the older man. J was nearer seventy than sixty, but the gray eyes in the long aristocratic face missed very little. They never had, one reason why J was still alive.

Blade explained the nightmare as they walked down the long central corridor toward the computer rooms at the other end of the complex. J listened without comment, his face expressionless.

«You think there's no risk to you in going ahead?» he asked, after Blade finished.

«I can't be certain, of course, but I doubt it very much. One nightmare, after all…» he shrugged.

«I hope you're right,» said J. His face was no longer so expressionless. Blade knew that J loved him like a son and was always troubled at the thought of him running unnecessary risks.

They approached the door to the computer rooms. The last of the electronic monitors scanned them, identified them, and opened the door for them. They passed in through a series of rooms packed with auxiliary equipment and the small army of technicians needed to run it and reached the door to the room holding the main computer. The door slid open, and Lord Leighton ushered them into his private sanctum.

The scientist looked exactly as he had in the nightmare, exactly as he had since Blade first knew him. His lean, twisted frame was enveloped in a ragged laboratory coat that might have been white once, after its last cleaning years ago. His white hair stuck out in the same disorder as always, and his bushy eyebrows seemed as ready to drop like a curtain over the dark, intensely bright eyes.

Blade let J describe the nightmare, while he himself went off to the changing room carved out of the rock wall. At this point in the proceedings, he always disliked waiting one second longer than absolutely necessary.

A few minutes later he stepped out of the changing room, naked except for a loincloth, smeared from head to foot with the black grease that was supposed to prevent electrical burns. It or something had always worked. He hadn't been burned yet-except in his nightmare.

Lord Leighton and J had apparently finished their discussion of the nightmare. Lord Leighton seemed to accept that there was nothing to worry about, or else he was simply in one of his untalkative moods.

Blade walked to the center of the room and sat down in the chair inside the glass booth. From then on events marched swiftly, following exactly the same path they'd followed twenty-five times before in real life and once in the nightmare. The only difference between today's reality and last night's ghastly dream was J's presence. Blade sincerely hoped there would be other differences!

In spite of what his reason told him, Blade was tense by the time Leighton stepped up to the control panel. He forced himself to breathe deeply and not stiffen as Leighton's hand came down on the master switch. Then the switch slid down its slot and reached the bottom.

A terrible shrieking and roaring filled the room, like a hundred factory whistles all sounding together. The sound tore at Blade's ears, but there was no pain. An immense wave of relief washed over him, relief that there was no pain, relief that his nightmare was not becoming reality.

Then the floor of the chamber cracked open, and a darkness like liquid tar flowed up around the feet of Blade's chair. He saw it reach his ankles, his knees, his waist, but he felt nothing. He sat motionless, taking deep breaths to fill his lungs, as the liquid darkness rose to the level of his chest. He took a final breath and held it as the darkness rose up to his chin. It rose to cover mouth and nose. He closed his eyes and felt a faint tickling on his eyelids as the darkness rose up over him. It was like being brushed with tiny feathers.

He sat motionless, holding his breath until his chest began to hurt as if white-hot bands of iron were tightening around it: He held his breath for a moment longer, until both head and chest seemed about to disintegrate into hot dust.

Then he breathed in. The blackness that was outside flooded in, and as it flooded in, it drowned all his senses at once.