Gladiators Of Hapanu

Chapter 1

Richard Blade walked alone down the underground corridor two hundred feet below the Tower of London. As he walked he tried to see the corridor as would a man who'd never seen it before and knew nothing about it.

The floor was large, close-set tile, a bland, neutral brown alternating with an equally bland gray in a sort of checkerboard pattern. The tile threw up echoes from Blade's footsteps for the walls and ceiling to catch and bounce back. The floor showed signs of wear from many fast-moving feet, but it was spotlessly clean. In fact it was not merely clean, it was as antiseptic as the floor of a hospital.

So were the walls. They were not tiled, but something solid covered with pale green semi-gloss paint, easy on the eyes and easy to wash. At intervals the walls were broken by plain metal doors. All of them opened by push buttons rather than knobs, and all of them had spy eyes in the middle, so that the people inside could see anyone waiting outside. The impression the doors gave was less a hospital than a top-secret military installation. These were doors which might hide the latest guided missile or experiments with a new and deadly nerve gas.

In other places the walls were broken by metal panels with EMERGENCY stencilled on them in foot high red letters. There were no conventional fire alarms or fire extinguishers in sight, and it was impossible to guess what might lurk behind the panels.

Overhead was a ceiling of pale white acoustic tile, broken every few feet by more metal panels, ventilating grilles, squares of translucent glass or plastic, and sometimes grids of small holes that might have been made by termites. At intervals a faded discolored line ran across the floor, up one wall, across the ceiling, and down the wall again. Something once stood across the corridor in these places. Now it was gone and the corridor stretched unbroken from end to end, more than two hundred feet.

Even without the steady echoes of Blade's footsteps, the corridor wasn't entirely quiet. There was the distant hum of air-conditioners, the click of typewriters, muffled hints of human voices, and other sounds that might have been anything. The corridor itself was echoing, empty, and sterile, but there was life and activity on either side of it.

So much for seeing the corridor through a stranger's eyes. Blade turned off his imagination and walked faster. He enjoyed these mental exercises, and was good at them. When he'd been at Oxford a teacher said he would make at least a respectable novelist, though probably not a great one.

Blade hadn't become a novelist, but when he'd left Oxford he'd entered a profession where a good imagination was almost as important. He became a field agent for the secret intelligence agency MI6A. In fact, he was hand-picked by its chief, the graying man known only as J. J saw a particularly promising young man, and he was right. Blade became one of the agency's best men, carrying out missions few others could have handled and surviving dangers that would have killed practically anyone else.

One reason for his success and survival was that imagination of his. More easily than most, he could put himself into the mind of an enemy, thinking of what the man might do, sometimes before the enemy thought of it himself: This kind of imagination didn't win him any prizes, but it saved his life a good many times.

Then a brilliant, eccentric scientist named Lord Leighton conceived the idea of linking a powerful human mind with an even more powerful computer. He wasn't exactly sure what this would produce, but he hoped it would be something more powerful and complete than either the computer or the man.

He chose Richard Blade for the experiment, because he needed a powerful mind in a superbly fit body and Blade had both. The computer went to work on Blade's mind-and suddenly Blade was whirled off across nowhere into an unknown world they called Dimension X.

The same gifts that kept him alive as a secret agent now kept him alive to return to England. They went on to keep him alive many more times, for Dimension X was obviously a major scientific breakthrough. A breakthrough into what, even Lord Leighton wasn't quite sure, but certainly a breakthrough. Out there in the unknown lay human resources of raw material, knowledge, and living space. All of it might be put to use for Britain, all of it might become the foundation for a new British Empire.

So the exploration of Dimension X became a Project, with the support of the Prime Minister's office, a budget of millions of pounds, a staff of dozens of the most brilliant minds in twenty different fields. None of these hired geniuses knew what the Project was all about, because the Dimension X secret was the most closely-guarded in Britain's history. No one cared to guess what might happen if the secret got out, but so far they hadn't had to find out the hard way. J became chief of security for the Project, and so far he'd done his job there extremely well. Dimension X was still a secret.

All of this, however, rested on the shoulders of one man — Richard Blade. He was the only living human being who could make the round trip into Dimension X and come out alive and sane. They'd found this out the hard way, at the cost of a number of people dead or mad.

In spite of this, the search for a new Dimension X traveler still went on. Blade's shoulders were broad, but they could bear only so much of a burden for so long. Even more important than Blade's body was his mind. That was strained to the limit every time he was hurled off into Dimension X, and sometimes matters didn't stop there.

Blade remembered the time he'd encountered the Wizard of Rentoro, an Italian Renaissance nobleman who'd passed into Dimension X by pure mental powers. The Wizard was a master of telepathy, telekinesis, and teleportation, perhaps the most dangerous opponent Blade's mind or body ever had.

At least he had been the most dangerous, until Blade's most recent trip into Dimension X. Lord Leighton was introducing not only a new, incredibly more powerful computer, but also new techniques for sending Blade into the unknown. With the new KALI computer and a completely automatic main sequence, it might finally be possible to send Blade to the same Dimension time after time. That would have been as important a breakthrough as finding another Dimension X traveler, although not quite as big a help to Blade.

As a matter of fact, the new technique did send Blade into the same Dimension twice in succession, as reliably as the London Underground. So the theory behind KALI was sound enough. Lord Leighton's theories usually were. In practice, it was very nearly a case of «The operation was successful but the patient died.»

Out in the unknown Blade met the Ngaa, the collective minds of an incredibly ancient race trapped on a doomed and dying world, once immensely wise but now grown evil with desperation. The Ngaa returned to England with Blade, driving him insane in the process-and that was only the beginning of the trail of destruction it left. By the time the whole nightmare was over, more than thirty people were dead. The Project was thrown into chaos and came within a few hours of being shut down for good by order of the Prime Minister.

In the end it was Blade himself who saved things. His mind restored, he pursued the Ngaa to its home, fought it, and destroyed it. Now Lord Leighton was free to continue the Project on a slightly less ambitious basis, and Blade was fit and ready for another trip.

Fit and ready, but with more scars than usual, including one that wasn't on his body and might be a long time healing. One of the victims of the Ngaa was Zoe Cornwall, kidnapped by the Ngaa and then murdered by it. Once Blade loved her and she loved him, in a past that now sometimes seemed as distant as the Middle Ages. They'd planned to marry, but the demands of Blade's work in the Project and the Official Secrets Act eventually drove them apart. Blade wasn't sure he'd ever stopped loving her. In any case, he hated to see innocent people of any sort dragged into the dangers he faced as a matter of professional duty.

Perhaps he was selfish in wanting Zoe alive, and certainly it would have been hard for them to start up a life together again. The Ngaa not only left her a widow but murdered her three children as well. She would have carried her own set of scars to the end of her life.

But it still hurt-terribly.

Blade had read the whole report on the battle against the Ngaa, a stack of paper as long as a best-selling novel. He'd marveled at the ability of bureaucratic prose to reduce horrors and disasters to the proportions of a leaky faucet. He'd also been reassured that every possible precaution was being taken to prevent such a disaster from happening again. To be sure, there'd been only one Ngaa, but it was far from certain that Dimension X didn't hold other and perhaps worse menaces. In fact, very little was certain about Dimension X, and the affair of the Ngaa had if anything increased that uncertainty. If Blade hadn't known these precautions were being taken, he'd have been forced to have second thoughts about another trip to Dimension X. Danger to himself was one thing. Danger to the whole human race or even a few dozen innocent people was an entirely different matter.

These thoughts and memories carried Blade the rest of the way down the corridor and through the outer rooms of the main complex. J met him at the door to Lord Leighton's holy of holies, the room holding the master computer.

«Lord Leighton either hasn't arrived or hasn't noticed we're here,» said J with a thin smile.

«That's no surprise,» said Blade. The KALI computer which had caused much of the trouble last time no longer existed. A squad of strong men wielding sledgehammers and blowtorches had reduced it to unrecognizable electronic junk.

Fortunately the hardware of the previous master computer had survived, stowed away in a secret warehouse. Lord Leighton was a frugal soul at heart, in spite of his frequently extravagant ideas of what to do for the Project with the taxpayers' money. Once he'd been known for squirreling away copper wire and test tubes. Now he squirreled away entire computers.

So the old computer was back in place. Its installation was something of a tape-and-chewing gum job, though, and needed careful maintenance. Lord Leighton insisted that he was the best man for much of this maintenance, and he was probably right. He was quite possibly in the main room now, fussing with some components and as oblivious to the rest of the world as if he were on Mars.

Blade and J chatted for a few minutes-afterward Blade couldn't remember what they talked about-then the door opened and Lord Leighton's voice invited them in. J led the way. They passed into the familiar rock-walled room, with the equally familiar gray crackle-finished consoles back in place. They showed signs of neglect and hasty installation, though, and there were trailing wires all over the floor. J and Blade stepped over them as carefully as if they'd been poisonous snakes.

In spite of this J moved so fast that Blade found himself falling behind. J passed around a console and vanished from sight. Then a sudden, explosive, «What the bloody-?» echoed around the room, loud enough to make Blade break into a run. He came around the corner and stopped dead.

J was standing, glowering at Lord Leighton. The scientist was looking steadily back at J, refusing to be intimidated. In spite of his humpback and polio-twisted legs, there was something rocklike and enduring about his stance and manner.

Leighton was also standing beside a silvery metal object, about seven feet high and looking like a cross between a medieval Iron Maiden and a futuristic space capsule. It didn't look particularly sinister, but it made Blade start and he could understand why it made J angry.

It was the launch capsule used with the KALI computer, supposedly destroyed along with it. Its existence proved that Leighton had violated strict orders from the Prime Minister, with the cooperation of Project staff.

Blade said nothing, but headed for the changing booth. He wasn't sure this unexpected development justified canceling the trip, and if it didn't he'd need to strip as usual. He felt a trifle dubious about leaving J, because the older man looked quite genuinely on the verge of having a stroke. On the other hand, it was hard to believe he had anything to contribute if an all-out quarrel between J and Leighton was brewing. He had no illusions that either man would accept him as a mediator, even though J regarded him almost as a son and Leighton had great respect for his intellect and survival qualities. When the chips were down, both men were too stubborn to listen to anyone.

By the time Blade came back, wearing only a loincloth, the atmosphere seemed a bit less tense. Whatever was going to happen, it wouldn't be the sort of head-on collision that might make it impossible for the two men to work together again. That would be almost as final a disaster for Project Dimension X as another attack by the Ngaa!

«-radical reduction in the stresses imposed on the subject during the transition,» Leighton was saying.

«Is this a fact, or simply an educated guess?»

Leighton must have been in a fairly good mood, because he didn't bristle at being accused of the obscene act of «guessing.» He shook his head. «It's a hypothesis, but one supported by all the data we have on Blade's first transition into the Dimension of the Ngaa.»

J nodded slowly. «That's true. The stress on Richard was so low that he was in the other Dimension before he realized it. That's basically how the Ngaa was able to take him over.»

«Precisely,» said Leighton, obviously keeping the triumph out of his voice with difficulty. «I'm not going to defend my bending of the rules, except that I've kept only the most useful and least dangerous part of the KALI system. In fact, I would say that using the old launching chair with this hastily rigged computer installation could be much more dangerous than using the KALI capsule.»

Leighton was capable of telling almost any sort of lie with a straight face. He would have made a superb politician if he hadn't had such a total contempt for politics. However, he seldom tried to lie to J on a matter of Richard Blade's safety. The old spymaster was too concerned about Blade and much too alert.

By now the snatches of the conversation he'd heard were triggering Blade's memories. Unlike the old system of wires and electrodes fastened in place by hand, the capsule made a circuit between him and the computer that was complete and identical each time. Leighton seemed to believe this might radically reduce the stress on the person in the capsule as he was shot off into Dimension X. That hadn't been in any of the reports, but it certainly sounded plausible. And if it was true — well, anything that reduced the danger of any part of the trip into Dimension X was a blessing.

For the moment at least Blade wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth. He cleared his throat, making the other two men pause, then asked Leighton:

«You'll be using the old manually-controlled main sequence with the KALI capsule this time?»

«Yes. The two are compatible, with a few modifications I've made.»

«And there's no other KALI hardware plugged in anywhere?»

«None.»

Blade turned to J. «Sir, I think I'd better take the chance. It doesn't sound like an unacceptable risk, as long as we're using nothing but the launch capsule. In fact, reducing the stress load on me won't do any harm at all. The faster I'm ready to fight when I reach the other side, the better. Most enemies there aren't so sneaky as the Ngaa.»

J frowned. «The problem is, you will be taking a chance, and a bigger one than I like.»

«That's possibly true,» said Blade. «But either I take the chance, or the whole Project takes it. If I know anything about the way politicians think-«

«Assuming their mental processes can be described as thinking,» put in Leighton.

Blade went on. «I suspect we're not out of the woods yet, as far as the Prime Minister is concerned. If we don't produce a fairly straightforward and normal roundtrip to Dimension X fairly soon, he may have second thoughts about keeping us going. We're still in the 'risky' category, and politicians like to keep that category as small as possible.»

J managed to laugh. «Richard, telling me that is teaching your grandmother to suck eggs. I was dealing with politicians while you were in short pants. But you're basically right. Go, and you'll have my blessing.» He raised his right hand, with the fingers firmly crossed.

Then he turned to Leighton. «Leighton, I don't particularly like this business of the hidden KALI capsule. But I'll let it pass on one condition. You tell me exactly how you managed to keep the thing hidden, and who helped you. I'm not questioning anybody's loyalty, but facts are facts. A network like yours could hide more disagreeable things than a piece of equipment.»

«Yes, but-«

«No 'buts,' Leighton. I don't play games with your computers. In return, I'll have to ask you not to play games with the Project's security.»

He took a deep breath. «If you won't cooperate, I'll have to do a housecleaning myself. Nothing brutal, you understand-just reassigning everybody I suspect of having had anything to do with hiding the capsule.»

«That certainly won't speed up our recovery from the Ngaa affair,» said Leighton.

«I'm willing to risk up to six months delay in the Project over this,» said J firmly. «I'm also willing to put the whole matter before the Prime Minister if necessary. It's not just our enemies who could benefit from sloppy security. What about the CIA, for example?»

Leighton sighed. «All right. I trust you to keep your mouth shut and not get anybody in trouble.»

The two older men shook hands, and after that things went swiftly. Leighton punched the button to initiate the Main Sequence. Blade climbed into the capsule, lay back, and relaxed. Leighton counted down, and as the count reached six, pressed another button to close the lid of the capsule. A click and darkness swallowed Blade. He felt the firmness of the capsule's inner surface against his skin.

Then in rapid succession:

A dazzling golden flash.

A soft, warm blueness, and a subtle sensation all over his skin, like a dozen skilled masseuses all working on him together. It was pleasant, almost erotic.

A harder blueness, neither cold nor warm.

Complete blackness.