Ice Dragon

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 in Wales. He no longer needed to stay at the little cottage on the Dorset 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 the British 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 northern Wales, 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 to London. 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 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 in London 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 of London's West 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 at Oxford, 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 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 a Harley 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 burgling Buckingham Palace 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 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 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.