Jewel of Tharn

Chapter One

The lights were burning late at Number 10 Downing Street Big Ben had just struck three and still the three men sat around the long, green-topped table in the Privy Council room. Blue smoke from J's pipe wreathed upward to form baroque curlicues in the white light of a high chandelier.

The Prime Minister took a sip from the small brandy snifter before him. He said: "It is a sort of death, I suppose. A death in life. Which this man Blade is willing to undergo again and again. You say he accepts these risks gladly?"

Lord Leighton, England's greatest scientist, a shrunken little man with a grotesque hump and glittering yellow eyes, nodded and said: "He does. Gladly."

J, who was Richard Blade's friend, and superior in MI6A, made a grumpy sound in his throat. "I don't think 'gladly' is precisely the word, sir. Blade is no fool. He couldn't have been my top man for twenty years if he were. He is a handsome fellow, right now in the prime of life, and he has a great deal to live for. The world, as the saying goes, is his oyster. Yet he has volunteered. He does accept the risks willingly. That's the better word, sir. Willingly. It is simply a matter of duty, of serving England, and that is something that Blade understands better than most". J's pipe went out and he fumbled for matches.

The Prime Minister looked at Lord Leighton and J, then down at the pile of flimsies before him. He put a pudgy finger on the papers, as though he expected them to fly away, and cleared his throat.

"Very well, gentlemen. Let us see exactly where we are. I will begin by saying that I do not understand, Lord Leighton, do not comprehend in any degree, this miracle that you have brought about. I am a politician, not a scientist, and God knows I have enough problems in this world without seeking for new ones in odd corners of the cosmos...or wherever it is that you send this man Blade. I..."

Lord Leighton, who would have interrupted God if he felt like it, broke in to say, "Not a question of cosmogony, sir. I tried to explain that in my report Not a question of time or space, either. It is a question of the dimensional rift: my computer so alters the molecular structure of Blade's brain and body that he is able to perceive, and live in, dimensions that none of the rest of us are aware of."

The Prime Minister, who did not like being interrupted, gave his Lordship a rather cold stare.

"You tried to explain a great many things in your reports, Leighton. I in turn have just explained that I don't understand them. Not really understand. Now, if you will allow me to get on?"

J busied himself in lighting his pipe again, covering a smirk. Lord Leighton, highest boffin in the land, could be arrogant, and a trifle condescending, with lesser brains than his own. Already, on several occasions, J had felt the rasp of Leighton's impatience.

The Prime Minister continued. "Blade has been out on two of these...these journeys?"

Leighton was silent, his small leonine eyes half closed. He looked sulky, but J knew better. Leighton wasn't sulking, he was merely thinking ahead a couple of centuries.

J said: "Yes, sir. Twice. To Alb and to Cath. The first time it was an accident. Something went wrong with the computer experiment. The second time it was deliberate. The third time... well, sir, that's why we're here."

The PM riffled the file of papers with his fingers. "Yes. You want a white card, an imprimo, a 'let this be done.' You also want a million pounds."

Silence. Lord Leighton closed his eyes altogether. J took the hint. He was now carrying the ball. As it should be. His Lordship knew little of officialdom and how things got done in a democracy.

J stuffed his pipe with crude sailor's roughcut, not taking his eyes from those of the PM.

"Yes, sir. That just about sums it up. We want your signature on a piece of paper. Carte blanche. And we do want the million pounds. With no questions asked in Parliament I am sure you realize, sir, that this matter is of life or death importance to England. So far, incredible as it may seem, only four people in the world know about it! Lord Leighton, myself, you, sir, and Richard Blade. But if we intend to exploit this thing, sir, and implement the decisions we are obviously going to have to make, based on the discoveries that Blade makes, we cannot maintain this type of cabalistic secrecy. We must expand, call in other people, a lot of them, and that is going to be an awesome task, sir, from the security viewpoint I think I can handle it, but it is going to take money. A great deal of money."

The PM stared down at the sheaf of papers. He drank a little more brandy. Then: "It is just possible that I can get the money. There is a fund - I suppose it is still extant - that was set up during the war." He gave J a tired smile. "It would have to be something like that, of course. Not only in the interests of secrecy, but plain common sense. If I were to go before the House and ask for money for... for a project this... they would have me in a straitjacket in no time."

Lord Leighton opened his eyes. "Then you'll give us the money...and the white card?"

For a moment the PM did not answer. The brandy snifter was empty now, but he did not reach for the decanter nearby. He tapped the glass with a finger and a chiming little note shivered for a moment in the silence and died away.

The PM picked up a flimsy and read from it.

"Possibilities of exploitation of inter-dimensional travel. Hmmm. Possible mass teleportation of surplus population. Colonization of newly discovered dimensions instead of, or in addition to, the moon and planets. Possible mass teleportation of precious minerals, not gold. We all know what that means, don't we? Hmmm. Possible cultural exchanges? I confess that I don't really know what is meant by that."

Lord Leighton blinked his yellow eyes. "Simply means that the more we understand about this universe, and the dimensions of it, the less chance that well blow the whole bloody thing to hell. That's what it means."

The PM read silently now. J watched and could feel sympathy with the man who headed the British Government J still didn't quite believe it. Not really. Not absolutely. Not even in this age of commonplace miracles. J was of the wrong generation. He knew it A teenager would accept Leighton's miracle with a bored "so what," and wonder what the fuss was all about J kept thinking that he was going to wake up.

When the PM had finished reading he put the papers down and walked to an escritoire in a corner. He fished a single sheet of paper out of a drawer and scribbled rapidly on it J, watching, saw the flourish of the signature. They had it! And if they had this they would also get the million pounds.

J was quite unprepared for what the PM did next, though he knew the man was rumored to have an odd, elfin sense of humor.

The PM took a candle from the desk, lit it, and walked back to the long table. He put the slip of paper on the table and dropped hot wax on it just below his signature. Into the cooling wax he pressed a massive seal ring which he wore on his left hand.

The PM smiled at J and at Lord Leighton, who was now alert and watching with interest.

"This whole thing has a medieval flavor," said the PM. "Witchcraft, alchemy, spies behind the arras, what you will. We may as well carry it the whole way, eh, gentlemen?"

He handed the sealed and signed bit of paper to J. "There you are. Let it be done! I'm sure it will be honored in most parts of the kingdom, what is left of it. Except, possibly, Wales and parts of Scotland." The smile was a trifle sour. "And I hope you aren't planning to work in Africa."

Lord Leighton stood up. He snatched the bit of paper from J's hand and stared at it, then nodded to the PM. "Thank you, sir. That's all we need... and the million pounds. Good night, sir."

His Lordship walked out of the room without looking back, his hump swaying, his gait crablike as a result of the polio that had struck him long ago.

J made a more gracious exit. Even tried, in some measure, to explain Leighton's rudeness.

"He is very tired, sir. And he is in constant pain. He..."

The PM waved it away. "No matter. No matter at all. If I had his brain I daresay I would be insufferable. Just get on with it. Luck to you. But if this is a hoax, any sort of flummery, then God help us all. I am as committed as you are." He picked up the sheaf of papers from the table. "These go into the fire tonight, as soon as you leave."

As J was leaving the PM called after him. J turned.

"I should like," said the PM, "to meet this Richard Blade one day. When the time is right. He must be quite a man, this dimensional wanderer. Rather makes space walking seem like a Boy Scout Drill, doesn't it?"

J nodded and smiled. "It does, sir. And Richard is indeed quite a man. Good night, sir."

Richard Blade was, at the moment, a man who was losing his girl. They had just made love for the last time. To Blade, forewarned of the termination of the affair, the lovemaking had been especially bittersweet He did not want to lose Zoe. There was a distinct possibility that he was in love with Zoe. There was no doubt at all that Zoe was deeply in love with him.

Which was why she was leaving him.

They were in the cottage in Dorset, near the tiny village of Burton-Bradstock. The air was sweet with hawthorne and rose and wild thyme, somewhere a last sleepy cuckoo called, and the moon was a high silver scythe over an amethyst Channel. Blade lay on the wide bed, still rumpled from their lovemaking, and watched Zoe dress. She was determined to drive up to London tonight.

Blade wore only a pair of white shorts. His body, so recently drained, was at ease, if not his mind, and he looked like a huge brawny tanned cat against the white sheet. He was well over six feet and built in proportion, with an awesome symmetry about him, so perfectly in scale, that a stranger did not realize how massive the shoulders, how oaken the thighs, until a stranger had occasion to see, or to feel, Blade in action. Zoe, who was an amateur artist and something of a connoisseur of bodies, had painted him many times in the nude. They had done many things in the nude, he and Zoe, and now she was leaving him.

Blade did not doubt for an instant that she meant it. Zoe was like that. She meant things she said, especially things she said in the tone she had just used with him.

He watched idly as she pulled on long black stockings and gartered them high on her firm white thighs. Zoe had a milky skin that never tanned. She stayed out of the sun and in consequence was always a little like a glistening alabaster goddess. Blade wondered, not for the first time, if women - decent women like Zoe - understood the aphrodisiac effect of black on white. He supposed not. Women, he had read, did not respond to psychological stimuli as readily as men. With them it was more a matter of touch, of tactile stimulation. Blade sighed and dismissed the new urge that was rising in him. Zoe wasn't going to let him touch her. Not any more. Not ever again.

Zoe slipped a gossamer pair of panties up her long legs and over the white garter belt. She leaned forward - Blade was getting a double image in the mirror on the dressing table - to fit her small pointed breasts into the cups of her brassiere. Blade felt an almost physical pain. New desire, bound to be thwarted now, began to gnaw at him.

"Zoe."

She slipped a blue linen frock over her head and straightened it. She picked up a silver backed brush and began doing things to her hair. She was watching him in the mirror.

Blade reached for a pack of cigarettes on the bedside table. He lit one, expelled smoke, and said again: "Zoe."

She was doing her mouth with a brush. She never used a stick. Doing that red moist mouth that he had kissed so many times.

Zoe dabbed at her mouth with a tissue. "Yes, Dick?"

"You've really thought this out? You know what you're doing? You really want to leave me this way?"

Her smile was a phantom in the mirror. "Yes. Yes. And no. I have thought it out, I do know what I'm doing, and I do not want to leave you."

Blade frowned. "That's women's logic, which means no logic at all. You love me and you don't want to leave me. But you are going to leave me. That's more than a mere man like me can understand."

Zoe twisted her leg to contemplate her stocking. Her lovely mobile face, with the generous mouth and wide set eyes, was impassive. She kept her face averted because she did not want Blade to see the sheen of tears in her eyes. Ladies, and Zoe was most distinctly a lady, did not cry at moments like this.

"We've been over this before," she said. "Please, Richard! There's no need to rehash it...let's just say goodbye and have done with it. Would you take my bag out to the car, please?"

Blade, as near as he ever came to sulking, slid into a pair of trousers and, barefooted, his huge torso glinting in the moonlight, carried her bag out to the Minx.

Zoe was very deft about it. It was, Blade was to think later, almost as though she had rehearsed it.

She did not cling, nor did she give him an opportunity for further argument She kissed him lightly on the cheek, said "Ta, darling," in the south country style, legged it gracefully into the Minx, tugged down her brief skirt, and was gone.

Blade watched the red dot of the Minx's taillight vanishing down the lane. It swerved behind a yew hedge and was gone. He listened as the little car purred on, halted at the blacktop road, turned left and took off in a burst of speed. She would take the blacktop into Bridport and then hit the arterial road for London.

Ta, Zoe.

He went back into the cottage, tossed the trousers off to one side, and stretched out on the bed again. It was somehow too large now, and too empty. Her fragrance lingered in the room like a delicate ghost.

Blade lit a new cigarette and stared at the ceiling. After a moment he began to curse, softly, barely moving his lips, making a liturgy of it He ran the gamut and felt slightly better.

Couldn't be helped, he told himself. Absolutely nothing to be done about it A job was a job. Duty was duty. Both came before private indulgence, even in love.

There, of course, was the rub. Blade was an honest man and he had never been able to tell Zoe - what she most wanted to hear - that he loved her. That he wanted to marry her.

Toward the end she had been most brutally candid.

"You disappear for weeks, months on end, Richard, and there is never an explanation. You go without warning... you come back without warning. Suddenly you appear and I'm supposed to welcome you back and take up just where we left off. Just like that! It won't work, Richard. Not with me... not any more."

It was useless to try to explain. Bound by his oath, and by the Official Secrets Act, Blade couldn't even explain that he couldn't explain. He took refuge in silence. And in cajolery - and in sex.

Even sex failed in the end.

"I'm a normal woman, Richard. I want to be married. I want a family and a home and reasonable security. Most of all I want to know where my husband is...at least most of the time. Even more important - I want to know that my husband is coming home. That I'll see him again. I don't know what you do, Richard, and I've never pried, but I doubt that you can truthfully reassure me about that - that you will be coming home! Whatever you do, I have the feeling that it is dangerous. More than a feeling, a certainty. Can you deny it?"

Blade couldn't.

"I love you with all my heart," Zoe had said, "but love isn't enough. Not for me. So after this weekend, Richard, I'm not going to see you again."

And now the weekend had gone and so had Zoe.

Blade's mood was such that he was glad when the phone rang next morning and J, after the usual affable preliminaries, "requested" his presence in London. Blade locked up the cottage, tossed his bags into the MG and took off with a roar, glad to be on the move.

J was waiting for him in the little office in Copra House, deep in the grimy environs of the City. Blade, much to his amazement, had found a parking place on Bart Lane and, after an hour with J, he and the older man drove to the Tower in the MG.

J did most of the talking during the drive, rattling on in the effete Establishment tones that concealed a shrewd brain. Blade was busy trying to digest all that he had heard just now. Operation X-Dimension had status, official status, and the fullest backing of the PM himself. Blade could not see that it changed matters very much - it was he, alone, who still had to go out there and face whatever must be faced. Alone.

"I'll look after your car, dear boy," said J. "Leighton doesn't know how long you'll be gone this time - or if he does know he won't tell me. In any case I'll take care of everything. You're not to worry."

Blade gave him a sour smile. J was nervous. More so than Blade, by far, and talking nonsense to relieve his tension.

The procedure at the Tower was the same. Burly guards escorted them past the site of the old Water Gate and down many stairs to a large bronze-fronted elevator. There Blade and J said goodbye.

J patted his shoulder. "See you soon, dear boy. I hope it's a ripping adventure this time." The old man's false teeth glinted at Blade. "But keep in mind that it's more than an adventure now - it's for England! Goodbye, Richard."

Blade stepped into the elevator, the bronze door sighed shut behind him, and he fell away into the depths of the Tower. The car fell so fast that he felt a little sick. This labyrinth beneath the Tower was all new work. New and top, top secret. Blade himself had not known of it until a few months before.

Lord Leighton was waiting for him in the brilliantly lighted foyer. The little hunchback in the white smock smiled with tobacco stained teeth as Blade left the car. The elevator shot up again.

His Lordship shook Blade's big hand. He peered into Blade's face with small yellow eyes stained red from lack of sleep. "I suppose J has told you of our new status?"

Blade said that J had told him.

Leighton nodded, then lurched away in his tortured, crablike walk. It seemed to Blade that the little cripple's hump was larger, but that was nonsense. He followed Leighton along the path he had walked twice before, through the computer room where the consoles clicked and hummed about their recondite affairs.

Leighton waved a claw-like hand at the computers. "A million pounds!" He chuckled. "That means all new equipment, Richard. These are already obsolete."

Blade changed his clothes in the same cubicle. He put on the twist of linen that served as a loincloth. Heretofore the linen had disintegrated as he passed through the computer. He smiled. He had landed naked in Alb, and naked he had landed in the dimension of Cath. J, rather sharply, had observed that Blade was nothing less than the Adam myth relived.

As he left the cubicle Blade's smile turned grim. Until now he had found no Eden, no Paradise. Quite the contrary.

Lord Leighton wasted no time. Everything was ready. Blade went into the glass cage that stood on a pad in the guts of the monster computer. Leighton greased his body and attached the scores of electrodes. The tiny wires, with their shiny metal cobra heads, were all tagged and grouped and ran through portholes in the center of the vast machine.

The first trip out Blade had been a little afraid. It had all been strange to him then. On his second journey he had been nervous, normally so. This time he was neither afraid nor nervous. He found that he was looking forward to it He had been idle too long.

Lord Leighton finished with the electrodes. He smiled at Blade, who sat ready in the chair, so festooned with wires that he looked a bit like Gulliver bound.

Leighton said: "Just remember, Richard, that you don't have to consciously observe and remember. It is better if you don't. Our work with the chronos computer has expanded your memory cells so that all observed data will file itself automatically. Just don't think about remembering and you will remember."

Blade nodded.

Lord Leighton reached for a switch behind him. "I can't be sure just when I'll bring you back. It's very tricky. I'm in the midst of some very complex calculations about that now, and it will take a few days. But you needn't worry, boy. I'll get you back!"

Something akin to affection gleamed in the hunch-back's yellow eyes. He who had never loved anything but a computer. "Ready, Richard?"

"Get on with it."

Lord Leighton closed the switch.