Kingdom Of Royth

CHAPTER 1

The official Rolls-Royce carrying J toward the Tower of London was not quite like the advertisements-so quiet that all he could hear was the ticking of the electric clock. But it was almost that quiet, and otherwise there were only faint traffic noises outside. It was eleven o'clock on a spring night, and London was either going to sleep or already asleep.

J would normally have been in bed and asleep also. Part of his rise to the position of head of the special intelligence branch MI6 was the result of years of rising early, not only before the dawn but before his rivals (and his enemies). But tonight Richard Blade was being hurled through Lord Leighton's gigantic computer on his ninth journey into Dimension X. J would sooner have violated the Official Secrets Act than not be on hand when his best agent-almost like a son to him was hurled off into some fantastic other world to live or die by his own quick wits and superb physical prowess.

Blade had made the same journey eight times. The first time it had been by accident, when an experiment indirectly linking one of Lord Leighton's earlier computers to Blade's mind has gone spectacularly awry. The remaining times, however, his journeys had been part of a deliberately contrived project to explore what was now called Dimension X, for the benefit of England. Over the short time of its existence, Project Dimension X had grown from a bee in Lord Leighton's white-haired bonnet to a massive undertaking housed in a self-contained complex more than two hundred feet below the Tower. Its financing swallowed money to the tune of better than half a million pounds a year. It drew on the talents of some thirty of England's most brilliant men-scientists, engineers, psychologists-without letting them know what they were serving. Only four people in the whole world-J hoped-knew full details. Blade, Lord Leighton, the Prime Minister, and J himself.

In spite of the Prime Minister's generosity with priorities, financing, and staffing, Project Dimension X still had a weak point. That weak point was Richard Blade himself. J grinned wryly at the notion of Blade, with his mind and body and experience, being a «weak point.» Then the grin faded.

It was true. Dimension X could not be explored or exploited without somebody going through the computer. So far, the only person able to go through the computer and return alive and sane was Blade himself. One other man had tried; he had returned permanently insane. A dozen others had been considered; all had been rejected. All fell short of Blade's perfection.

But however perfect Blade might be, there was a limit to what he could take. Sooner or later his brain would suffer major damage from too much stress placed on it too often by the computer. Even worse, somewhere out in Dimension X his mighty strength might not be great enough, his lightning reflexes not fast enough, and he would not come back at all.

It was absolutely necessary to find at least one other man, and preferably several, who could survive a trip into Dimension X, both physically and mentally. They needed to take the strain off Blade for his sake. Even more, if he cracked or vanished before they found somebody else, the whole Dimension X project would come to a standstill, possibly for good. That would benefit nobody and nothing.

All of which explained why J was in the official Rolls-Royce heading into London. An hour ago he had been high over the Atlantic in an airliner. To all eyes he had been a tall, elderly impeccably Establishment businessman or civil servant. He had just completed a mission to Washington, a mission personally ordered by the Prime Minister. He had been discreetly inquiring of the Americans whether they had any good agents that might be available for a joint Anglo-American project. Making the inquiries widely enough to get useful information but not so widely that American curiosity was aroused and they started inquiring in their turn had been one of the most delicate jobs of J's whole career. He thought it had gone well. At any rate, he already had seven names and the promise of a thorough search of the staffs of American intelligence agencies for more. Between that and the Prime Minister's equally discreet inquiries in England's armed forces, something should turn up.

Of course, it would be preferable for the Project to remain an all-British affair. If the Americans provided men, they would also be sure to demand a share of any benefits from the Project. But even dividing the benefits with the Americans was preferable to suspending the Project entirely. And it was even more preferable to keeping it going with Blade alone until it destroyed him.

J caught himself. Was he thinking too much of saving Blade and not enough of their common duty to England? If he was, it was time to face the fact that he was getting old and hand over his job to a younger, more dispassionate man. Then he remembered that even if he retired as chief of M16, he would still be involved with Project Dimension X. The Prime Minister had specifically asked him to stay on even after retirement as the Government's representative with the Project. He had agreed. The Prime Minister had tried to present this as a high honor, and J supposed that in a way it was. But, and here he grinned again, it was also an easy way of saving the Prime Minister from having to deal directly with Lord Leighton very often. Leighton might be England's most brilliant scientist, and he might have forgotten more about computers than any other five men in the world had learned. But that didn't make him any less eccentric, irritable, or maddeningly difficult to work with.

J was still running futures-Blade's, his own, and the Project's-back and forth in his mind when the Rolls drew up at the entrance to the Tower. He climbed out, then smiled broadly as a tall figure with an escort of dour Special Branch men loomed up out of the darkness. It was very decent of Richard to come out to meet him here on the surface, even though they couldn't exchange any serious words until they had left the escort behind.

They did that at the massive, gleaming bronze doors marking the head of the elevator shaft down to the complex far below. The door swished shut behind them and the elevator began its unnerving plunge downwards. J turned to Blade and thrust out his hand.

«How are you; Richard? I'm sorry I couldn't get back until just now. I wouldn't have been able to do even that if the P.M. hadn't sent an official car out to the airport for me.»

Blade grinned and took the offered hand in a strong grasp. «It wouldn't have mattered. Lord Leighton said we were going to wait before starting the sequence until you arrived, however long that might be.»

«Well, I'll be damned!» J's eyebrows rose. «I'm almost prepared to believe that Lord L is developing some human feelings at last.»

«Quite possibly. He-«Blade was interrupted as the elevator sighed to a stop. The doors slid open, revealing the familiar long corridor stretching away under the lights.

As they stepped from the elevator, Lord Leighton popped out of a side door like the White Rabbit. He looked even more like an industrious gnome than usual as he scuttled ahead of them down the corridor on his polio-twisted legs. His hunchbacked body bounced inside the grimy white laboratory smock. As they moved along through the familiar series of electronically guarded doors, he kept up a cheerful stream of comment.

«Very glad you could get back in time, J. Richard knew you'd want to be around for the send-off; talked my arm and half my leg off persuading me to wait. No good reason not to, of course. We can start the main sequence any time we choose. The problem's always going to be making adjustments once the sequence is started. So far we haven't had any malfunctions in the middle. We'll have to make some modifications in the sequencing procedure, though. Put in a provision for «holds» like the Americans use on their space launches. Don't want to put Richard halfway into Dimension X and leave half of him here, do we?»

J found Leighton's cheerfulness more than a trifle ghoulish and his technical comments about as intelligible as if they had been in Chinese. But it again occurred to him-might Leighton possibly be developing some human sensibilities about the whole Project? Was the cheerful patter an effort to conceal a sudden nervousness of his own, as well as to attack the nervousness he assumed J and Blade were feeling? J certainly didn't mind admitting to having the wind up a bit, as usual. He turned to look at Richard, striding along in massive silence beside him. Blade's lips wore a very faint smile, but it seemed to be pasted on, out of keeping with the rest of his manner, which was preoccupied and a bit tense. Hardly surprising, that. Blade had been a first-class field operative for MI6 for the better part of twenty years and had survived more unexpected dangers than most men would encounter in ten lifetimes. But even the worst field assignment didn't throw an agent literally naked into a situation about which he knew absolutely nothing beforehand. So far, Blade's physical and mental qualities had brought him through safely. But this sort of good luck couldn't last indefinitely.

As if he had been thinking along the same lines, Blade turned to J and said, «How was the American mission, sir? Do I plan to retire on my laurels after this trip?» There was a note of self-mockery in Blade's voice that made J feel a little better. Richard was as ready as ever to take whatever the world-this or any other one-might throw at him.

«Don't start planning your retirement yet,» J replied in the same light tone. «It's too soon to see if the Americans can come up with anybody good enough. I have a few names, but that's all for the moment. I haven't yet even worked out a proper cover story for bringing them over here for testing.»

Blade nodded. «Lord L thinks he may be on to a method for the advanced testing of candidates. Not just physically, but mentally as well.»

J nodded grimly. He thought of the ruined shell of a man locked away for the remainder of his life in a North County institution because his mind had not survived the trip into Dimension X, even though his body had returned. Lord Leighton turned around and also nodded.

«If the mental breakdown was the result of some physical effect that the computer has on the subject's brain, we're barking up the wrong tree. And if it turns out that Richard is the only man in the world with a brain immune to that effect-well, we're in a nasty situation. But if it's simply a question of a man's being unable to adapt to such a fantastically different environment, one of the psychiatrists thinks he may have developed a new method of testing for stress tolerance. If it-ah, here we are.»

As always, the main computer room, filled with the great shadowy bulks with their crackled finish and the swarm of writhing multicolored wires reminded J of an abandoned temple of some fantastic and sinister religion overrun by the jungle. And the squat black chair in its glass cubicle in the middle looked like an altar for sacrifices of a highly unpleasant sort.

Blade, however, seemed entirely relaxed and at home. He turned to J and said, «Well, sir, it looks like that time again. No point in making Lord L wait any longer.» They shook hands, and Blade stepped into the dressing room.

Inside, he quickly stripped naked and began smearing on the black paste that protected him from electrical burns as the computer's immense power surged through his body. Now that the time was drawing near, he felt his tension slipping away. It was replaced by anticipation. Apart from what it might bring for England, the whole Project offered him an endless series of challenges and adventures. And it was a love of these that had helped bring him into the intelligence service in the first place.

This time, of course, he was not running away from a broken love affair or running toward some place he hoped might cure an inexplicable and maddening impotence. He had resigned himself to a series of fleeting relationships with women as long as he was working on the Project. As for his virility, neither he nor any of his recent partners could have any reasonable complaints on that score. No, it was just a case of going out once more to do what he did well and, when you got right down to it, enjoyed doing.

He pulled on the loincloth. This was purely a gesture, since it had never yet survived the trip. He stepped out into the chamber and strode over to the chair. He knew the routine by now to the point that he felt like twiddling his thumbs as Lord L adjusted the net of restraining straps, then began attaching the cobra-headed electrodes to every part of Blade's body. This went on until he was festooned with wires-blue, green, yellow, red-leading off in every direction into the guts of the computer, like some mad artist's vision of an octopus.

Then there was a further wait, while Blade's impatience began to build. Of course Leighton had to double-check everything. Still, why did he always have to be so bloody slow about it? Blade took several breaths as deep as the straps permitted and tried to relax.

Finally everything was ready. J moved aside and raised a hand in farewell as Lord L stepped slowly up to the main console and poised his hand over the master control switch. He turned and looked inquiringly at Blade. «Ready, my boy?»

«Ready, sir.»

«Good luck.»

The gnarled hand pressed the master switch. There was a hum of surging power, then the shrill wailing of a hundred thousand flutes filled the chamber and made the air turn a liquid green. Everything around Blade turned green too, except for the figures of J and Lord L. They turned blue, then shrank and became dwarfed and monkeylike, scratched themselves and clambered frantically up the face of the computer. The electrodes writhed and twisted and pulled themselves free from his body, turning to snakes as they did so. The snakes wriggled furiously across the floor and swarmed up the face of the computer after the fleeing monkey figures.

Just as the snakes reached them, the face of the computer itself cracked open in a hundred places. Blade cringed as the great slabs of facing came pouring down on him and then poured through him, and a tangible blackness flooded out from the vast hole where the computer had been, gushing out until Blade was completely surrounded by it and the snakes and monkeys were both gone.

Then the blackness receded slightly, and Blade was standing on a concrete block with harsh blue lights pouring down on him from all around. A voice was chanting tonelessly, «Five-four-three-two-one-LIFT-OFF!» Fire spewed out from under the block and he and it together began to rise into the sky. Quickly they were out of the blue lights, rising again into thick blackness, until the flames gushing from the block died and it fell away. Blade hurtled alone through the dark, then felt himself slowing. His climb ceased; he rolled over and began to fall, silently, with no sensation of air rushing past or of anything except the falling, the endless falling.