Liberator Of Jedd

Chapter Six

During the next few days Blade lived almost continually with Ogar. He swiftly mastered the various rudimentary sounds that served Ogar for language and these, coupled with sign language — and here Ogar was very fast on the uptake — allowed them to converse after a fashion. Ogar was completely awed and subservient. Blade was the god who brought the meat.

Ogar did not appear to think it strange that it was always dark outside the cave and that the terrible night noises never ceased. This temporal discontinuity especially impressed Lord Leighton.

«No sense of time,» his Lordship noted in his ledgers. «It follows that at his stage of development he does not foresee death for himself, does not understand it in other things. Death is a mystery to him, the more so because of his complete unawareness.»

Then J, after a series of talks with the Prime Minister, sprang his surprise. Lord L was caught off guard.

J joined the issue over dinner one night, after leading the unwary old man into a cunning trap. Blade, over a steak nearly as raw as those he shared with Ogar, kept out of it as a good subordinate should.

J said: «The computer is repaired, then? We can send Richard into Dimension X any time we choose?»

Lord L, busy with his notes and barely pecking at his food, nodded vaguely. «Yes. I suppose so. But don't trouble me with that now, J. That can wait. At the moment Ogar is much more important than Dimension X.»

J finished chewing and swallowed. Then, «Bear with me, Leighton. Now — can you achieve the same setting on the computer that you had when it backfired and Ogar came to us?»

His Lordship began to sense trouble. He put down his notes and glowered at J. «I suppose I can. What of it? What are you getting at, J?»

Blade stared down at his plate. He knew what J was getting at. He waited for the explosion.

It came. J socked it to the old man. «The Prime Minister wants Blade to go out at once. As soon as possible. Ogar is to go with him. Both of them through the computer and back to Ogar's dimension. I am sure that you will see the advantages of this — Dick will have a friend, a guide. For once he will not be going in cold. I—»

Lord Leighton's leonine eyes glittered down the table at J. «I see that you have been going behind my back. You have been conspiring against me, running to the PM with tales. I must say I am surprised, J. I expected better of you. But you've wasted your time. I am in command of this project. I and I alone. I will say when Blade goes into Dimension X — and that will be when I am ready, not before. And most certainly Ogar will not go with him. Lose Ogar now? Send him back to his own dimension? You must be out of your mind, J!»

J shook his head, in regret more than anger. «You're wrong, you know. On all counts. The Prime Minister runs the show. He holds the purse. Face reality, my dear Leighton. The Prime Minister wants results. Now. Practical results. Something to show the Committee on Secret Funds. Ogar's dimension is the answer — you yourself say that it must be very like our own was half a million years ago. Think, Leighton! Think of all that vast treasure. Untouched. Unspoiled. Oil, gold, coal, uranium, bauxite, copper — the list is endless. Diamonds lying around on the surface. And a laboratory, Leighton! A living, breathing, existing laboratory for Blade to study and report on. Against all that, Leighton, Ogar is of very little significance.»

Lord L sat very still. He picked up his teacup, stared at it for a moment, then hurled it across the room to smash on a wall. «Of little significance, J? Ogar of little significance?»

The storm broke. Blade sat in silence and admiration. He had long known, and appreciated, the old man's command of billingsgate, but now his Lordship surpassed himself. He cursed J and the Prime Minister for five minutes and did not repeat himself once. J, like a clever old tree, bowed to the wind and was not broken. He gave Blade a saturnine smile, winked, and listened unperturbed to comments on his ancestry.

In the end Lord L went stomping off to see the Prime Minister. Hours later he returned, bitter and somewhat chastened, but unforgiving. J had won. Blade, and Ogar, were to go out first thing in the morning.

J had been sure of the outcome. After Lord L limped out, pale with rage and near to frothing, J said: «The boffins in Scotland are very near to a breakthrough on teleportation. A year. Two at the most. That means we will be able to achieve large-scale transport from X to Home Dimension. It bears very heavily with the PM. And with me, for that matter. I used it as a fulcrum to move him to my way of thinking.»

He gazed fondly at Blade. «And it will be a great help, Dick. For once you won't be going into Dimension X as a total stranger. Ogar should be of immense value back in his own world.»

Blade nodded slowly. The plan did have its advantages. What the disadvantages were, if any, he would have to wait and see.

«We'll have to drug Ogar tonight, then,» J continued. «A light dosage. Enough to get him to the computer and through it before he wakes up. It's the only way.»

So that night Ogar was treated to an especially delectable hunk of raw meat, saturated with a powerful sleeping potion. Ogar wolfed it down, rubbed his hairy belly, gibbered at Blade in appreciation — and soon dropped off into a deep slumber.

As dawn was breaking over London, Blade carried Ogar up the stairs, into the elevator and finally to the tiny room nestled in the penetralia of the gigantic computer. Lord L, who was not speaking to either of them, this time allowed J to enter the sanctum, something he had never permitted before. It was, J thought, an obverse gesture of contempt for all stupid and pragmatic minds. Lord L had not been persuaded by J's argument that if they could get Blade back from Dimension X they could also recover Ogar.

«It doesn't work that way,» Leighton said tartly. «Blade's brain has been conditioned. Ogar's has not. It was sheer lucky chance that we got Ogar in the first place. No. Ogar will never come back.»

His Lordship wasted no time. He set about his task as grimly as any executioner. He had devised a technique in half an hour, when he knew he must, and now he bound Blade and Ogar in a reticulation of wires and electrodes that practically made them one. Blade, sitting in the chair with Ogar clasped in his arms while J looked on uneasily, noticed an odd fact: he was hardly aware of Ogar's smell.

They were ready. Lord Leighton stepped to his instrument board and made a complicated series of adjustments. He had not spoken since they entered the compartment.

J cleared his throat. He was actually seeing it for the first time and he felt a renewed sense of the terror he had experienced in Reading. Sweat trickled down him and his knees felt quavery and there was an enormous painful lump in his stomach. Fear for Blade, and even for Ogar, lanced him. They were all mad, he told himself. Mad. And no help for it. None at all. Too late. Lord L, without warning, was pressing the red button.

A steady pillar of white flame began to build inside Blade. He was being scooped out, burnt hollow, eviscerated. His eyes left his skull and became separate entities attached to his body by long stalks. The ceiling slid down at him, about to crush him, then a rift appeared and he went soaring up and through the rift into blackness.

Not for long, the blackness. Blade went swirling through it on a long curving vector, the force and velocity of which were so complex that Blade, as he riddled the answer in neon chalk on a celestial blackboard, marveled at his own acumen.

The equation slipped away, torn from his bleeding brain by a mauve wind that blew between the spheres. Blade did a wingover, adjusted the fleshy rudder on his coccyx and became aware of a rude knocking on the tiny door in his belly.

A hairy little doll with a macrohead was demanding to be let in. A horrible stench sifted into the corridors of Blade's nostrils and drifted through him like decayed smoke.

Knock-knock-knock — the stinking little mannequin was demanding to be admitted into Blade's guts. Why not? Plenty of room. Was he not disemboweled? He reached down and opened the door of his belly and watched the small figure disappear within.

Immediately the pain began. Pain made more dreadful because Blade could not scream. His lungs were full of fetid smoke.

The universe screamed for him. One cosmic shriek of agony. The pain went on and on.

He was falling now, dropping into the midst of a bloody sun. Red incandescence licked at him. He was consumed. Ashes — ashes— Nothing — nothing—