The Bronze Axe

Chapter Sixteen

"Some of the greatest inventions," said Lord Leighton, "have been discovered quite by accident. I think, J, that this may be one of them."

For a moment J did not answer. He was looking at the big man in the small white bed. Richard Blade slept peacefully, his curling beard and longish hair a dark stain on the pristine pillow. Small electrodes attached here and there led to a large electroencephalograph in one corner of the aseptic room, part of a hospital complex lying far beneath the Tower of London. Here there was silence, broken only by their voices and the occasional hum of a machine, with no encroachment by the insane traffic high over them.

J's benign, aging Establishment face bore traces of harrowing nights and days. As head of Britain's super agency, MI6A, he was accustomed to bearing a heavy load; the past few weeks had been nearly intolerable.

"I thought we had lost him," J said. "I will admit to it now, Lord Leighton. I had given up hope and I was blaming you and your damned blundering. That infernal computer of yours "

Lord Leighton's yellow eyes were red streaked and his expensive suit hung on his polio-ruined frame like so many rags. Now and then he twitched and raised an arm, as if trying to ease himself of the hump he must wear forever. He was peering at the encephalograph.

"His brain waves are very nearly back to normal," he told J quietly. "Another few hours and the molecular structure will be restored to what it was. I have sedated him to sleep another twelve hours. When you talk to him again, J, he will be exactly the man you have always known."

J nodded without speaking, He went to the bedside and bent over the sleeping Blade, then lightly touched the bearded face with his fingers. "Wherever he's been, Lord L, he has been in wind and weather. And sun. He is burnt nearly black. That wound in his back and the healed burns my God, Lord L! He is going to have a story to tell!"

Lord Leighton paced a few steps sometimes movement eased the eternal pain in his back and watched J with a mixture of affection and impatience. J was a spymaster, no scientist, and it was inevitable that he should get the cart before the horse.

"I hope Blade can tell us his story," Lord Leighton began, "but I shouldn't count on it too heavily, J. He simply may not remember very much. I have foreseen that. I am already working on a memory expanding drug which, in conjunction with a sort of booster computer I call it a chronos computer should enable Blade to remember everything about his next venture. And without any conscious effort on his part."

Lord Leighton beamed at J, remarkably like a crippled old cat that has found a way to attract mice without effort on its own part.

J was not ashamed to let his jaw droop as he stared at the little cripple.

"His next venture? What in hell are you talking about, man?"

Lord Leighton looked long-suffering, patient, and waved a placating hand toward a small table on which lay a thick file bound in green leather.

"It's all in there, J. Everything. Read it in the taxi, on your way to the Prime Minister. It's the highest priority and top top secret, or however you chaps label these things."

J looked from Lord Leighton to the peacefully slumbering Blade and back again at Leighton. "I," he said, "will be eternally damned! I'm going to have something to say about this, Leighton. I'm damned if I stand by and watch you "

Lord Leighton still wore the expression of an angel whose patience is tried beyond measure. When J's complaints had tailed away into inarticulate mutterings, he said:

"You don't really understand it yet, do you, J? I said a moment ago that many great inventions, or scientific discoveries, are made by accident. This I believe to be one of them. I can't prove it yet, but I think that Blade has been out in another dimension! Not in space, not in time none of your science-fiction jiggery pokery but I believe that the computer so disarranged his brain cells that he has been seeing, existing, in a dimension that we cannot see or experience, though we may both be living in the very midst of it at this moment. Walking through it, as it were, without knowing it is there.

"Put in an absurdly simple way it is nothing more than the dog whistle thing the dog can hear the whistle, you can't. But the sound is there!"

By now J had recovered some of his aplomb. He frowned. "We nearly lost him this time, damn it. Who knows what will happen next time if there is one."

"There will be one," said Lord Leighton softly. "The Prime Minister will see to it. He is not a fool. This discovery may have unlimited possibilities, J, may open doors that we do not even conceive of now. It could mean the complete renaissance of England as a nation, as a great power. God knows we stand in need of it!"

J was silent. Putting it like that made all the difference. Richard Blade had been risking his life for Britain many years now. He was tops in a most dangerous profession. If this thing were asked of him Blade would do it without a murmur.

"He is in excellent shape," Leighton said. "We have given him exhaustive tests, as you know, and there will be many more. I find no evidence of any permanent brain damage. Best, and most important, I have finally succeeded in tracing down the computer fault that was responsible. It was not easy, J! It has taken me days of sweat, as you also know. I am, in a way, responsible for that. I built the computer so it would correct its own errors and this it did. That is why I had to take it completely down, and run so many thousands of tests, before I could duplicate the error, and reverse it, to bring Blade back. But I'll not have to go through that again."

J, still only half convinced, looked again at the sleeping man. Blade was smiling faintly.

Lord Leighton went to the machine and scanned it briefly. "He's dreaming. Distinct REMs now."

J scratched his sharp chin. "I wonder what about? I mean here or there? This dimension I'll accept that mumb-jumbo for the moment or the one he's been to?"

Lord Leighton's smile was crooked as he turned from the machine. "We shall never know but let me get back, J. The computer made a mistake and then immediately corrected itself, thus making it devilish hard to find the mistake. That was the problem all along. If I hadn't thought of that yarn of Stevenson's we might never have gotten Blade back."

"Stevenson? I don't follow."

"The writer, man! The chap that wrote Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Don't you recall? Dr. Jekyll could change into Hyde, and back again, because of some impurity equal to the computer's mistake in the original batch of salts that Jekyll made into solution and drank. But when that batch was gone, so was the obscure impurity, and Jekyll had only pure salts. He was stuck in Hyde's body. Surely you see it I had to find the mistake, which the computer had erased, and then put it back into the programming. Then reverse it to get to Blade. Actually rather simple, once one has the logic of it in mind."

"It still took you long enough," J said tartly. "You must have tried a hundred times."

"Fifty-one," said Leighton. Then, wearily, "Fifty-one times I reached for him, and got him on the fifty-second." He smiled briefly. "I wonder what he was doing when I finally reached him? And if he knew what was happening?"

There was a gentle rap on the door. Lord Leighton opened it and took a small envelope from a uniformed guard. He closed and locked the door and turned to J as he tore open the envelope. A large black pearl rolled into his hand. Lord Leighton tossed the pearl to J, who nearly dropped it.

"Absolute form and purity," read Leighton from the lab report in his hand.

"Lustre unsurpassed, of highest quality, nothing like it known to experts. No record of any such pearl in historic times. No history. Impossible to evaluate in money terms, for it is unique in fullest meaning of the word. And so on and so on there's a lot of expert's gibberish which I'll not bother reading. But you see the implications now, J? Blade brought something back! Call it treasure, if you like, and of no great importance. But on his next trip what might he not bring back? Knowledge, J. Knowledge!"

The big man in the bed moved restlessly and spoke one word. "Taleen."

Both men caught the word distinctly in any case the recording tapes were switched on and they went to the bed and waited.

Nothing more. Richard Blade slumbered on, his lips twitching now and again in what might have been a smile, or the beginnings of a scowl.

J, having taken leave of Lord Leighton, and submitted to the elaborate checking out process that permitted him egress from the tower's underground labyrinth, wandered a bit bemused as he sought for a taxi. It had begun to rain, a slight but annoying drizzle, and taxis were hard to come by.

Spotting an empty at last J waded bravely into the stream of traffic, raised a fawn-gloved hand and shouted: "Taleen Taken!"

He caught himself at once and cried "Taxi" and the driver pulled over and stopped. As J piled in he said, "Number Ten Downing, please. And do hurry."

J, clutching the green file to his sparse chest, was slightly distraught. Why had he called out that word a name? which he had heard only once in his life. Taleen? Taleen! Taleen. Possibly something Freudian there, and God knows he didn't want to get into that. He was a simple civil servant, whose business happened to be managing spies, with a soupcon of counter-espionage, and matters were muddled enough as it was. And yet Taleen? What could it possibly mean?

The driver of the taxi, a cockney, watched his fare in the mirror. He shook his head slowly. You got all types. The gent was a toff, no doubting that, and must be a nob or he wouldn't be going to Number Ten. That was all right the gent had the Number Ten look. The constables would let him in, right enough.

Looked a little barmy, though. Staring off into nothing, twisting his mouth about and saying something over and over. Must be some sort of facial tick, poor chap.