The Temples Of Ayocan

Chapter 1

Making a living by being whisked off to other dimensions on short notice has advantages. Also disadvantages. At the moment, Richard Blade was more conscious of the disadvantages.

The voice on the telephone was that of a young woman in a mighty rage. Even so it was a beautiful voice, as beautiful as the body it was coming from. Blade had learned to know the body intimately over several nights during the past few weeks. But then the message had come from J-get ready for another trip into Dimension X. So he had called Cynthia to tell her that he would be out of town for the next few weeks or months.

«No, I can't give you an address where you can reach me. I'll be traveling around too much for that.»

«You're trying to give me the brush-off, Dick. I wish you'd come right out and say, 'Get lost, Cynthia.' I'd have more respect for you if you did. You men are all alike. Stallions in bed, but when it comes to something like this, you haven't got the courage of a cockroach!»

«Now, damn it all, Cynthia, I'm not saying get lost because I don't want-«

«You don't want? What about me not wanting something? We were so good together, Dick. I can't stand it for you to just walk off like this. Especially when you won't tell me where you're going, or anything! You just want to go off tomcatting around, and don't want to tell me!»

«Cynthia, you're being ridicu- Hello, Cynthia? Cynthia?»

The line was dead.

Blade put the receiver back in the cradle. Then he let out his frustration and annoyance in language much stronger than merely «Damn it all!»

There definitely were disadvantages to being the key man in Project Dimension X. When the demands of the Project came down on even his most casual relationships like DDT on a mosquito and killed them just as dead, it got more than a little annoying. Oh, well, Cynthia had been showing signs of getting possessive, perhaps even marriage-minded. That would have meant telling her goodbye sooner or later, but certainly not now. Lord Leighton had barged in properly!

At least Blade knew that he would not have too much trouble finding another congenial woman after he returned from Dimension X, even if Cynthia had given him the brush-off. For Blade, this was simply recognizing a fact. He was inevitably attractive to women. And why not? Six feet plus, two hundred and ten pounds of athletic Englishman, pushing forty but looking ten years younger, radiating charm, vitality, and virility. Not a fluent talker, but not tongue-tied either. And with the indefinable but definite glamor that hangs around a man who always seems to be on the move, whose scars suggest an active and even dangerous life, but who never talks about what he does. To almost all who knew him, Blade's profession was a mystery.

He hoped it would stay that way, considering what it really was. Tomorrow morning Blade would go to the Tower of London. A secret elevator would carry him two hundred feet down to an equally secret underground complex that housed the most advanced computers in the world. These computers were the brainchildren of Lord Leighton, England's most brilliant and most irascible scientist. Blade's brain would be directly linked to these computers.

And then he would be hurled, as naked as the day he was born, into another dimension, where anything and everything might happen. Animals that walked like men, savage warriors, decadent super-civilizations, even nonhuman intelligences from outer space-he had met them all. And so far he had survived each meeting. Thirteen times, to be exact.

Not only natural gifts, but training and experience had kept him alive. He had been one of the top agents for the secret intelligence agency MI6 for the better part of twenty years. He had learned to be a professional survivor long before Lord Leighton had even dreamed of the computer that made the Dimension X Project possible.

He hoped that sooner rather than later Lord Leighton and J would come up with someone equally qualified. He was tough, he was smart, so far he had been lucky, and by temperament he was an adventurer in a century where adventurers too often found themselves the odd man out. But he could push his luck only so far. If it ran out before Lord Leighton and J found anybody else, Project Dimension X would be left high and dry. The whole purpose of the Project was to explore and perhaps someday exploit Dimension X for knowledge and raw materials that England could use. Without somebody able to travel into Dimension X, this would become impossible.

So Lord Leighton was looking for somebody new. J, head of MI6 and Blade's guide and mentor for twenty years, was looking for somebody new. And the prime minister, who had backed Project Dimension X and all its host of subprojects to the tune of many millions of pounds, was looking for somebody new. But so far Blade was in no danger of joining the ranks of the unemployed.

He went over to the sideboard and pulled out a bottle of whiskey. Four fingers of Scotch, a dash of soda, and he had a good stiff nightcap. He raised the glass in a silent toast to his unknown successor, whoever he might be, and drained it. Then he went to bed.

He was up early the next morning, and had a large breakfast. He had no idea how long he would be in Dimension X before he could find food. The last time he had gone across, Lord Leighton had sent along a comprehensive survival kit with several days' survival rations. But Blade had arrived with nothing and as naked as he had all the previous times. For safety's sake he preferred to assume the same thing would happen this time. Blade's experience as a field agent and then as an explorer of Dimension X had taught him the wisdom of assuming the worst.

A taxi took him to the Tower of London through a chill, gray, unremarkable winter day. And the expressions of the Special Branch men guarding the entrance to the complex were as chill as the weather. Was that look something they were trained to assume, or did it come naturally after one had been a Special Branch operative long enough?

In the complex itself, two hundred feet below, the gloomy weather and the gloomy Special Branch men seemed like a bad dream. Light gleamed off polished floors and walls, and the air was warm. All the guarding was done by invisible electronic sentinels, some of them Lord Leighton's own inventions, others from the Ministry of Defense's bag of tricks. And J was waiting for Blade when the elevator door slid open, to walk with him down the corridor to the computers.

Blade looked more closely than usual at J as they walked side by side. If J was aging at all, he was doing so as imperturbably as he did everything else. Perhaps he had acquired a few more wrinkles in the years since Project Dimension X had begun. Certainly some of his still thick gray hair had definitely begun to turn white. But J still looked more like an aging senior bureaucrat in the Ministry of Agriculture or something equally prosaic than what he was-one of the most experienced and respected spymasters in the world, with a career of achievement going all the way back to World War I.

Certainly nothing showed in J's voice as he chatted with Blade. «Lord Leighton says we're going to be reverting to the old procedure this time.»

«No survival kit?»

«Quite right. He thinks your-'materializing'-in Dimension X well above ground level the last time wasn't an accident. He thinks the extra mass of the survival kit wasn't quite compensated for by the adjustments to the computer, so you went through in an unbalanced state. Physically, that is.»

Blade nodded. «And he's worried that the next time I might pop through into Dimension X a hundred feet up, instead of just thirty?»

«Quite so. And go smash when you come down. Lord Leighton doesn't want that, not at all.»

«How nice of him,» said Blade. But there was a grin on his face that took some of the sarcastic bite out of his words. Lord Leighton was determined to appear the unwavering and completely emotionless scientist, with no concern for anything but the results of his experiments. Perhaps he had really once been that unconcerned about Blade's welfare. But no longer. Both Blade and J knew that Lord Leighton had come as close to affection and concern for Blade as he could. In fact, he was probably almost as concerned about Blade's welfare as he was about his computers. Not as concerned as J, though, for J loved Blade like a son.

«Very,» said J, matching Blade's tone and expression. «He's going to try some experiments to get the computer adjusted properly for the survival kit. But they'll take quite a while, along with everything else he has to do. So for the time being you'll be going into Dimension X-ah-in the altogether again.» Blade nodded.

They passed through another door, and the scrutiny of its electronic watchdogs, and then they were in the computer rooms themselves. Blade nodded and smiled to the white-coated technicians manning consoles and working on breadboard layouts. By now all of them knew him by sight, and he knew most of them. The turnover among the staff of the underground complex was slow. Once Lord Leighton got hold of a qualified man, he was reluctant to let him go.

Finally the last and smallest door slid noiselessly shut behind them. They were in Lord Leighton's inner sanctum.

It was also the place where Lord Leighton seemed most at home. Almost anywhere in the outside world, he was an unimpressive, even grotesque figure-hunchbacked, whitehaired, scuttling about on polio-twisted legs, his wrinkled and mottled face showing his eighty-plus years with brutal clarity. He looked like an aging and unfriendly gnome, with only the bright dark eyes showing any signs of health and vigor. But among the computers he had created, he looked different-very normal, very much in command.

There was a brief exchange of greetings and pleasantries as Blade and J entered. But Lord Leighton was obviously impatient to get things moving. From the pattern of lights on the master console of the central computer, Blade realized that the main sequence was already underway. Within a few minutes the computer would be ready to hurl him into Dimension X.

With no survival kit to worry about, his own preparations were no different from what he had gone through a dozen times before. In fact, the preparations had become a drill, like field-stripping a machine gun or making a parachute jump. He had learned both during his commando training. But it was easier to be careful with the gun or the parachute. With them, how much care one took could make a big difference, even the difference between life and death. With the trips into Dimension X, nothing in the preparations seemed to make any difference. He always arrived naked as a baby, his head throbbing.

But why take chances? With as much care as ever, he stripped off his own clothing. Then he smeared every inch of his skin with the foul-smelling black gunk that was supposed to prevent electrical burns. Perhaps it actually did. Then he knotted a loincloth around his middle, no doubt as futilely as all the times before.

He stepped out and walked to the chair in the center of the room. The seat was cold against his bare thighs as he sat down. His head almost brushed the glass roof of the cubicle that held the chair, while his feet rested on the rubber mat where it stood. Around him the huge consoles of the main computer rose to the rock ceiling of the chamber. In their gray-crackled finish the consoles seemed almost as ancient and solid as the rock of the walls and roof.

J stepped back and sat down in the observer's chair, while Lord Leighton went busily to work. If there was anything slow or aged about his hands, one would never know it to watch him putting the electrodes on Blade. There were scores of them, in the shape of gleaming metal cobra's heads, leading into scores of wires in a dozen different colors, the wires linking Blade to the computer.

Now Blade was fully wired in place, with electrodes hanging from every part of his body that they could grip. Lord Leighton finished his visual inspection of all the readouts. He never omitted this, no matter how many automatic controls and monitoring devices he installed in the computers. «The human mind is still the best monitoring device when you can't be sure in advance of what you're going to find,» he often said. Then he turned to Blade, ran one hand through his scanty white hair, and poised the other over the red master switch.

«Are you comfortable, Richard?»

Blade would have shrugged if the straps and electrodes on him had permitted. «I'd have to say I'm as comfortable as I could expect, under the circumstances.» Not that his discomfort or comfort would make any difference in another few seconds, when he was whirled off to Dimension X. But Lord Leighton obviously wanted to hear that his guinea pig was comfortable. So why not humor the man?

Lord Leighton smiled thinly. Blade fixed his gaze on the gnarled hand as it drifted down to close over the switch. He kept it fixed as the switch slowly moved down in its slot, toward the red line-and over it.

Sudden, terrible, total disorientation struck Blade, all his senses blacking out at once. There was an instant when he was not even aware of his own body, and barely aware of the workings of his own mind. There was just enough self-awareness left for him to feel a stabbing, numbing fear.

He was dying.

The computer had finally run amuck and destroyed his mind.

This was the last moment of awareness he would have, before he went out forever like a snuffed candle.

If he had had a throat, he would have screamed in that moment. But he had to scream inside his mind. And then the moment passed.

Light and sound and the sensation of movement returned to him in an explosive rush. For a moment he wanted to scream again, as the sensations poured down on him like a waterfall, making his mind reel. Then his mind reacted and stabilized itself, sorting out all the impressions tearing at it into something coherent.

He was sliding down an immense shimmering black slope, whirling around and around as he did so. Overhead pulsed a glaring sky filled with terrible silver light, so brilliant that he had to narrow his eyes to keep from being dazzled. There was no feeling of air rushing past him as he plunged downward, no feeling of friction with the blackness under him. It was as though the black surface was so perfectly lubricated that he slipped over it as effortlessly as a bit of dandelion fluff.

Then the air around him began to grow thicker, seemingly trying to wrap itself around him and slow his passage. He began to feel as if he was falling ever more slowly into a bottomless mass of thin, watery dough-sticky, clammy, and cold. He found himself holding his breath, then discovered that the dough was growing thicker and beginning to tighten around his chest. Each time he breathed out, he found it harder to breathe in again. Then he could not breathe in at all, and once again he felt a moment of panic. And then there was blackness.