The Torian Pearls

Chapter 2

Four dark-suited Special Branch men barred Richard Blade's path as he approached the secret entrance to the underground complex below the Tower of London. They checked his identification and looked him over closely. None of them knew exactly who or what he was, but all of them knew that he was someone authorized to enter the complex at will. That made him important, but there was no deference in their manner as they looked him over. A Special Branch man on critical security duty would not defer to the Queen of England without orders.

Blade entered the building that concealed the head of the elevator shaft. It was an old powder magazine, dating from the eighteenth century. The entrance was now fitted with a steel door three inches thick that could slide into place at the touch of a button. The whitewashed interior was brightly lit and continuously scanned by electronic monitoring devices. At the touch of another button the interior could be flooded with tear gas.

J was waiting for Blade by the elevator. They shook hands in silence. There was no need to refight the battle Blade had fought and won over the past few weeks. The calm smile on J's face and the firmness in his handshake said everything necessary. Then he turned and pressed the button set in the wall. A section of the wall slid aside, revealing the golden bronze of the elevator. The door slid open with a faint hiss and Blade and J stepped into the elevator car.

They stepped out again a few seconds later, two hundred feet below the Tower. The main corridor of the Project's complex stretched emptily away in front of them. Sometimes Lord Leighton himself was waiting to greet them here, but not today.

The corridor was empty, but it was neither silent or unguarded. The distant purr of machinery, the clatter of typewriters and computer terminals, faint footsteps and blurred voices all combined into sound that flowed along the corridor.

Every foot of the corridor was watched every minute of the twenty-four hours of the day by computerized systems of electronic monitors and sensing devices. Every few yards were archways concealing more sliding steel doors. Like a ship's hull, the complex was divided into compartments that could be sealed off in seconds against any attack. Trapped and immobilized, the attackers could be dealt with almost at leisure.

They would be dealt with harshly, Blade knew. The defenses of the complex included several of the latest, nastiest, and most expensive security devices. They also included some of Lord Leighton's own devices, products of his endlessly fertile mind and somewhat gruesome sense of humor. Blade didn't know anything about most of Lord Leighton's devices and wasn't quite sure he wanted to know. He did know they would work, and that was enough.

The two men walked swiftly along the corridor, passing through eight successive archways before they reached the computer rooms at the far end. There were five of those rooms. The first four held the steadily increasing mass of auxiliary equipment and storage facilities for the computers and the technicians to handle it all. Katerina Shumilova had infiltrated the complex as one of those technicians.

As they passed through the rooms, it seemed to Blade that every inch of floor had something on it and every desk had at least three people using it. It would soon be time to add another room to the complex.

Blade wondered if the money would be available. Project Dimension X could not draw on regular Parliamentary appropriations for research and development. It depended on the Prime Minister's Special Fund and the sale of whatever Blade brought back from Dimension X.

When he brought back gold or jewels, that was easy money. Often he brought back materials or devices that defied the scientists' best efforts to duplicate them. Sometimes he brought back only the knowledge of something centuries beyond Home Dimension science. These exciting discoveries were invariably useless without many millions of pounds of additional research and development.

Sometimes luck was with him. From Englor Blade brought home knowledge of several new alloys and a new chemical fuel that could revolutionize aircraft design and performance. With luck they would need only a few years before they were in production, and meanwhile they'd generated a million pounds for the Project. But even a million pounds was only a fraction of what the Project could use.

The two men passed through the rooms of auxiliary equipment and reached the door to the main room. Beyond it lay the heart of the whole Project, the immense master computer that hurled Blade into Dimension X and drew him home again. So far it had always done both.

Lord Leighton was confident that it would go on doing so as reliably as it had done in the past. Blade could only hope the scientist was right. Certainly the old man would do his best. He found it hard to care about anyone or anything except the pursuit of knowledge and openly admitted as much. But he did care what happened to Richard Blade. There was no doubt about it, although Blade suspected Leighton would rather be burned at the stake than admit it.

The door slid open as Blade and J approached it. For once Lord Leighton was neither waiting to greet them or bustling about making last-minute checks on the computer. He was sitting calmly in a chair in front of the main control panel, a cup of tea in one hand and a well-thumbed copy of the British Journal of Computer Research in the other. In his stained, ragged, and rumpled laboratory coat and threadbare black trousers, he looked more like the computer's caretaker than its creator.

J looked at the scientist. Wry amusement spread across his face and sounded in his voice. «My goodness, Leighton. Is the pace getting to you?»

Leighton's bushy eyebrows rose. There was nearly as much white hair left in those eyebrows as there was on the scientist's head. «On the contrary. Everything is ready and the main sequence initiated. It would be quite pointless to do anything else until Richard is ready to be hooked up. I am not, after all, one of those types who feels obliged to demonstrate his energy by rushing about to no purpose.»

That was quite true. Leighton had plenty of other chances to demonstrate his energy. He demonstrated a phenomenal amount of it, considering that he was past eighty and had lived most of those years with his legs twisted by polio and his spine bent into a hunchback. His daily routine often left men half his age unable to keep up with him.

The next move in the familiar routine was Blade's. He made his way between the enormous gray crackle-finished consoles of the computer to the little changing room carved out of the solid rock of the wall. Inside the room he stripped naked, smeared himself with smelly black grease to guard against electrical burns, and pulled on a loincloth. The loincloth was more a gesture than anything else. He'd always arrived in Dimension X naked, sometimes with embarrassing results.

Once he'd been able to take a ruby ring with him, and another time a knife. This time he was taking nothing, since there was nothing on hand that might have a good chance of making the trip with him. Adding random bits and pieces of gear simply made still more complicated and dangerous a trip that was already complicated and dangerous enough.

He retraced his route to the center of the computer room. A glass booth stood there, with a metal chair on a rubber mat inside it. The chair looked as if its purpose was executing condemned criminals instead of sending Richard Blade off into Dimension X.

Blade sat down in the chair, leaned back against the cold rubber of the back, and stretched his legs. He began to breathe regularly and deeply, to saturate his system with oxygen and ease any tension as much as possible. J pulled the folding observer's seat down from the wall and sat on it.

As J sat down, Leighton rose from his chair with a speed and grace surprising in someone of his age and physical condition. He carefully marked his place in the magazine, put it on the chair, set the teacup on top of it, and came over to Blade.

Now Leighton seemed to explode into action, darting around and around the chair with the speed and agility of a whirling dervish. To every part of Blade's body he taped cobra-headed metal electrodes. Each electrode was attached to a wire running off into the computer. Leighton had once told Blade there were only a hundred and sixteen of the electrodes. Looking down on himself, Blade found it hard to believe there weren't several times that many.

Eventually all the electrodes were in place. Leighton made a final inspection, untangling a purple wire from a yellow one, shifting one electrode a few inches down Blade's thigh, putting on an extra piece of tape to hold another one firmly where it was. Then he backed away, wiping his hands on his laboratory coat.

He backed away until he stood by the main control panel, eyes scanning the flashing lights, hand within easy reach of the red master switch. He waited there until the familiar dance of the lights told him the main sequence was finished and the computer ready to do its work. Then the long-fingered hand on the end of the arm darted at the switch and drew it in a single smooth motion down to the bottom of its slot.

The room, the computer, the two men watching, the booth itself all vanished from around Blade in the time it took him to blink his eyes. He blinked again, and a vast cliff of fissured and scarred blue-gray stone reared itself before him and towered above him. He was still sitting in the chair, but now it rested on yellow sand.

Blade craned his neck upward, looking for the top of the cliff. He could not see it. So high above that he could not even guess how far, the blue-gray stone faded into a swirling gray sky. It was as if the cliff itself became the clouds, melting from solid blue-gray rock into gray mist.

Blade stretched his legs and started to rise from the chair. As he did, the ground under him shuddered violently, swaying from side to side and then heaving up and down. The movement was sharp enough to send the sand swirling up in clouds around him. He closed his eyes, but he could feel the grittiness between his teeth as the sand found its way into his mouth.

After a little while the movements of the ground ceased. Again Blade started to rise, and realized that somehow he could not. It was as if the joints of his arms and legs were locked, or his back and buttocks were firmly glued to the chair. It was an annoying sensation.

Blade tried harder, and still harder, until the muscles stood out along his arms and thighs and neck in ridges and lumps. He put all of his enormous strength into trying to rise, until his chest was heaving and all his muscles began to ache.

As he tried to relax and gather strength for another effort to rise from the chair, the ground shuddered again. This time the movements were even more violent and went on longer. The sand rose up around Blade in a swirling yellow cloud that blotted out everything more than a foot in front of his nose.

The movements of the ground slowly faded away, and the cloud of sand subsided. As it did, a faint rumble sounded from high above. Blade looked upward, and his eyes opened wide.

A vast section of the solid gray-blue rock was peeling off the face of the cliff and dropping directly down on top of him. As it fell it crumbled and cracked, splitting into three pieces. Each one of those pieces seemed as large as a house, more than large enough to smash Blade like a bug under a hammer when it landed.

He was not in a real world, though, so nothing would happen to him even if the stone landed. Or was he? Was this weird world as real as Britain, and would his death here be as real and permanent? That chilling thought drove him to a still more desperate effort to rise from the chair and somehow get clear of the base of the cliff. He heaved himself upward as if he wanted to leap into the air. The chair quivered, but he did not rise.

There was still one thing he could do. He threw himself violently to one side, and the chair rocked under him. He did it three more times, and each time the chair tilted farther and farther. At last he threw it down on its side. With a tremendous twisting of his thighs and torso he landed on hands and knees, the chair riding on his back like the shell of a crab.

The chair now held his head down so that he could no longer look upward, but he knew he had no more than a few seconds. He heaved himself desperately forward, fingers and toes clawing at the sand.

He'd covered perhaps ten feet when the light above him was suddenly blotted out. He had a tiny part of a second to realize that this was some sort of end, if not the end of everything. Then a slab of stone the size of a small office building landed on him.

In that moment he knew pain that swept away all other sensations, all thoughts, all awareness even of his own body. Then the pain faded, and he knew that he was not dead-at least not except in this strange world he'd just left. He was aware of every separate molecule of his body, hurtling away on its own path into an immense chill dark emptiness. This awareness lasted long enough for relief to fill his mind, relief that he'd survived one more monstrous twisting of the laws of nature in the nightmare world between the Dimensions.

Then both relief and awareness vanished, and everything was blackness and the terrible cold void where his molecules darted about like meteors.