Treasure Of The Stars

Chapter 1

The big man on the branch watched the soldiers passing thirty feet below. He watched them as intently as a hawk picking out its prey. None of the soldiers looked up or even seemed to realize there was such a direction. They tramped through the ankle-high grass, crackling twigs underfoot and ploughing through bushes. They made so much noise that the man in the tree could have followed their progress on a pitch-black night. If it weren't for the ugly-looking rifles in their hands, the soldiers would have been almost funny.

The man in the tree was armed only with a rough club and a rawhide sling. He wore only a barbaric collection of animal skins. No one would have laughed at him, though.

He was an inch over six feet tall, and weighed more than two hundred pounds. His heavy-boned frame was layered with superbly-conditioned muscles. His skin was darkened by wind, weather, sun, and dirt, and seamed with scars in at least a dozen places.

The last of the soldiers was passing under the tree and heading off downhill. Their eyes were still fixed on the ground or on the backs of their comrades. The man in the tree mentally noted other details about the soldiers besides their clumsiness and carelessness. They wore round black helmets with narrow white crests, dark green jackets and trousers that looked more elegant than comfortable, black leather boots and belts, dark brown packs on polished metal pack frames. Two men carried fat snub-nosed weapons that looked like giant shotguns-probably grenade launchers. The rest carried heavy rifles with big pan shaped magazines, fixed bayonets, and elaborate sights. Each rifleman also had three or four egg-shaped red grenades hooked to his belt. One man carried a shiny long barreled pistol.

The soldiers might be overdressed and clumsy, but they looked remarkably well-armed. If they could use their weapons better than they marched, they would be formidable.

So the man waited until the soldiers were well out of sight before climbing down from the tree. He stood for a moment at its base, listening carefully. The soldiers were still moving as noisily as ever. He could follow them without any trouble. He swung the club in his right hand and set off on the trail of the soldiers.

He moved with grace and power, putting his feet down with great precision yet still covering ground quickly. Every movement suggested the flawless coordination and reflexes of some powerful animal. Yet the heavy-boned dark face was too alive and aware to be an animal's, and the dark eyes were searching, restless, almost frighteningly intelligent. In this man, mind and body had joined to create a superb fighting machine, one that didn't seem to belong in the same world with those clumsy soldiers in green.

In fact, the man wasn't from the same world as the soldiers he followed. His name Was Richard Blade, this was Dimension X, and he'd come across infinity by what might be called science but still seemed more like a miracle.

Richard Blade actually didn't belong in his own homeland, modern Britain, much more than in Dimension X. He was a man whose mind and body were made for the lonely, dangerous, and frequently short life of the professional adventurer. He would have been a tower of strength to Francis Drake raiding Spanish galleons in the sixteenth century. In the safe, sanitary, ordered life of a modern industrial country, he was a man out of place.

Every so often, though, even the most oddly-shaped peg will find a suitable hole. When Blade left Oxford, a man called J was head of the secret intelligence agency MI6. He suspected what skills this young man might have, and made him a field agent straight out of the university. Blade justified J's confidence by becoming MI6's best field man. Time after time he succeeded in assignments which would have been suicidal for any other agent. He still knew he had nine chances out of ten of dying violently, but accepted this with open eyes. It was part of the price to be paid for doing his duty and living a life which so well suited him.

Years passed, and in a laboratory under the Tower of London an aging, half-crippled, hunchbacked scientific genius conceived an experiment. His name was Lord Leighton, he was even more brilliant than he was eccentric, and the experiment was to link a sophisticated computer and a powerful human mind, then see what happened. He hoped to create a combined human-electronic intelligence with the virtues of both and the limitations of neither.

The human mind had to be powerful, and it had to be housed in an equally powerful body. So it was hardly surprising that Lord Leighton ended up with Richard Blade as his test subject. Blade was very nearly the best living example of the ancient ideal of «a sound mind in a sound body.»

What happened after that surprised even Lord Leighton. The computer did not link itself with Blade's mind. Instead it twisted all of Blade's senses, so that he awoke to live and move about in a strange savage world called Alb. It was a world that might have existed thousands of years in Earth's past, but it was not really Earth. It was-Dimension X.

Blade faced all the dangers of Alb with the same skill and determination he'd used against enemy agents. Once more he survived, until Lord Leighton adjusted the computer, restored Blade's senses to normal, and brought him home to Britain.

Blade came home to a crisis. Obviously a whole new world lay out there in Dimension X, perhaps many worlds. If these worlds could be explored and exploited, there could be a new dawn and a new empire for Britain.

Just as obviously, the existence of Dimension X had to be kept secret. If it was revealed, no one knew for certain what might happen, but everybody expected the worst. Revealing the secret of Dimension X might lead to a nuclear war and the end of this world, rather than the discovery of new ones.

So Blade found himself caught up in the most vital top-secret project in British history. Lord Leighton continued as scientific head of Project Dimension X, producing larger and larger computers. A staff of hand-picked security-cleared technicians helped him as much as he would let them.

J added handling the security of the Project to his other duties. Less formally, he kept an eye on Blade, heading off Lord Leighton's wilder schemes when they threatened to put Blade in danger for no good reason. J was nearer seventy than sixty, a man nearing the end of his life, a many who'd been married to his duties all that life. Blade was the son he'd never had.

Inevitably, money was needed to expand and continue the Project, money by the millions of pounds, which had to be found somewhere. The Prime Minister's Secret Fund helped, and so did selling what Blade carried back from Dimension X-gold and jewels, strange drugs, stranger metals, the secrets of advanced technologies. Project Dimension X never got rich, never even showed a clear, profit, but somehow kept going.

Blade made trip after trip into Dimension X, and little by little some of the mysteries vanished. No one could call the Project a failure, yet somehow the big successes everyone hoped for continued to be just out of reach.

None of the technological secrets Blade brought home could be exploited without years of expensive research and development.

There was no way to predict where Blade would end up, when Lord Leighton pulled the master switch on the computer. He'd visited some Dimensions more than once, but usually he entered a new world on each trip. Dimension X could never be explored or exploited this way.

Finally, the strain of travel from one Dimension to another was beyond most people's endurance. No one ever came back from Dimension X with Blade and stayed alive and sane for more than a few hours. No one except Blade had ever made the round trip from Home Dimension and stayed alive and sane at all. They'd been looking for another person with Blade's qualities for a long time, without finding one.

So the Project rested entirely on Blade's survival, and was horribly vulnerable because of this. In Dimension X Blade faced dangers that made anything in Home Dimension seem like children's games. He survived them all, but the luck of even the most unkillable man will run out sooner or later.

Blade knew this, hoped for someone else to take over his job, but didn't let the matter worry him. He had to keep going as long as he could. It was a matter of duty, and more than that.

Blade thrived on the life of a secret agent, but it wasn't a completely free life. He was always part of an organization, even if the rest of it was thousands of miles away. He was always operating under rules and restraints, and he was always operating in a twentieth-century world. In Dimension X he was a man alone, nothing between him and a gruesome death but his own skill, strength, and wits.

More time passed, and one morning Richard Blade went through a familiar routine for the twenty-ninth time. He went to the Tower of London and was identified by grimfaced Special Branch men guarding the entrance to the underground complex. He took an elevator two hundred feet down to the complex, then walked a long echoing corridor, guarded by a score of electronic sentinels.

At the door of the computer section J met him, a little grayer than before, perhaps, but still as erect as a sword and quietly concerned about Blade. Together they passed through the rooms full of supporting equipment and entered the main computer room.

There Lord Leighton waited for them, among the towering gray crackle-finished consoles of his great computer. Blade went into a small room carved in the rock wall and prepared himself for his trip. He stripped naked, smeared himself with foul-smelling black grease to prevent electrical burns, and pulled on a loincloth.

Then he came back out into the main room and sat down in a rubber-padded chair standing in a glass booth in the middle of the computer's consoles. J watched as Leighton scurried around Blade, attaching cobra-headed metal electrodes to every part of Blade's body-ears, fingers, toes, even his penis. From each electrode a colored wire trailed off into the computer.

Meanwhile Blade hyperventilated, to fill his system with oxygen. Slowly he felt the tension flow out of him to be replaced by an eager anticipation of what he might find in Dimension X this time.

Leighton finished his work and gave it a final inspection.

He walked to the main control panel and watched the master timer as the computer readied itself for the great moment.

Then J raised a hand in a farewell salute, Lord Leighton's hand came down on the red master switch, and Blade whirled off into Dimension X.