"Jeffrey Lord - Blade 11 - Dimension of Dreams" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lord Jeffery)

Dimension of Dreams
Blade Book 11


by Jeffrey Lord




Chapter One
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Richard Blade looked up at the forty-foot aluminum mast to the spinnaker fittings at the masthead. Then
he looked forward to the big orange spinnaker, straining and pulled drum-tight by the rising wind.
And then he raised his voice to carry over the wind and shouted to be heard below in the cabin of the
motorsailer, "Annie! Come on deck and take the wheel while I go forward and drop the spinnaker. It's
getting on to blow."
A muffled acknowledgment floated out from behind the polished teak door. Then the door swung
open and Lady Annette Pangborn popped out, mounting the steps to the cockpit with the poise and
balance of a seasoned sailor. She was wearing a bikini that concealed only nominal portions of her
tanned, fashion-model's body. She slipped gracefully into the padded helmsman's seat and took the
chromed wheel from Blade. With a winch handle swinging in one hand he went forward along the heaving
deck.
He didn't care much for having to drop the spinnaker. Its two thousand square feet of orange nylon
almost gave the deep-keeled motorsailer the performance of a racing sloop. But the blue sky to the
southwest was beginning to turn gray and the blue gray waters of theEnglish Channel were beginning to
heave up higher and higher in white-capped waves. The motorsailer was lurching and heaving in a way
she had not done that morning when they left the French coast behind.
The oiled winch worked smoothly, but he had not expected it to do anything else. Everything aboard
Annie's motorsailer was the result of abundant money and good judgment. She had inherited both from
four generations of shipping magnates. If Annie ever married, Blade expected that she would do her best
to send that same money and judgment on to another few generations. But theEnglish Channel was as
likely to turn to onion soup as Annie was to marry.
That was why he was aboard her motorsailer this spring day. Blade had all the assets needed to
make him attractive to women. Good looks, an athletic body well over six feet tall, charm, apparent
wealth, and (as those women who carried matters far enough discovered) abounding virility. There were
always women around him, and among them were always a good many who could not help imagining
themselves as Mrs. Blade.
Which was impossible. Richard Blade was not merely the imposing, middle-aged man-about-town
he seemed. In reality he was the best secret agent the intelligence office MI6 had ever possessed. He had
survived the better part of twenty years of the deadliest sort of fieldwork. And more than fieldwork.
What often seemed like half a lifetime ago,Britain 's leading computer expert, Lord Leighton, had
conducted an experiment directly linking a man's mind to his latest computer. That man had been Blade.
With his combined qualities of mind and body, he had been the perfectтАФwell, call it the perfect guinea
pig.
And now he was still a guinea pig. The computer had hurled Blade straight into another dimension
with a Dark Ages level of civilization. Only those qualities of mind and body that had led to his selection
in the first place kept Blade alive to return to his own dimension. Those same qualities had kept him
alive-at times by the narrowest of margins-during nine more trips into nine different dimensions, or at least
nine different aspects of what Lord Leighton called Dimension X.
Project Dimension X had been launched the moment Blade returned from his first trip. The value