"Jeffrey Lord - Blade 19 - Looters of Tharn" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lord Jeffery)

The elevator door slid silently open, and Richard Blade stepped out into the corridor beyond it. He was
two hundred feet below the Tower of London, in the overgrowing complex that housed most of Project
Dimension X. At the end of that corridor stood Lord Leighton's computer. In less than half an hour that
computer would be hammering its complex pulses into Blade's brain, twisting his perceptions so that for
him reality itself would also be twisted.

When it untwisted itself again, he would be seeing Dimension X.

Blade strode down the apparently empty corridor, listening to the echo of his footsteps from the tile
floors and the whir of machinery behind metal doors. There was no sound from the all-seeing, unsleeping
electronic sentinels that kept watch on every inch of the corridor.

He found that he felt his usual mixture of tension and anticipation as the time of his next journey came
closer. It was impossible for even a man as used to danger as Blade to ignore the fact that each trip was
a leap into the unknown. So far there was no way of controlling or even predicting where he would land.
The one thing that was certain was that Richard Blade was the only living man who could return from
Dimension X both alive and sane.

One day, from one dimension, Richard Blade would not return to England. His body would lie in the soil
of an unimaginably distant land. The project itself would come to a grinding halt until they found someone
else equally tough. Lord Leighton would curse the delay and the Prime Minister would curse the loss of a
man valuable to England. The head of MI6, the aging spymaster known as J, would mourn Blade as he
would have mourned the son he never had.

But Blade was also palled with anticipation. If each dimension had unknown dangers, it also held
unknown adventures, challenges, opportunities. He could and did live the way he could live best-by his
own wits, his own skills, his own strength. He did not have to worry about women who wanted
stay-at-home husbands. He could say what he wanted, to whom he wanted, as he had to, without any
damned Official Secrets Act mucking up the works! He was a free man in Dimension X, and that was
good for him and often for the people he traveled among. Everywhere he went, Blade left marks of his
passage. More often than not what he left behind was better than what had been there before.

J once referred to that sort of thing as "interdimensional social work." But the old man wasn't nearly as
cynical as he sounded. That was just a mannerism, picked up during too many years of sending men to
their deaths and playing deadly games. J had seen too much to really sneer at anything or anyone that
helped make any world a little less grim and harsh for even a few people.

As though Blade's thoughts had conjured him out of the floor. J appeared in the corridor ahead.

"Hello, Richard."

"Good morning, sir. Lord Leighton on schedule?"

"Have you ever known him not to be?"

Blade shook his head and laughed. Lord Leighton was one of the greatest scientific minds alive, and also
one of the greatest curmudgeons. All the skill he refused to use in getting along with his fellow human
beings he put into getting along with computers. So computers that drove other men mad with frustration
worked flawlessly for him.