"Jeffrey Lord - Blade 27 - Master of the Hashomi" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lord Jeffery)

Blade 27: Master of the Hashomi

By Jeffrey Lord

Chapter 1
Richard Blade awoke. He felt hard rock under him and small sharp stones jabbing into his bare skin. His
head throbbed like a drum and a searing white light dazzled him. He closed his eyes and tried to relax. It
had been a remarkably swift and simple transition into Dimension X.

He could not help laughing at that idea, although the laughter made his head hurt more. He supposed a
transition into Dimension X could be "swift." At least it had seemed to him only a few seconds in the
nothingness that lay between Home Dimension and Dimension X. How long it really was; he couldn't
even guess. Normal concepts of time and space had less than no meaning when a man was passing from
an underground room below the Tower of London into some part of infinity.

What made no sense was to call any transition into Dimension X "simple." To be sure, there hadn't been
anything unusual about this trip. He wasn't carrying any equipment and Lord Leighton hadn't sprung some
new and exotic experiment ripened in his brilliant, eccentric, and endlessly fertile mind.

Blade had simply smeared himself with smelly black grease to prevent electrical burns and sat down in a
chair inside a glass booth in the center of the underground room. Lord Leighton bustled about, attaching
scores of cobra-headed metal electrodes to Blade's body, wiring him into the huge computer whose gray
crackle-finished consoles rose all around the booth. At last Leighton returned to stand by the main
control panel. With the gray-haired man known only as J watching, Leighton pulled the red master
switch. Current surged into him, the computer and his own train joined, and for the twenty-seventh time
Richard Blade was flung away from the room, from Britain, from the world he knew, into-somewhere
else.

Very simple, until you started thinking about all that had gone into preparing this series of events that had
become almost a routine.

There were only four men in the whole world who knew it all. There was Lord Leighton, the most
brilliant and the most eccentric scientific brain in Great Britain. The giant computer was his creation, and
in a sense Dimension X was his discovery. It had been his idea to wire Richard Blade into the computer
for the first time. He thought the combination of a human and an electronic brain would produce
something new and unique.

It certainly had. When Blade returned from his first trip into Dimension X, it was instantly clear that he'd
returned with one of the most important scientific discoveries of all time. It had to be kept a closely
guarded secret, from Britain's enemies and even from her friends. It also had to be studied further.

There was a whole world-many worlds-out there in Dimension X. There were resources of knowledge,
material, skills, people-a whole new British Empire that could dwarf the first one. One scientist, one
computer, and one man of action wouldn't be enough for the job.

So the Prime Minister of England was told of the discovery, and several million pounds from secret
funds went to establish Project Dimension X. The man called J, head of the secret intelligence agency
MI6, was told, and he became the Project's administrator, security chief, and man-of-all-work. He also
kept a watchful eye on Lord Leighton's more bizarre whims and fancies, particularly when they might
endanger Richard Blade. J had picked Blade straight out of Oxford, seen him become MI6's crack