"Jeffrey Lord - Blade 29 - Treasure of the Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lord Jeffery)

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.