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

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.