"Jeffrey Lord - Blade 30 - Dimension Of Horror" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lord Jeffery)

toys?"

Leighton was a monster, a troll, a grotesque Quasimodo lurching along with a halting, crablike
gait on legs that had never quite recovered from a near-fatal childhood attack of polio. Yet under
his high balding forehead with its sparse strands of white silky hair pulsed a brain of terrifying
power. In the field of computer technology Leighton might well be the greatest genius England-
indeed the world-had ever seen. Every device in this project had begun as a gleam in these dark-
pupilled yellow-rimmed bloodshot eyes that now stared up at J through the thick distorting lenses
of a pair of steel-framed glasses.

J replied uncertainly, "Very pretty toys. Very pretty."

Leighton extended a small dry claw and J shook hands with him. Toys? Was it proper for a man
of Leighton's advanced age to go on prattling about toys?
Now Leighton was shaking hands with Blade, bubbling over with gargoyle enthusiasm. "I've
solved it at last," the little man boasted. "At least I think I have!"

"Solved what?" Blade was grinning, caught up in the scientist's excitement.

"Our most challenging problem of all. Before this we've never been able to send you to the same
place twice, except by accident. If I'm right in my theories and calculations, I can now, once I've
established the coordinates, send you again and again to the same destination. The replicator is
ready!"

J raised a questioning eyebrow. "Really?" J had all but given up on this part of the project. From
the beginning the replicator had been top priority, yet it had never come to fruition.

J did not become infected with Leighton's high spirits. Instead he looked around once again at all
the new equipment, and his sense of impending disaster returned stronger than ever. New
equipment? That meant untested equipment, hazardous experiments made more hazardous. Again
and again Lord Leighton's demonic device had hurled Richard into other universes, other
dimensions that no one before had dreamed existed. Somehow it had dragged him back each
time, sometimes seconds before some particularly unpleasant death. The very names of the places
he'd been rung with a shimmering occult sonority. Tharn! Sarma! Jedd! Patmos! Royth! Zunga!

Where were these places? In the distant past or the distant future? On planets that circle other
suns in this galaxy or some other? In divergent or parallel time tracks, worlds that might have
been? In universes that coexisted with this one, but which we could not see? J had no idea. With
each trip the whole bloody business had become harder to understand. Even Lord Leighton, full
of glib explanations at first, had gradually become as baffled as Blade and J.

Yes, though nobody honestly knew what they were doing, the experiments went on. Perhaps the
time had come to halt, to stop doing and start thinking.

But Leighton was clutching J by the arm, saying, "Come along, old chap. The best is yet to
come." J allowed himself to be half-dragged toward the innermost computer room, the place
where the impossible had happened already so many, many times.

J hung back when they reached the massive entrance door. "Perhaps it would be better to wait, to
be careful . . . "