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

It was Blade, surprisingly enough, who answered, "No! I want to go."

J studied the younger man a moment. It's said one can become addicted to anything. Was Blade
addicted to the machine? Here was a possibility they'd never considered, a dangerous possibility.
And what if Blade found on the "other side" a world he liked better than stodgy old England?
Could the computer bring Blade home against his will?

The door opened.
Blade and Lord Leighton went in, J trailing behind.

Lord Leighton had been chattering on all this time, and Blade, listening intently, had been
nodding at intervals and asking questions in a low voice.

"As you see, the most drastic changes are the ones I've made in here," said the hunchback
proudly, gesturing toward the place where once the familiar electric-chairlike device had stood.
With alarm J noted that a new contraption occupied the center of the room, a sort of upright Iron
Maiden or Egyptian mummy case, but with a tangle of wires attached to it.

Lord Leighton was explaining, "This case is molded so that it fits you exactly, Richard my boy.
No one else can use it. And all the electrodes that I used to attach to you, one at a time, are now
pressed into positive contact with your body automatically when the box closes."

"Interesting," said Blade. "A definite improvement."

"A part of an overall plan," said Leighton. "The replicator, you see, is not a separate unit to be
plugged into a preexisting whole. It is a strategy for the organization of the entire process. When I
put the electrodes on by hand, there's no way I can ever put them on exactly the same way twice.
I, myself, was inadvertently introducing variation into something that must be exactly the same
every time. And look here." He gestured toward a completely remodeled control console. "I have
eliminated the red sliding switch you've so often seen me throw an instant before you-er-
departed."

"Then how do you start the final sequence?" asked Blade.

"I don't. Once the program is fed into the computer memory banks, only two switches remain
active: Program Start and Program Stop. And when Program Start is pushed, the preliminary
sequences begin and run themselves out, one after the other. That's nothing new. The innovation
is that the impulse that starts the final sequence comes directly from the computer, automatically,
when it comes to the end of the prelims. I never touch the controls unless I think something is
going wrong. Then I hit Program Stop. Normally everything is completely automatic, including
the closing of the box. The computer even turns itself off after you've been launched"

Blade asked, "What's the point of that? Oh wait, I see. The machine repeats every step exactly the
same way every time, and thus should produce the same result, so long as nobody changes the
program."

Leighton beamed up at him. "Exactly! You should have been a scientist, my boy. You have the
mind for it. What we had failed to see was that no human being could do things as perfectly as a
machine, not even a human being as unusual as myself."