"Jeffrey Lord - Blade 32 - Pirates of Gohar" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lord Jeffery)

Pirates of Gohar
Blade Book 32


By Jeffrey Lord




Chapter 1
^┬╗
Lord Leighton was eighty years old. He'd been born a hunchback, and his legs were twisted from polio
as a child. Yet the wrinkled hands and long arms were still surprisingly strong and skilled. He easily
unlocked the heavy steel door and started pushing it open. Then Richard Blade stepped forward to help
the scientist.
Richard Blade was one of those dark men who look older than they are when they're young and
much younger than they are when they get older. He stood an inch over six feet, and his two hundred
pounds moved with the ease and grace of a hunting animal in perfect condition. He placed one large hand
against the door and with a single smooth motion pushed it open.
Beyond the door was a small low room, with a bare concrete floor and whitewashed stone walls. In
one corner a gleaming metal ovoid seven feet high rested in a steel cradle. It might have been a lifeboat
for a spaceship. On the wall opposite the door was a rack of electronic testing gear, and on the floor in
front of the rack a pile of components. Much of the gear and all the components were smoke-blackened,
twisted, or half-melted. The ceiling over the testing rack was also black, and Blade detected a faint smell
of burned insulation.
"Good God," said Blade. He'd seen far worse accidents with electronic gear, but not in this
top-secret complex. "Who did what?"
Leighton shoved both hands into the pockets of a filthy laboratory smock and grimaced. "As far as
we can tell, some idiot installed Circuit 19 backwards." He shrugged. "It could have been much worse.
The circuit breakers kept the surge out of the capsule itself. The automatic alarms shut the door, the fire
extinguishers suffocated the fireтАФ"
 "And suffocated the technician?" asked Blade with a perfectly straight face.
Leighton gave Blade a gnome's smile. "No, but I wouldn't have minded if they had. All the automatic
elements worked perfectly. It was the human element that failed. And people still ask me why I love
computers!"
Blade's face and voice hardened. "Perhaps. But I seem to recall that it wasn't a human being who
released the Ngaa in this Dimension."
Leighton's eyes met Blade'sтАФand then the scientist looked away. "Richard, that also was ultimately
human error. My error. The KALI computer made only those mistakes I allowed it to make, in myтАФah,
misplacedтАФconfidence that it was completely self-correcting."
Blade's face softened again, and he felt a sudden genuine warmth toward Leighton. The old man
looked like a cheap horror-movie version of the mad scientist, who will cheerfully risk destroying the
world to prove one of his theories. He wasn't. His reaction to the one time he'd actually come close to
doing this proved it.
Not that Leighton wasn't as brilliant and eccentric as any man in the history of science. Even his worst
enemies didn't deny the brilliance, and his best friends admitted he was eccentric to the point of being
maddening. His brilliance had conceived a computer far ahead of anything in existence at the time, and his
eccentricity led to the idea of linking it with a human mind. He hoped the resulting combination of human
flexibility and machine capacity would produce a super-mind.
For the subject of the experiment he chose Richard Blade, a top field agent for the secret intelligence