"Jeffrey Lord - Blade 36 - Return to Kaldak" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lord Jeffery)

Cheeky yeeeeped again, breaking J's train of thought, and started racing around the room. Leighton
stood protectively in front of his desk, arms spread wide to keep the feather-monkey from jumping up on
it and scattering valuable papers to the four winds. J wondered if it was his own thoughts about Richard
Blade which had excited the little animal. Then he heard familiar footsteps on the stairs outside the office.

So did Cheeky. He ran to the door, leaped up, and caught the doorknob with both paws. He swung
there, turning the knob while he kicked at the door frame with both feet. The door swung open and
Richard Blade walked in.

Seen close up, he seemed to have gone gray-haired all at once. Then J took a still closer look and
recognized plaster dust. He also saw dark rings of grit under Blade's usually well-manicured fingernails.

"Just come from the house, Richard?"

"Drove up this morning," said Blade with a grin. "The workers knocked off at their usual time, leaving the
job half-arsed. So I finished it off myself. Up until midnight doing it, too, and then of course there wasn't
any hot water!"

Leighton made a tut-tutting noise of mock indignation. "The union will get you for that, Richard."

"What they don't know won't hurt them," said Blade cheerfully. "Besides, the contractor's foreman is the
son of my father's old groom. He's not going to sneak."

"Good," said J. "How is the house coming, by the way?" He'd seen it once. It was an eighteenth-century
squire's establishment, appallingly run-down when Blade acquired it.

"Well, we can keep partridges and stray pigs out of the ground-floor rooms now. There are four rooms
on the upper floor where you don't need an umbrella when it rains. And you can light at least one
fireplace without fumigating the whole house."

At this point Cheeky yeeeped indignantly at being ignored and took a flying leap onto Blade's shoulder.
Blade scratched his feathery crest absentmindedly, without taking his eyes off Lord Leighton and J.
"Well, from the look on His Lordship's face I should say he's pickled another bright idea for us," he said.
"Do I go through hanging from a trapeze this time?"

J swallowed his laughter. Leighton merely shook his head. "No. It's simply a couple of logical
extrapolations from our experience last time."

The last trip into Dimension X, Leighton used a new technique. Whereas in the past Blade had been
greased up and wired all over with electrodes, for the last trip he had stood in the middle of a booth of
wire mesh, charged with an electrical field linked to the computer. Since he always came back without
being physically linked to the computer, why couldn't he go the same way?

It worked-once. Leighton had a scientist's confidence that what had worked once would work again,
under the same conditions. J was less optimistic, but he was willing to go along with the scientist, if
Richard agreed.

Leighton explained. "With the new booth, there is a lot more room within the area the electrical field
covers. Room for more than a more-or-less naked Blade. We don't have a second person trained and