Neither Lord Leighton nor J was at the surface entrance to the complex. There was only the quartet of sober-garbed and even more sober-faced Special Branch men, who emerged from the shadows and took position around Blade as carefully as if he had been the crown jewels of England. Then they asked for his identity card. They would have done that even if they had recognized his face, and they probably did not. The Special Branch men who provided the above-ground security for the project served only a single one-year tour, then returned to regular duties, forever bound by the Official Secrets Act as tightly as Blade himself.
Blade wondered at times what impressions the security men or the scientific and technical experts on the staff might have formed about the project, impressions that might be dragged out of them by a sufficiently comprehensive interrogation. It might be a good idea to have one or two of the men interrogated, just to check. Unless J had already had that done? Blade grinned. He would have been very surprised if J hadn't already thought of the same thing. And if he had thought of it, he would have had it done. The head of MI6 had a reputation for covering all his bets. That reputation went back to his work in the First World War, long before Blade was even born. Blade knew that the old spymaster would leave nothing undone to guard the project. And also to guard Blade, whom he loved like the son he had never had.
When the elevator had dropped two hundred feet to the level of the complex and the heavy bronzed doors had slid noiselessly open, J was waiting for him. They walked through the long corridors, with the subdued lights gleaming on polished stone and metal, to the entrance of the computer rooms. There were sounds of human activity-voices, the clatter of a typewriter, the whine of a recording device-from behind the closed doors of the corridor, but there was not a living soul in the corridor itself. No human guards were needed down here. Each step of Blade's and J's progress, each passage through a door, was monitored by electronic devices that represented the latest in Ministry of Defense design. The devices never slept, never got tired, and could never be bribed or blackmailed, even if they might be jammed.
The computer rooms were a complex within a complex, a series of linked chambers hewn from the solid rock. But most of that rock was hidden behind the looming bulks of the computer consoles and auxiliary equipment. From the sullen gray faces of the computers, covered in a crackled plastic finish that made them look diseased, a fantasy of multicolored lights flickered and winked down at Blade. He found the computer rooms the only part of the whole underground establishment that really oppressed him, but he had never had to spend enough time there for them to really bother him.
Nor would he have to this time, either. Lord Leighton popped out the door to the central room. His eyes gleamed behind their thick glasses in a way that, Blade knew, meant the main computer was all ready to go.
«Good morning, good morning, Richard. I trust you're ready to go? The computer certainly is. I don't like to keep it on the line at maximum level for very long now. All these new attachments increase the current drain by over forty percent. One of these days Richard is going to find himself caught between Dimensions by nothing more exotic than a blown fuse. We've got to convince the PM that the supporting equipment for the power plant has to be replaced, and soon.»
«No doubt,» said J with an urbanity that Blade recognized as a hidden mischievous impulse to indulge in a little verbal fencing with Leighton. «But most of those new attachments were provided for your subprojects. If you hadn't insisted on installing them, there wouldn't be any problem. And the PM didn't balk at providing the money for that.»
«Oh, quite. But if politicians had any scientific training, they'd logically realize one can't really install new equipment without providing for all the consequences. And the PM is a politician, for better or for worse.» He, turned his hunched back on J and Blade, as if the term politician were a hitherto unutterable curse consigning the prime minister to the nether regions. Then he began the visual check of the master control panel, which he would never delegate to any subordinate.
«Well, Richard,» said J with resignation in his voice, «I suppose his Lordship's right. Time to go.» With a precise motion he thrust out a hand and strongly shook Blade's. Then he stepped back to the small recess beside the main control panel. There was a stool in it, which Lord Leighton had provided so he could sit and watch Blade flicker out of his Home Dimensional existence. Such a gesture from Lord Leighton assured Blade that the scientist possessed an actual, genuine, real heart, lurking somewhere behind that searingly brilliant intellect and the brusque, cynical, eccentric manner.
For himself, however, there was no softening or modification of the familiar routine. He went into the dressing room, stripped off his street clothes, and reappeared naked except for a loincloth and a head-to-toe covering of blackish cream intended to prevent electrical burns. Whether smearing himself with that foul-smelling gunk was really necessary he didn't know. But considering the amount of current that flashed through his body each time he was shifted into Dimension X, it was probably a reasonable precaution. He had no desire to wind up barbecued to a turn in the chair; that chair in its glass cubicle already looked rather too much like an electric chair.
He sat down in the chair, and Lord Leighton went to work, darting about the chair with his once white laboratory smock flapping and making him look like some energetic and untidy bird, attaching the gleaming cobra-headed electrodes all over Blade's body. The gnarled hands were amazingly steady and sure in their movements. In a few minutes Blade was sitting festooned with electrodes, and the multicolored wires leading from them like some abandoned building overgrown with vines and fantastic fungi. He found that his breathing had increased and that his stomach felt tight and cold. He forced himself to breathe more slowly and flexed as many of his muscles as he could to relieve the tension. Save the adrenaline for Dimension X, where you may really need it, you idiot! Then he turned his head to where Lord Leighton stood at the master panel and nodded. The gnarled right hand lifted in salutation, then came down, pulling the red master switch with it.
This time it happened with explosive suddenness. Lord Leighton whipped out of sight between one heartbeat and the next. The computer consoles charged in on him from all sides with a single gigantic lurch. For a second he felt like a man standing at a four-way rail crossing and watching runaway locomotives thunder toward him down all four tracks.
Then the hurtling gray bulks struck, and he dissolved into a fine mist that still retained sensation as the impact of the computers hurled it upward into the black sky. The mist coiled and dissipated as it rose but never lost sensation. He felt a deadly cold seep down from the sky and attack each separate microscopic particle that he had become, felt all sensations heightened by this new and terrible dispersal, which was spreading him across cosmic distances.
He rose farther, farther; the cold continued to envelop and chill him, and soon; he began to lose sensation in some of the more remote particles, as though they had fallen into ice water and been engulfed altogether in its numbing chill. His brain was it functioning more slowly now that it was dispersed along with the rest of him? — tried to send out pulses to those remote particles. But they were dispersed and chilled beyond his ability to reach them. And he continued to spread across space with more and more of his particles being enveloped by the chill..