The two men passed through the rooms of auxiliary equipment and reached the door to the main room. Beyond it lay the heart of the whole Project, the immense master computer that hurled Blade into Dimension X and drew him home again. So far it had always done both.
Lord Leighton was confident that it would go on doing so as reliably as it had done in the past. Blade could only hope the scientist was right. Certainly the old man would do his best. He found it hard to care about anyone or anything except the pursuit of knowledge and openly admitted as much. But he did care what happened to Richard Blade. There was no doubt about it, although Blade suspected Leighton would rather be burned at the stake than admit it.
The door slid open as Blade and J approached it. For once Lord Leighton was neither waiting to greet them or bustling about making last-minute checks on the computer. He was sitting calmly in a chair in front of the main control panel, a cup of tea in one hand and a well-thumbed copy of the British Journal of Computer Research in the other. In his stained, ragged, and rumpled laboratory coat and threadbare black trousers, he looked more like the computer's caretaker than its creator.
J looked at the scientist. Wry amusement spread across his face and sounded in his voice. «My goodness, Leighton. Is the pace getting to you?»
Leighton's bushy eyebrows rose. There was nearly as much white hair left in those eyebrows as there was on the scientist's head. «On the contrary. Everything is ready and the main sequence initiated. It would be quite pointless to do anything else until Richard is ready to be hooked up. I am not, after all, one of those types who feels obliged to demonstrate his energy by rushing about to no purpose.»
That was quite true. Leighton had plenty of other chances to demonstrate his energy. He demonstrated a phenomenal amount of it, considering that he was past eighty and had lived most of those years with his legs twisted by polio and his spine bent into a hunchback. His daily routine often left men half his age unable to keep up with him.
The next move in the familiar routine was Blade's. He made his way between the enormous gray crackle-finished consoles of the computer to the little changing room carved out of the solid rock of the wall. Inside the room he stripped naked, smeared himself with smelly black grease to guard against electrical burns, and pulled on a loincloth. The loincloth was more a gesture than anything else. He'd always arrived in Dimension X naked, sometimes with embarrassing results.
Once he'd been able to take a ruby ring with him, and another time a knife. This time he was taking nothing, since there was nothing on hand that might have a good chance of making the trip with him. Adding random bits and pieces of gear simply made still more complicated and dangerous a trip that was already complicated and dangerous enough.
He retraced his route to the center of the computer room. A glass booth stood there, with a metal chair on a rubber mat inside it. The chair looked as if its purpose was executing condemned criminals instead of sending Richard Blade off into Dimension X.
Blade sat down in the chair, leaned back against the cold rubber of the back, and stretched his legs. He began to breathe regularly and deeply, to saturate his system with oxygen and ease any tension as much as possible. J pulled the folding observer's seat down from the wall and sat on it.
As J sat down, Leighton rose from his chair with a speed and grace surprising in someone of his age and physical condition. He carefully marked his place in the magazine, put it on the chair, set the teacup on top of it, and came over to Blade.
Now Leighton seemed to explode into action, darting around and around the chair with the speed and agility of a whirling dervish. To every part of Blade's body he taped cobra-headed metal electrodes. Each electrode was attached to a wire running off into the computer. Leighton had once told Blade there were only a hundred and sixteen of the electrodes. Looking down on himself, Blade found it hard to believe there weren't several times that many.
Eventually all the electrodes were in place. Leighton made a final inspection, untangling a purple wire from a yellow one, shifting one electrode a few inches down Blade's thigh, putting on an extra piece of tape to hold another one firmly where it was. Then he backed away, wiping his hands on his laboratory coat.
He backed away until he stood by the main control panel, eyes scanning the flashing lights, hand within easy reach of the red master switch. He waited there until the familiar dance of the lights told him the main sequence was finished and the computer ready to do its work. Then the long-fingered hand on the end of the arm darted at the switch and drew it in a single smooth motion down to the bottom of its slot.
The room, the computer, the two men watching, the booth itself all vanished from around Blade in the time it took him to blink his eyes. He blinked again, and a vast cliff of fissured and scarred blue-gray stone reared itself before him and towered above him. He was still sitting in the chair, but now it rested on yellow sand.
Blade craned his neck upward, looking for the top of the cliff. He could not see it. So high above that he could not even guess how far, the blue-gray stone faded into a swirling gray sky. It was as if the cliff itself became the clouds, melting from solid blue-gray rock into gray mist.
Blade stretched his legs and started to rise from the chair. As he did, the ground under him shuddered violently, swaying from side to side and then heaving up and down. The movement was sharp enough to send the sand swirling up in clouds around him. He closed his eyes, but he could feel the grittiness between his teeth as the sand found its way into his mouth.
After a little while the movements of the ground ceased. Again Blade started to rise, and realized that somehow he could not. It was as if the joints of his arms and legs were locked, or his back and buttocks were firmly glued to the chair. It was an annoying sensation.
Blade tried harder, and still harder, until the muscles stood out along his arms and thighs and neck in ridges and lumps. He put all of his enormous strength into trying to rise, until his chest was heaving and all his muscles began to ache.
As he tried to relax and gather strength for another effort to rise from the chair, the ground shuddered again. This time the movements were even more violent and went on longer. The sand rose up around Blade in a swirling yellow cloud that blotted out everything more than a foot in front of his nose.
The movements of the ground slowly faded away, and the cloud of sand subsided. As it did, a faint rumble sounded from high above. Blade looked upward, and his eyes opened wide.
A vast section of the solid gray-blue rock was peeling off the face of the cliff and dropping directly down on top of him. As it fell it crumbled and cracked, splitting into three pieces. Each one of those pieces seemed as large as a house, more than large enough to smash Blade like a bug under a hammer when it landed.
He was not in a real world, though, so nothing would happen to him even if the stone landed. Or was he? Was this weird world as real as Britain, and would his death here be as real and permanent? That chilling thought drove him to a still more desperate effort to rise from the chair and somehow get clear of the base of the cliff. He heaved himself upward as if he wanted to leap into the air. The chair quivered, but he did not rise.
There was still one thing he could do. He threw himself violently to one side, and the chair rocked under him. He did it three more times, and each time the chair tilted farther and farther. At last he threw it down on its side. With a tremendous twisting of his thighs and torso he landed on hands and knees, the chair riding on his back like the shell of a crab.