«No.»
The multitude of whispering voices grew fainter. «All you desire, in waking life or in dreams, we can give you. Come. Come.» They were now scarcely audible.
Blade said, «Your time moves more quickly than mine, Ngaa, and your time is running out. I will not come to you. I will leave you in your crystal city in the sky, above the planet you have burned clean of life, leave you there to die.»
The Ngaa answered with a fading sigh. «You will change your mind, Richard Blade, and soon.»
When he heard nothing more, J removed the headphones. It was then he became aware that the hairs on the back of his hand were standing up and swaying. He glanced around, startled. The room was bathed for an instant in a dim blue glow.
The glow faded. The hairs on J's hand ceased moving. The Ngaa, as far as J could tell, was gone.
«Follow me,» J commanded.
The attendant followed him into the hall, and down the passageway to the door of Richard's room.
«Richard!» J called. «Are you all right?»
«Yes, sir,» came Richard's voice from inside.
J unlocked the door and, without waiting for an invitation, burst into the room. Blade had turned on the bedlamp and was sitting up, propped against his pillows, regarding J with amusement. «So, you did have my room bugged, didn't you?» Richard demanded.
«Of course I did!» J snapped. «Do you take me for an idiot? Was the Ngaa here just now?»
Richard nodded. «You heard the thing speak, didn't you?»
«I heard it,» J said, annoyed. «I also heard that you spoke to it as if your memory had completely recovered.»
«It has.»
«And you didn't tell me?»
«The last link has only now fallen into place. I know why I could not remember. The Ngaa! The Ngaa spoke to me softly, there in the crystal city, repeating things to me over and over, showing me visions, or dreams, making me believe they were real. The Ngaa hypnotized me! That's the answer. The Ngaa hypnotized me to forget, then tried to hypnotize me to obey, but I would not. The Ngaa sent visions of horror, frightful nightmares drawn from my own subconscious, to try to force me to do as I was told, but I resisted. Somehow I resisted it.»
J was puzzled. «You call the Ngaa it? Why not he or she?»
Richard chuckled. «Because the Ngaa is not a living being.»
«Then what is it?»
«There is nothing like it in our dimension, but it is something like a disembodied spirit simulated by artificial means, and something like a… a computer.»
Richard awoke with a feeling of smug satisfaction and lay a long time staring at the ceiling. Bright sunlight streamed in his window. Birds sang. Breakfast dishes clattered in the distance.
I've won, he thought.
Time was against the Ngaa. It would grow weaker and weaker, eventually losing its ability to manifest itself in the normal space-time continuum. Then, trapped in its own dimension where one Earth-minute was equal to many other-dimensional hours, the Ngaa would someday be destroyed by the nova of its sun.
Automatic victory!
A younger, more reckless Richard Blade might have been disappointed at the lack of «action» and adventure, but Blade had learned the value of a victory that did not deplete his resources, did not leave him less able to deal with the challenges of the future.
There was a knock at the door.
«Come in,» Richard called.
The key rattled in the lock. J entered, returning the key to his waistcoat pocket. «Good morning, Richard. You're looking well,» the old man said, eyeing Blade thoughtfully.
«I'm feeling well,» Richard replied, swinging his feet to the floor.
«Well enough to face a government examiner? Well enough to convince the fellow of your sanity?»
«A government examiner?» Richard stood up.
«Yes. Perhaps several. The Prime Minister has delivered an ultimatum: unless you are sane enough to pass his tests, he'll close down Project Dimension X for good. The deadline, I might add, is only four days away. In the meantime you are confined to quarters here. In particular you are under no circumstances to return to London or have anything to do with the KALI computer. Those are orders!»
Richard slipped on his usual white slacks and white T-shirt. «Sensible precautions, though hardly necessary. Why would I want to go near KALI? And even if I did want to, how would I escape from this snug little rabbit warren of yours? How would I transport myself all the way from here to England? Typically British of the PM to forbid me to do something I am both unwilling and unable to do.»
«Glad you see it that way, old chap.» J clapped Richard on the back. «You are completely recovered, aren't you?»
«Completely.»
«Excellent! After breakfast I'll phone Downing Street and tell them to send their examiners straight away. We'll snatch the project from the jaws of oblivion at the last possible moment, in the style of the very best Victorian melodrama.» J's usual reserve had been replaced by a surprising warmth and exuberance.
«And then it will be business as usual at the Tower of London, eh?» Richard frowned.
«Of course. What's wrong?»
«I don't think it would be wise to use KALI again for awhile. At least not with the same instrument settings.»
«No? Because of the Ngaa?»
«Exactly. The Ngaa is powerful, dangerous and… desperate. Can we risk opening a gateway for it to reenter our dimension?»
«Definitely not.»
The two men left the room together. Guards waited outside. Even now, though Richard was apparently his old self again, J took the absurd precaution of locking the door.
They went downstairs and entered the dining hall.
Richard looked around with a sudden uneasiness. «Where's Zoe?»
Colby, at the head table, glanced up and answered, «I haven't seen her this morning. She must still be in her room.»
Richard wheeled and strode back the way he had come.
The guards tensed and reached for their tranquilizer pistols, but J signaled to them not to fire. Richard swept past them so quickly he almost knocked one of them over, then mounted the stairs three steps at a time. J, puffing and wheezing, followed him up.
Richard accosted an attendant who was coming down the hall outside Zoe's room. «Have you seen Mrs. Smythe-Evans?»
The man looked startled. «Why yes, I have.»
«In her room?»
«No, she came out just a few minutes ago.»
«Where did she go?»
«Down the back stairs, but it's certainly strange that you're asking me these things.»
Richard shot him a worried glance. «Strange? Why?»
«It was you she was with, Mr. Blade.»
Richard's smugness vanished, to be replaced with a sick apprehension. He brushed past the puzzled attendant and, breaking into a run, bounded down the back stairs. To the amazement of the kitchen staff, he sprinted past the stoves and refrigerators and burst through the screen door out onto the back porch.
Half-blinded by the sudden sunlight, he almost tripped and fell as he went down the steps, then paused, shading his eyes with his hands, searching the tennis courts and groves of pine and eucalyptus. No one was in sight.
«Damn,» he whispered.
Then he heard a familiar laugh in the distance, from the front yard. Her laugh!
As the guards appeared, red-faced from running, on the back porch, Richard was off again, rounding the corner of the mansion at a long-legged lope.
Now he was in the side yard, now in the front, now pounding past the lion statues and the flagpole, across the weed-cracked paving stones toward the wire-mesh fence, toward the front gate where he could see green-uniformed armed guards turning to look in his direction.
Then he saw Zoe.
She was nearly to the front gate, walking with a jaunty step, dressed in her borrowed white nurse's outfit, her back to him. At her side was a tall, muscular man in white slacks and T-shirt. Blade had no trouble recognizing the man.