Abruptly Richard was startled by an animalistic snort and wheeze, amplified and echoed by the bare rock walls. A snores Richard advanced and found, awkwardly sprawled in a chair before a readout unit, the dwarfish twisted form of the hunchbacked Leighton. On the worktable of the readout unit stood three empty bottles. There were other bottles on the floor. The air was filled with the reek of alcohol.

Richard stepped closer. There was a sheet of diagram paper on the table and several pencils. Had Leighton been working on something as he drank? Richard read the heading: «KALI program 280.» Richard had never learned how to program computers, but over the years he had learned to read some parts of Leighton's planning sheets. His eye scanned the columns, looking for something that would identify the purpose of this program.

He found it.

In the place set aside for the height and weight of the person to be sent into the X dimensions, Richard found not his own specifications, but Leighton's. Leighton had been working on a program to send himself into the X dimensions! This frail old man was planning to launch himself on a journey that brought madness and death to voyagers who were young and strong. And if he survived, how could he return after the PM closed down the project? But of counse! Lord Leighton did not want to return. With his beloved project ended, what was left for him in this world?

Noiselessly Richard passed the sleeping scientist and continued on.

The massive vault door of KALI's inner sanctum, her holy of holies, opened itself and stood open, waiting for him. Richard entered with a feeling of awe. The door swung shut. For the first time in his life, Richard was alone with the computers, without J, without the gnomelike Leighton. He seemed to sense, as he could never sense before, the presence of something… no, someone. The computer had perhaps been a mere machine once, when the project had begun, but now it was more. Where is the line that divides mechanical computation from conscious thought? Who can say? Richard only knew that somewhere, sometime in the years they'd been working on Project Dimension X, that line had been crossed without them noticing it.

KALI was not a thing.

KALI was a person.

Like a worshipper approaching an altar, Richard approached the control console. A small red light shone like a ruby eye above the only two switches that were active, the Program Stop and the Program Start. KALI was on standby. She was waiting for him. He laid aside his tranquilizer pistol. He knew she would not transport it. He slipped off his swimming trunks. He knew from experience they would not follow him into the worlds beyond the gateway, into other space-time continuums, other universes. Only naked would she take him. Only naked would she give him a new birth on a different plane of existence.

He glanced at the box in which he would stand when he was launched. How like a coffin it was! And at the same time, how like a womb. Its copper-colored many-segmented interior gleamed in the subdued light. It stood open, waiting.

Like a hand. Like a mouth. Like a Venus's-flytrap.

Richard hesitated no longer, but stepped forward and firmly pressed Program Start. The red light went out. A green-glowing digital clock lit up and began the countdown.

He crossed to the center of the room, to the wire-bedecked sarcophagus, as KALI inexorably raced through her preliminary sequences.

He stepped inside, leaned back against the cold metal, and thought about the Ngaa. I'm coming, Ngaa. Nothing stands in my way now.

And he thought of Zoe. He thought of Zoe for a long time.

The clock went on flickering, moving into the low numbers. Fourteen. Thirteen. Twelve.

Suddenly Richard heard the vault door open with a swish. He turned his head.

Lord Leighton was standing in the doorway, swaying drunkenly.

Behind his thick glasses, the little hunchback's eyes were round and owl-like, black pupils rimmed with yellow. His mottled face was ashen, his halo of white hair a disheveled mop, his green smock more dirty and rumpled than Blade had ever seen it before. He took a halting step forward on his ruined legs, then almost fell, catching himself with an outthrust bird claw of a hand on the door jamb.

Only one word did the old man utter, but that word he shouted, setting the echoes ringing in the high-ceilinged rock-walled room.

«No!»

Richard watched him helplessly. It was too late to leave the launch box to try to stop Leighton. In an instant the box would shut, and he did not want to be outside then.

Steadying himself against the wall, Lord Leighton shambled toward the Program Stop button. Richard could see the sweat break out, glistening, on Leighton's high wrinkled forehead.

Eight. Seven. The numbers were flickering.

On the count of six the heavy curved door of the launch case swung shut, plunging Richard into darkness. A low hum began. Richard thought, What's Leighton doing? If only I could see him… Imagination supplied an image of Leighton's bony finger extending toward the Program Stop button.

Then darkness turned into blazing golden light.

Chapter 14

Each voyage into Dimension X was different, yet all had certain features in common. There would be a period of wild imagery, dreamlike, but with an urgency unmatched by any except the worst of nightmares, then there would be sensations of motion, of incredible speed. Then there would be physical sensations experienced with a curious detachment. Cold. Heat. Unbearable pain that somehow did not really hurt. Always before Richard had taken these things passively, letting them happen.

He could no longer afford that luxury.

It had been because of a failure of critical judgment that the Ngaa had trapped him. The Ngaa, master of illusion, had made him believe he was still between dimensions for some time after he had arrived on the «other side.» It had taken advantage of his passive attitude to establish a hypnotic control Richard had not been able to break until that night in the plane over London when he had been commanded to kill J and had resisted, a control that even then had only gradually faded, a control that-Who knows? — might still exert some influence on Blade's subconscious mind.

Richard thought, I must distinguish illusion from reality, or the Ngaa will win.

Sometimes Richard landed in a new universe fully conscious, but more often he blacked out for some undetermined period before awakening in an unfamiliar and usually dangerous environment. This time he must not black out! The Ngaa knew he was coming.

Richard thought, I am awake now. I will stay awake.

The golden light was rushing past all the while in total silence, as if he were falling faster and faster into clouds of bright gas or dust. Falling. A terrible vertigo threatened to possess him, but he pushed it away with the thought, This is illusion.

The light seemed to hold faces, naked bodies. They flashed by like streaks of flame, gazing at him with gaunt anguish. Illusion, Richard thought again.

But their eyes were so haunted, their bodies so wasted with disease, starvation and age, their heads so skull-like. Could there be concentration camps here in the void between universes? Could there be Spanish Inquisitions? Plagues? Witch hunts? Illusion! Illusion!

But now he could begin to hear their voices, their wails of wordless agony.

Nothing but illusion!

Wordless? It seemed to Richard he could begin to understand them.

«Help!» they were crying. «Help! Help us!»

The golden light was shifting to a dull, dim blue, and Richard felt cold, an infinite cold that made his swim in the Thames seem summery.

«Help!» they called out again and again.

How could he refuse them? He was a human being, and so were they.