The Crystal Seas

«Joshua managed it,» put in Blade.

«I know,» said J, with another laugh. «But that was a miracle. And it would take another miracle to keep Lord Leighton's brain from coming up with more ideas for two years.»

Leighton laughed in his turn. «It most certainly would. But let's not keep Richard waiting while we argue.»

That was a notion Blade heartily supported. Now that the moment was actually approaching, the strain on him was, as always, close to its peak.

And as always, the routine of preparing himself relieved most of the strain. It was so familiar, so monotonous, so apparently pointless-and therefore so refreshingly normal, so much like ordinary life in Home Dimension.

It might not be pointless, of course. There was no way of knowing what would happen if he didn't smear foulsmelling black paste over every inch of skin. It was supposed to prevent electrical burns and other possible nastinesses from the jolt of current passing through him at the moment of transfer into Dimension X. Perhaps it did. Perhaps if he ever left out this step, he would wind up in Dimension X dead and charred as black as an over-fried chicken wing.

So Blade played it safe. He stripped himself to the skin, smeared himself with the black goo, and pulled on a loincloth. Then he stepped out of the changing booth and walked over to the main chair. One or two wires might have been added or taken away since the project began, but otherwise the chair looked the same. A black metal chair with black rubber padding on the seat and back, it stood on a thick rubber mat inside a glass booth. It always looked and always would look too much like an electric chair.

Blade sat down. Lord Leighton bustled about him, attaching the scores of cobra-headed electrodes to every part of his body. The cords of the electrodes ran off like a horde of multicolored snakes into the great computer. Blade looked up at it. The monstrous consoles in their gray, crackled finish loomed as high as ever, frowning ominously down on him in the dim light of the chamber.

It always seemed that Leighton would go on attaching electrodes until there was no more of Blade's skin to take them. It was always something of a surprise to Blade when Leighton stopped. But it always happened, sooner or later, and Leighton always stepped back to admire his work for a moment.

By this time J had parked himself on the small chair in the corner reserved for him. A mask of self-control had descended on his lined face as he watched Blade get ready to go into danger again. Blade knew that J loved him like a son, but both of them were caught in a net of duties that they could not give up-not without harm to England, and not until there was someone else to do each of their jobs.

Blade did not have to wait much longer. The big clock on the master control panel worked itself around to zero. The sequence-indicator lights all lighted up like a Christmas tree. The main sequence was in the computer's banks, ready to respond to the impulse from the master switch.

Lord Leighton's clawed hand hovered over the master switch, and his surprisingly bright, dark eyes looked questioningly at Blade.

Blade nodded.

«Good luck, Richard,» said J.

Blade nodded again. In this moment his throat was almost always too dry to talk. And his eyes were on Leighton's hand, now descending to pull down the switch. It slid down its polished slot and clicked into place.

As it did, the red lights on the panel suddenly began to swell and rapidly grow brighter, burning into Blade's eyes like miniature suns. In seconds the whole chamber was flooded with red light, pulsing and savage. Blade looked down at himself, saw the red light reflected in shimmering patterns from the glossy black grease on his skin. Or was it his skin that had turned glossy black? He stretched out an arm to look at it. It rose effortlessly. He stood up. Dimly, half lost in the red glare, he saw Lord Leighton and J shrinking away from him, transformed into dwarfed, apelike figures.

He drew himself to his full height. Now he felt himself expanding and growing like a giant. Not like a balloon-every bit of him was as solid as it had been before. His hand touched the rock ceiling. There was a moment of pressure, then the rock seemed to explode away from around his body in red-glowing fragments and go whizzing away into- blackness.

He rose up through the earth until his head broke the surface, and kept on rising. The earth gaped where he broke through, then closed behind him. He flexed his legs and leaped upward. His legs pulled free of the rock and earth. Now he stood in the Tower of London. Already his head was above the top of the flagpole on the White Tower, and as he turned from side to side to look over London, he continued to grow.

Black and shining, Blade grew, until he could see London spread out below him, lit with a hell-red glow from horizon to horizon. God-like, he stretched his arms out to embrace the city and seemed to hear it roar and pulse in response. Then the red light faded, and the city vanished. Blade stood alone in the blackness-the gigantic, terrible, blackness-knowing that this time he had been pushed beyond the normal human limits-into where?

Chapter TWO

Blade literally came back down to earth with a bump. Suddenly the darkness was gone, and he was back to normal size. Then he struck something hard and cold with a bone-shaking crash, bounced, and rolled over and over down a long, hard, sloping surface, picking up bruises as he went. He finally arrived in Dimension X with a bone-jarring thump against another hard surface.

He lay there without even trying to move until his head began to clear. He felt aches and pains all over, from the bruises and cuts he had picked up rolling over the rocks. And he knew he must have struck his head harder than usual, since there was a distinct, unmistakable roaring sound in his ears.

Eventually he got up the energy and coordination to move. Everything still seemed to be working-no bones broken that he could see or feel right now. Cautiously he stood up. For a moment his head swam, and he nearly lost his balance. But after that, he knew he would be able to stay on his feet. So he stretched, to get a few more of the aches out of his muscles and joints, then looked around him.

Now he knew why he had been hearing a roaring in his ears. He was standing on a rocky beach by the ocean. Great blue-green waves were roaring in onto the beach and breaking in clouds of foam and spray. They were breaking hard enough to move rocks the size of a man and breaking with a terrible, continuous grinding noise. A long reef of high-piled rocks ran out into the sea, off to Blade's right. The incoming surf broke in high rainbows of spray over a mound of black rocks at the far end, a good quarter of a mile away.

Blade looked back at the shore and along the beach. He didn't like what he saw. The beach lay at the bottom of a semicircle of high, weathered rock cliffs nearly half a mile long. At the foot of the cliffs was thirty or forty feet of rocky slope. Blade realized that he must have struck near the top of that slope and rolled down. Above the slope the cliff shot vertically nearly two hundred feet against the blue sky. Blade could see flowering trees and bushes tossing in the sea wind on top of the cliff. At least the land was not going to be totally barren and inhospitable-if he could ever get to it.

That was going to be the problem-getting off this beach and out of this cove to somewhere more habitable. He could try to climb two hundred feet of crumbling rock in his present battered condition, with only toes and fingers for climbing aids. Or he could try swimming out, getting safely through a hundred-yard belt of boiling white surf without drowning or being smashed against the rocks. Then he would have to swim some unknown distance along a totally unknown coast until he found a better landing place, and then back to shore probably through still more surf. Blade was a superb swimmer who could easily cover twenty miles at a stretch. But that didn't mean he liked such a plunge into the unknown.