Wizard Of Rentoro

«The Wizard's situation was already unfortunate before you had anything to do with him,» said Leighton. «The autopsy showed that. He'd been able to control the aging process in his body, but only partly in his brain. The autopsy showed a good many brain cells that had lost function long before you came on the scene. He must have already been on the edge, and those last efforts put him over. He was caught in a vicious circle. The more his brain deteriorated, the more wild ideas he got, and the more wild ideas he got, the more he increased the strain and the rate of deterioration.

«No, Richard, there's nothing you did to the Wizard that wasn't already inevitable-and close. In fact, one might say that you gave him a more merciful death than he would have had otherwise. If he hadn't come with you, he would have ended up a mindless animal, staggering, then crawling, then lying in his own filth until he died of thirst or starvation or disease. As it was, he died painlessly in a hospital bed, not even knowing that he was dying.»

Blade felt a great sense of relief. If Leighton said this, it was true to the best of his knowledge. Leighton would lie with a perfectly straight face about quite a few things, but never about anything scientific. On scientific questions he would not tell a lie to save himself from a firing squad, let alone to make Richard Blade feel less guilty.

Blade smiled. «So I suppose he would not have been able to teach me or anyone else his skills, even in Rentoro?»

«Unlikely, to say the least. The effort involved in the teaching would probably have pushed him over the edge.»

«So now he really is gone, and all his secrets with him,» said Blade.

Leighton's eyes sparkled. «Not quite, Richard, not quite.» Painfully he bent down and pulled off the canvas cover, revealing a wire cage with two white mice in it. Then he opened the briefcase and took out two pairs of sky-bridge crystals. They were only a fraction of the normal size, but there was no mistaking the material.

Leighton placed one pair carefully on his desk, then put the other pair on the floor in front of the cage. Blade held his breath. Leighton opened the cage door, the mice darted out, they passed between the crystals on the floor-

— then with a faint pop they appeared between the crystals on Leighton's desk. Both were lying motionless on their sides, but Leighton reached over and gently prodded their stomachs with a finger. Slowly they got to their feet, then darted for the edge of the desk. J caught them as they reached it, cupped one in each hand, and gently returned them to the cage.

«We are able to cut these from one of the crystals you brought, then activate them electrically,» said Leighton. «Unlike mental force, electricity makes the crystals permanently active, and uses them up rather quickly. So we can't make any really high-capacity sky-bridges with the crystals you brought back.

«However, we're working on that. A spectrographic analysis suggests at least the possibility of synthesizing the crystals on a large scale. It will require a fairly large investment in research-don't groan out loud, J, if you please! but I suspect that in the near future…»

Blade found himself unable to pay attention to Leighton's predictions about the near future. A single, magnificently satisfying thought was echoing around his mind.

It hadn't been wasted, after all.