"Jeffrey Lord - Blade 24 - Dragons of Englor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lord Jeffery)

Blade 24: Dragons of Englor

By Jeffrey Lord

Chapter 1
Two tall men walked along a corridor two hundred feet below the Tower of London. Their footsteps
raised echoes from the tiled floors and painted cement of the walls.

The man on the right was known only as J. A casual look at him would have suggested that he was a
senior civil servant, nearing retirement age after many years of faithful and unobtrusive service. The
Oxford accent, the erect carriage, and the flawless, understated tailoring of his dark gray suit all
reinforced the impression.

The man on the left was named Richard Blade. He had always been harder to classify than J, and always
would be. A dark man, one might have called him-dark hair, dark, closely trimmed beard, skin tanned
almost to swarthiness. A wealthy man-he wore a custom-tailored suit, handmade brown shoes, a fine
digital watch. A powerful man-under that suit was obviously an athlete's body, massively muscled and
conditioned. If asked to guess about Richard Blade, the onlooker would have probably said, "A well-off
amateur athlete and man about town."

The onlooker would have been spectacularly wrong about both J and Richard Blade.

J had indeed served the British Crown faithfully and unobtrusively for many years. In espionage a man
has to be faithful, and a man who isn't unobtrusive doesn't live very long. J was one of the century's great
spymasters and head of the secret intelligence agency MI6. He had also reached an age where a normal
man would have been at least thinking about retirement. But those who make distinguished careers in the
dim shadowy world of espionage are seldom so normal.

Richard Blade was indeed a trained athlete, and not at all short of money. He'd been one of MI6's finest
and deadliest field agents, picked by J himself when fresh out of Oxford. There was nothing of the
amateur about him, and there never would be. He was a brilliant and formidable professional in a game
more demanding and far deadlier than polo or tennis or steeple-chasing.

He was also unique in the whole world. He was the only living human being who could travel into other
Dimensions and return safely. It was because of Blade's uniqueness that he and J were walking along the
echoing corridor far below the Tower of London. At the end of the corridor lay a series of rooms, and in
the last of those rooms stood an enormous computer. That computer was the creation of Lord Leighton,
who had the most brilliant mind and usually the worst temper among all of Britain's scientists. Richard
Blade's brain would be linked to that computer, so that they formed a single circuit. Then Lord Leighton
would pull a red master switch, activating that circuit, and Richard Blade would whirl off into-somewhere
else.

They called that "somewhere else" Dimension X. When the great computer had finished twisting Blade's
brain and senses, he saw and smelled somewhere else, heard and felt somewhere else, fought and moved
somewhere else. Somehow he always survived and came back alive, sane, and reasonably healthy, to tell
of what he had done and seen in the unknown. He was the only living person who could do that, in spite
of all the efforts made to find others.
 There was much more to what had now become Project Dimension X than simply giving Richard Blade
a chance for one incredible adventure after another. Out there in Dimension X lay vast resources of all
the things that Britain so desperately needed-land, metals, knowledge. Blade had gone out twenty-three