"Jeffrey Lord - Blade 29 - Treasure of the Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lord Jeffery)

Leighton finished his work and gave it a final inspection.

He walked to the main control panel and watched the master timer as the computer readied itself for the
great moment.

Then J raised a hand in a farewell salute, Lord Leighton's hand came down on the red master switch,
and Blade whirled off into Dimension X.

Chapter 2

Most of the time Blade traveled from Home Dimension to Dimension X in an explosive psychedelic
bombardment of all his senses. Sometimes it was merely spectacular, sometimes terrifying, sometimes
agonizingly painful.

This time there was nothing like that. The computer room and everything in it vanished. In its place was
an endless blackness, with silver and golden lights twinkling starlike in a thousand places. Blade felt hints
of a terrible cold all around him, felt his skin beginning to prickle-then blackness and all the other
sensations vanished. A moment in limbo, then a bone-jarring thud as he landed on a solid surface which
seemed to be covered with some sort of padding.

Blade kept his eyes closed and listened for any sounds that could mean immediate danger. He heard the
sighing of wind, the creak of branches, and the twitters and chirps of several kinds of birds. Nothing else.

Blade continued to lie still while he counted to twenty, allowing his body to reorient itself. His head
ached slightly, but no worse than it would have done from a mild sinus attack. He felt none of the blinding
agony which sometimes used to leave him immobile and vulnerable for half an hour. The hyperventilating
seemed to prevent that sort of headache.

Blade opened his eyes and sat up. He was sitting as naked as the day he was born on a thick layer of
fallen blue needles. He seemed to be on a wooded hillside, surrounded by large trees. Some carried the
blue needles and soared up out of sight, while other squatter ones spread wide and trailed long golden
leaves. The ground was nearly clear except for fallen needles and occasional patches of waist-high
reddish ferns. Upslope Blade caught a glimpse of blue sky and drifting white clouds. He listened again for
any sounds except wind and birds, again heard nothing, and headed up the hill.

The top of the hill was farther than he'd expected. He covered at least a mile before he broke out of the
trees onto open, rocky ground. A few yards in front of him the ground dropped sharply away into a
rugged cliff. Several hundred feet below it ended on the bank of a twisting little river, clear blue where it
flowed deep, silvery where it boiled through a stretch of rapids. On the other side of the river the forest
began again, an endless carpet of blue and gold with smaller patches of red. Blade had seldom seen such
a lush and colorful display of vegetation outside the tropics.

Many miles away across the treetops, the ground swelled into a range of green hills, then abruptly leaped
upward into a wall of mountains. The sunlight blazed off snowscapes and glaciers twisting down scarred
rocky flanks. Blade could only guess how high the mountains rose, but they looked at least as high as the
Alps. They cut off the horizon in all directions except for one narrow valley.

The sky was blue, with faint brownish-gray tinge. Blade sniffed the air. It was brisk and clean, the air of
a virgin wilderness a thousand miles from civilization. Whatever tinged the sky didn't seem to be affecting
the air.