"Jeffrey Lord - Blade 35 - Lords of the Crimson River" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lord Jeffery)

Blade was still the only living man who could make these dangerous journeys and return alive and
healthy.

When Leighton, J, and Richard Blade all agreed on doing something for Project Dimension X, it was as
good as done. It took only a few days to find a building for sale in a suburb of London, and only a few
weeks to move a good part of the Project into it. They were careful to move only those parts of the
Project which wouldn't give away much of the Dimension X secret, although security precautions were as
rigid as ever.

Complex Two still needed a great deal of computer capacity. The master computer could not have any
terminals outside the underground Complex One without compromising its security. So the new building
needed hardware of its own. After a few hundred thousand more pounds were pried loose from the
secret funds, Complex Two got its own computer. If Lord Leighton was willing to commute back and
forth between the complexes, he could now play with computers twenty-four hours a day.

For a while Leighton nearly did this. His eighty-odd years, his hunchback, and his polio-twisted legs
didn't slow him down very much. They didn't slow down his mind at all. It was as quick and fertile as
ever, devouring facts and jumping ahead to bold conclusions the same way it had for nearly sixty years. It
worked that way when Leighton sat down to consider the problem of Blade's return from Dimension X.

Every time Blade went into Dimension X, he was wired into the master computer so that its electronic
mind and his human one were linked. Leighton always took great care to make that link as complete and
predictable as possible, and the KALI capsule, which encased Blade's body so that almost every inch of
his skin was in contact with wire electrodes, had been a great success. But some of Leighton's
experiments along those lines had been less than successful. He still shuddered at the memory of the
automated KALI computer, which had unleashed the Ngaa monster on the world. Blade had nearly been
killed, more than thirty other people had died, and both the Project and the whole world had been put in
a deadly danger, from which Blade had to save them at the risk of his life.

Still, Blade's departure for Dimension X was now pretty much a matter of routine. His return from
Dimension X, on the other hand, followed no pattern Leighton could discover. Somehow the computer
reached out across space, time, and Dimension to link itself with Blade's mind and twist it back into its
normal patterns, so that he once again saw and heard and moved through Home Dimension England.
What was more, the computer almost always waited until Blade's work in Dimension X was completed.
It seemed as if Blade and the computer remained linked in some way after Blade's departure.

It was even more maddening that the computer also brought back whatever Blade was holding or even
close to at the time. He'd seldom been able to take any equipment into Dimension with him. Several times
this nearly cost him his life, and it ruled out any idea of really exploring Dimension X. Coming back,
however, Blade had brought everything from jeweled knives to a full-grown live horse!

This was the kind of mystery Lord Leighton didn't like at all. It weakened his control over the most vital
experiment he'd ever performed, an experiment vital to the future of the whole world as well as to his
own career and reputation. Blade's discoveries in other Dimensions, as well as the things he brought back
with him when he returned home, provided the knowledge and power to make England a great power
once again, to make Leighton a great man, and to make the world better off than it had ever been. But
the mysteries still attached to traveling in other Dimensions made Leighton look as if he didn't quite know
what he was doing, and he would cheerfully have sold his soul to the Devil to avoid that fate.
Unfortunately the Devil wasn't buying. Lord Leighton had to puzzle things out as best he could, and his
best wasn't good enough. There were other problems, too. The Project's budget was generous, but it