Before Blade's mind could form another thought, Lord Leighton's hand descended smoothly onto the red master switch and drew it even more smoothly down to the bottom of its slot.
The floor beneath the booth dropped away into a swirling black nothingness. The booth and Blade inside it seemed to hang suspended above the blackness, with the room and the computer consoles and Leighton and J still clearly visible all around.
Then the blackness began to turn red and come alive with dark fumes that swirled around Blade without burning or choking or even brushing against him. They seemed to swirl right through him, for suddenly he was as intangible as they were.
Beneath the redness a fiery yellow began to glow, rising up through the redness, rising up through the fumes, pouring a fierce light over the computer and the men. They seemed to dissolve in that light, as if they'd been dropped into boiling acid.
The light grew brighter, and Blade saw that the booth was gone from around the chair, and then the chair was gone from under him. He was alone, seated on nothingness in the middle of raw yellow fire that should have burned but did not.
He was still alone when the yellow fire faded slowly away into blackness and the blackness swallowed him up and blanked out all his senses.
Chapter 2
Richard Blade awoke slowly, with his head throbbing as usual. The sun was out-he could feel it on his skin. So he lay quietly on his back, his eyes closed against the light, while the headache faded and all his other senses built up a picture of the world around him.
There was the sun. There was a definite breeze, warm but with a sort of faint undertone of damp coolness. It felt very much like the breeze on an English spring day. There were bushes around him and trees overhead, their leaves rustling in the breeze. There were flowers blooming close enough for their scents to reach Blade. He recognized roses and half a dozen others, all surprisingly familiar. Under him, prickling gently against his bare skin, was short, thick grass, still slightly damp from a night's dew. It felt trimmed as close and as neatly as any lawn or park.
He could hear the faint drone of insects, the fainter chirps of birds, far away and fainter still the barking of a dog. Still farther away was a subdued murmuring and muttering. If Blade had been in England, he would have called it heavy traffic on a road several miles away.
The headache was fading now. Blade sat up, shaded his eyes to keep from getting the full blast of the sun, and opened them.
He was between two rows of bushes, with trees arching overhead to form almost a canopy. Through that canopy he could see cotton-puff clouds ambling across a deep blue and faintly hazy sky. On a branch seemingly close enough to touch, a bird perched. It was the size and shape of an English robin, except that its breast was a genuine crimson rather than a reddish orange. As he watched, it sprang into the air. He noticed that its outspread wings had pale, almost whitish tips.
The grass under him was definitely a lawn-recently mowed, too. He picked up a handful of clippings and let them sift through his fingers and scatter on the breeze. The ground under the bushes was freshly weeded, too. This was obviously a park or some rather extensive and well-kept estate.
That suggested a fairly respectable civilization. Blade was pleased. He could survive anywhere, among any kind of people. He had done so many times in the past, and no doubt would do so many times in the future, until either his luck ran out for good or until someone else was chosen to go off into Dimension X. Yet he was still a good deal more comfortable among people who took baths, wrote and read books, and were not in the habit of killing strangers on sight.
Blade stood up and started walking along the strip of grass between the two rows of bushes. He would do well to get out of this park or estate and get to some place where he could find some clothes. After that it would be safe to start exploring and trying to meet people. Civilized Dimensions had at least one disadvantage. They had proper authorities, and those proper authorities often disapproved of people wandering around dressed as Blade was, in nothing at all.
Blade quickly saw that a fence ran across the far end of the grass strip, completely blocking his exit. He moved on, noticing that the well-trimmed bushes on either side of him looked remarkably like an English privet hedge, although the berries were pale blue rather than grayish white.
Blade came up to the fence. It was a plain undecorated piece of work, wrought iron painted fiat black. Peering around the hedges, he could see the fence stretching away in either direction. It looked like a hundred other fences be had seen in similar parks and estates in Home Dimension. Nothing surprising or unusual about it at all.
On the other side of the fence was a white gravel path, neatly raked and weeded, also stretching off in either direction as far as Blade could see. He could see quite a distance, and all he could see appeared to be more park, more trees, more pruned bushes, flowerbeds, and neatly mowed lawns. Very far away he thought he could make out an occasional quick-moving splash of color and hear the murmur that sounded like traffic noises.
On the other side of the path was something just as familiar as all the rest. In fact, it was so familiar that Blade began to find it vaguely disturbing. It was a white porcelain drinking fountain with brass fittings, mounted on a plain concrete base. It was thoroughly twentieth century British, except that this wasn't twentieth century Britain.
Or was it? Blade found a thought slowly forming in his mind. It was not vague at all, but it was even more disturbing than the drinking fountain.
Was he still in Home Dimension, even in England? Had the computer finally misfired, merely shifting him a few miles sideways in space and perhaps a few months forward or backward in time? Was he in a park in the suburb of London, and were those distant murmurings that sounded like traffic noises exactly that?
It was too soon to call that the explanation. There was that robin that wasn't quite a robin, that privet hedge that wasn't quite a privet. Also, there was no sound of air traffic overhead, neither jets nor light planes nor helicopters.
True, all of this. But Blade had to admit that birds and shrubs weren't things he knew very well. Both the «robin» and the «privet» could be something perfectly common and respectable that he simply didn't recognize. As for the air traffic-well, there were undoubtedly parks even in the suburbs of London a good distance from any air traffic lanes. The same thing would be even truer of other towns and cities in southern England.
On the whole, Blade rather hoped that he wasn't still in England. The public authorities there definitely frowned on people wandering around naked in public. Unless he was very lucky in the matter of finding clothes, he would be arrested sooner or later. Then there would have to be identifications and explanations made, somehow, preferably without involving J or anybody else even remotely connected with the Project. A hundred different things could go wrong, possibly reviving the whole «mystery hero» problem or even breaching the security of Project Dimension X.
There were no spikes on top of the fence. Blade put both hands on the upper crossbar and got ready to swing himself over it. He wanted to inspect that drinking fountain, and, if it was as authentic as it looked, get a drink of water from it. Then he would be on his way. The park seemed fairly deserted-it was probably a weekday. But somebody was bound to wander by sooner or later.