The elevator arrived with a rush.

The door slid open. J and Blade entered. The elevator dropped through two hundred feet of solid bedrock with a speed J had never quite gotten used to, then slowed to a stop. They stood in silence until the heavy bronze door hissed open.

They stepped out into a brilliantly lighted foyer, bare except for a desk and two chairs freshly painted an uninspiring olive drab.

«Where's Lord Leighton?» Blade wondered aloud.

«I fancy he's waiting for us in the computer area,» said J.

Blade moved through the foyer with a catlike lightness that belied his powerful two-hundred-and-ten-pound mass of rock-hard muscle and bone.

They walked briskly through long corridors, passing closed doors, closed doors and more closed doors. J could hear muffled voices behind the doors, the clatter of typewriters, the whir of spinning computer tapes, but within the hallways not a soul was to be seen. No human guards were needed. Electronic sensors followed their every step, checking and rechecking that they were who they were supposed to be, and were going where they were supposed to go. As long as the sensors functioned, no stranger could enter these passages without setting off an alarm, no matter how careful he was.

At the end of the final passage, a massive door slid open automatically for them and they entered the central computer area. J glanced around and frowned.

In these rooms surrounding the heart of the whole project J was accustomed to seeing a crew of technicians hard at work, but now there was nobody here. In fact the computers themselves had changed. They had been changing slowly over a period of time, but this was the first time J had really noticed.