Blade looked to one side of the console. The spectator's chair was still folded up into its niche in the wall. It didn't look as though J were going to make it down here in time. A pity, and J would regret it, but it couldn't be helped. The old man had always been busy when he was head of MI6 and Richard Blade was one of his crack agents. He was still busy, now that he worked with Project Dimension X. Things were always unexpectedly coming up to drag him away or chain him to his desk.

Blade turned his attention back to Lord Leighton in the exact moment the scientist's hand gripped the master switch. In a single, smooth motion, he drew it down to the bottom of the slot. Lights danced across the control panel in a continuous ripple of color, and pain swallowed up Richard Blade.

He'd felt pain before-wounds, torture, the pain that exploded and thundered in his head when it was time for him to return to England from Dimension X. Pain was never a friend and could never be one, but it was an old, familiar enemy. At least it had been familiar until now.

This pain was different. This was pain that gripped every part of his body from his scalp to his toes in white-hot pincers, rending and clawing, stripping away the flesh from the bones and tearing one bone from another. The pain blinded him, searing his eyes like molten metal. He couldn't look at himself, but he knew that if he did he would see flesh blistering and blackening and his blood boiling away before it could flow, his exposed bones cracking, his fingers and toes curling up like dead leaves and dropping to the floor. Lord Leighton would be staring in horror, torn out of his scientific detachment. Something had finally and fatally gone wrong. The computer wasn't sending Blade into Dimension X. It was slowly and agonizingly killing him.