Blade had never been very good at sitting and waiting. He had forced himself to have some tolerance for it; otherwise he wouldn't have lasted very long as an agent. But he knew that he would always be happier in the middle of the action. He would have a real problem of adjustment the day-a good many years off, the doctors told him-when declining physical powers would force him to the sidelines for good.

Blade spent the next twenty-four hours in no particularly useful way. He scrounged dinner, reducing the kitchen to chaos again. He dipped into books from his increasingly well stocked shelves, slept, and scrounged breakfast.

It was a damp, chilly morning, the kind that makes one wonder whether spring is real or just a story to encourage children, when Blade climbed into a taxi and gave the driver directions for the Tower of London. He took no equipment, because so far he had arrived in each new dimension naked as the day he was born. Now if Lord Leighton really wanted to do something useful, Blade thought, he could put his mind to work on a method for sending some gear through the computer. The computer had dropped Blade smack in the middle of battles more than once, and he would much rather have something besides his sheer strength and unarmed combat skills to rely on in a situation like that. A gun would be risky, of course. The current passing through his body might affect the cartridges. But a survival suit with built-in flotation and fragmentation protection, a couple of fighting knives, some emergency rations. . Blade went on mentally listing the items for an ideal Dimension X survival kit and became so involved in the task that the driver had to announce their arrival at the tower three times before Blade heard him.