That was why he was aboard her motorsailer this spring day. Blade had all the assets needed to make him attractive to women. Good looks, an athletic body well over six feet tall, charm, apparent wealth, and (as those women who carried matters far enough discovered) abounding virility. There were always women around him, and among them were always a good many who could not help imagining themselves as Mrs. Blade.

Which was impossible. Richard Blade was not merely the imposing, middle-aged man-about-town he seemed. In reality he was the best secret agent the intelligence office MI6 had ever possessed. He had survived the better part of twenty years of the deadliest sort of fieldwork. And more than fieldwork.

What often seemed like half a lifetime ago, Britain's leading computer expert, Lord Leighton, had conducted an experiment directly linking a man's mind to his latest computer. That man had been Blade. With his combined qualities of mind and body, he had been the perfect-well, call it the perfect guinea pig.

And now he was still a guinea pig. The computer had hurled Blade straight into another dimension with a Dark Ages level of civilization. Only those qualities of mind and body that had led to his selection in the first place kept Blade alive to return to his own dimension. Those same qualities had kept him alive-at times by the narrowest of margins-during nine more trips into nine different dimensions, or at least nine different aspects of what Lord Leighton called Dimension X.

Project Dimension X had been launched the moment Blade returned from his first trip. The value to England of being able to penetrate and explore other dimensions and bring back their wealth or knowledge was obvious. Blade's superior, the man called J, who headed MI6, had reluctantly parted with his best agent. The prime minister himself had funneled generous support in money and trained people to the project. But the key man in the project was still Blade himself. He was still the only man in England able to travel into Dimension X and return alive and sane.