Leighton extended a small dry claw and J shook hands with him. Toys? Was it proper for a man of Leighton's advanced age to go on prattling about toys?

Now Leighton was shaking hands with Blade, bubbling over with gargoyle enthusiasm. «I've solved it at last,» the little man boasted. «At least I think I have!»

«Solved what?» Blade was grinning, caught up in the scientist's excitement.

«Our most challenging problem of all. Before this we've never been able to send you to the same place twice, except by accident. If I'm right in my theories and calculations, I can now, once I've established the coordinates, send you again and again to the same destination. The replicator is ready!»

J raised a questioning eyebrow. «Really?» J had all but given up on this part of the project. From the beginning the replicator had been top priority, yet it had never come to fruition.

J did not become infected with Leighton's high spirits. Instead he looked around once again at all the new equipment, and his sense of impending disaster returned stronger than ever. New equipment? That meant untested equipment, hazardous experiments made more hazardous. Again and again Lord Leighton's demonic device had hurled Richard into other universes, other dimensions that no one before had dreamed existed. Somehow it had dragged him back each time, sometimes seconds before some particularly unpleasant death. The very names of the places he'd been rung with a shimmering occult sonority. Tharn! Sarma! Jedd! Patmos! Royth! Zunga!

Where were these places? In the distant past or the distant future? On planets that circle other suns in this galaxy or some other? In divergent or parallel time tracks, worlds that might have been? In universes that coexisted with this one, but which we could not see? J had no idea. With each trip the whole bloody business had become harder to understand. Even Lord Leighton, full of glib explanations at first, had gradually become as baffled as Blade and J.