Even without the steady echoes of Blade's footsteps, the corridor wasn't entirely quiet. There was the distant hum of air-conditioners, the click of typewriters, muffled hints of human voices, and other sounds that might have been anything. The corridor itself was echoing, empty, and sterile, but there was life and activity on either side of it.

So much for seeing the corridor through a stranger's eyes. Blade turned off his imagination and walked faster. He enjoyed these mental exercises, and was good at them. When he'd been at Oxford a teacher said he would make at least a respectable novelist, though probably not a great one.

Blade hadn't become a novelist, but when he'd left Oxford he'd entered a profession where a good imagination was almost as important. He became a field agent for the secret intelligence agency MI6A. In fact, he was hand-picked by its chief, the graying man known only as J. J saw a particularly promising young man, and he was right. Blade became one of the agency's best men, carrying out missions few others could have handled and surviving dangers that would have killed practically anyone else.

One reason for his success and survival was that imagination of his. More easily than most, he could put himself into the mind of an enemy, thinking of what the man might do, sometimes before the enemy thought of it himself: This kind of imagination didn't win him any prizes, but it saved his life a good many times.

Then a brilliant, eccentric scientist named Lord Leighton conceived the idea of linking a powerful human mind with an even more powerful computer. He wasn't exactly sure what this would produce, but he hoped it would be something more powerful and complete than either the computer or the man.

He chose Richard Blade for the experiment, because he needed a powerful mind in a superbly fit body and Blade had both. The computer went to work on Blade's mind-and suddenly Blade was whirled off across nowhere into an unknown world they called Dimension X.