Finally, there was the Prime Minister. He sat very much in the background, accepting the miracle that was Project Dimension X, protecting it, financing it, helping it in a thousand and one absolutely essential ways without making any pretense of really understanding it. The Prime Minister was a politician, but he was also an honest man, and he was just as devoted to England as Blade, Lord Leighton, or J.

So they made a good team. They were an unlikely quartet of miracle workers. But they were also a successful one, in a deadly business where success was all that mattered.

«File Acorn» was this month's code word for another trip into Dimension X. Tomorrow at ten o'clock in the morning Blade would be far below the Tower of London, wired into Lord Leighton's mammoth computer, ready to be fired off into the unknown.

Blade's mind was so occupied with what would be happening next morning that he hardly noticed the helicopter's landing. He only came fully alert again when the sergeant tapped him on the shoulder.

«Mister Blade, sir-time for the next go-round.»

«Thanks, sergeant.»

Blade stood up and started shoving his equipment into its carrying bag. As the helicopter's rotors whined and whispered down into silence he jumped down onto the grass of the landing pad. At the far end of the runway the little high-winged jump plane was banking in for a landing. Sunlight sparked and glinted off its wings. The sun was fully up now, and the last traces of mist and dew were rapidly vanishing. It was going to be a beautiful day for jumping.

It was also going to be a day for keeping his mind on the job at hand, and not on what was going to happen tomorrow. It would be bloody silly for him to rack himself up doing something he had done sixty or seventy times!