Richard Blade had the habit of cultivating new physical skills whenever he had the time for it. Therefore it was not surprising that J's orders to report for a new Dimension X mission found him rock-climbing in Wales. He no longer needed to stay at the little cottage on the Dorset seashore, even while awaiting orders. A modified American two-way survival radio made it possible for MI6's powerful transmitter to reach him anywhere in the British Isles.

So between the intensive sessions of weapons training and unarmed combat, the casual women, the nights on the town, and the voracious reading, he piled climbing gear into the trunk of the MG and trundled off to northern Wales, to test himself against its crags and cliffs. He supposed this compulsion to test his body to the limit would pass someday. But although forty was looming on the horizon, he was still at the peak of his physical powers. The doctors attached to the Dimension X Project had assured him that he had many years, many more than most men, before his body would start to decline.

The doctors should certainly know. Each of the nine times he had returned from whatever dimension Lord Leighton's giant computers had hurled him into, he had been poked, prodded, monitored, X-rayed, and generally examined almost cell by cell. By now the doctors (among them several of England's most brilliant medical minds, working faithfully without any idea of what project Blade was working on) should know his physical makeup better than any man's had ever been known before. They also assured him that so far there were no signs of major damage from all the stresses his brain had endured from those same computers.

That was a good thing to consider, as the MG purred westward through gray stone, thatched-roof villages just coming awake, on the last lap to London. It was a clear brisk autumn morning, the sky marred only by the blur of smog over the great city itself, and the trees by the road were beginning to flame scarlet and orange.