Blade stretched his arms and legs to their limits and shadowboxed briefly, then did karate exercises until his head started complaining. He didn't want to lose water by working up an unnecessary sweat. He might not find a stream or pond for at least a couple of days.

Blade laughed. He'd come to take surviving under improbable conditions for granted, because the skills that made this possible were now so much a part of him that he seldom had to think about them. How would an observer have looked at him, casually marching as naked as Adam through something that didn't look much like the Garden of Eden?

How would he have looked to Zoe Cornwall, even if he'd been able to tell her how he made a living, instead of being gagged by the Official Secrets Act?

He'd met some women who had all the survival skills he had, and it was possible they might have been able to travel with him to other Dimensions, but Zoe hadn't been one of them. She was lovely and warm and intelligent, but definitely someone who could survive only in the heart of modern civilization.

Blade was different. He could survive on the fringes of civilization as a spy or far beyond it in Dimension X. In fact, he was more at home in such places. That was a big difference between Zoe and him. In the end, would it have been too big a difference for a happy marriage? Blade wondered.

Then he put the question firmly out of his mind. It was both depressing and supremely irrelevant. Zoe had died a grim, lonely death in a far Dimension, killed by the monstrous Ngaa, and Blade had never seriously contemplated marrying anyone else. By now, it was more likely than not that he'd die a bachelor. In the improbable event of his living long enough to retire from Project Dimension X, he'd be too old and set in his ways to make any woman a good husband.