He was tanned and in better condition than usual, if that were possible. This was the result of a month spent diving for Greek vases off Smyrna, varied with nights ashore in Turkish bars, sipping good raki and watching the belly dancers. And before that there had been a month at his Cornish cottage. That month had been just as pleasant but not quite as relaxing. A lovely and charming young German exchange student had kept him agreeably busy for a good part of that month. Two pleasant months, and now it was time to earn his next spell of leave.

He wondered where he would end up this time. The variety had already been so incredible that he wondered if Dimension X had anything left that could really surprise him. Of course landing in a polar ocean, or in the crater of an active volcano would be surprising. Very surprising. But he wouldn't live long enough in either case to appreciate the surprise. Or he might land in a dimension with no human inhabitants. That hadn't happened yet either. But that would not be terribly interesting. In fact his main survival problem in that case would be not dying of boredom before the computer brought him home.

He shrugged. He was trying to predict the unpredictable and measure the infinite. He would be dead or retired long before Dimension X ran out of surprises. In fact a thousand men could make regular trips into Dimension X for a century without exhausting its possibilities, or so Lord Leighton said. And that was something Blade rather liked. He knew he liked to be always on the move in search of something new. So here he was, involved in a project that handed him on a silver platter as much adventure and as much novelty as any human being could very well cope with. He was content. Not complacent or self-satisfied, but content. He knew he had out of life nearly everything he could reasonably ask.