Blade threw in the clutch and the MG went jolting down the church driveway. He shook his head in weary amusement. He almost filled the classic picture of «the man who has everything.» He even had the best of all imaginable jobs, for Blade preferred to live on the frontiers of danger. Dimension X gave him all the opportunities for that any man could ask for.
But he had never found a woman who could or would live out there on the frontiers with him, or at least understand what drove him out there. So he did not have everything, and sometimes it hurt.
Chapter 2
The elevator door slid silently open, and Richard Blade stepped out into the corridor beyond it. He was two hundred feet below the Tower of London, in the overgrowing complex that housed most of Project Dimension X. At the end of that corridor stood Lord Leighton's computer. In less than half an hour that computer would be hammering its complex pulses into Blade's brain, twisting his perceptions so that for him reality itself would also be twisted.
When it untwisted itself again, he would be seeing Dimension X.
Blade strode down the apparently empty corridor, listening to the echo of his footsteps from the tile floors and the whir of machinery behind metal doors. There was no sound from the all-seeing, unsleeping electronic sentinels that kept watch on every inch of the corridor.
He found that he felt his usual mixture of tension and anticipation as the time of his next journey came closer. It was impossible for even a man as used to danger as Blade to ignore the fact that each trip was a leap into the unknown. So far there was no way of controlling or even predicting where he would land. The one thing that was certain was that Richard Blade was the only living man who could return from Dimension X both alive and sane.