One day, from one dimension, Richard Blade would not return to England. His body would lie in the soil of an unimaginably distant land. The project itself would come to a grinding halt until they found someone else equally tough. Lord Leighton would curse the delay and the Prime Minister would curse the loss of a man valuable to England. The head of MI6, the aging spymaster known as J, would mourn Blade as he would have mourned the son he never had.

But Blade was also palled with anticipation. If each dimension had unknown dangers, it also held unknown adventures, challenges, opportunities. He could and did live the way he could live best-by his own wits, his own skills, his own strength. He did not have to worry about women who wanted stay-at-home husbands. He could say what he wanted, to whom he wanted, as he had to, without any damned Official Secrets Act mucking up the works! He was a free man in Dimension X, and that was good for him and often for the people he traveled among. Everywhere he went, Blade left marks of his passage. More often than not what he left behind was better than what had been there before.

J once referred to that sort of thing as «interdimensional social work.» But the old man wasn't nearly as cynical as he sounded. That was just a mannerism, picked up during too many years of sending men to their deaths and playing deadly games. J had seen too much to really sneer at anything or anyone that helped make any world a little less grim and harsh for even a few people.

As though Blade's thoughts had conjured him out of the floor. J appeared in the corridor ahead.

«Hello, Richard.»

«Good morning, sir. Lord Leighton on schedule?»

«Have you ever known him not to be?»

Blade shook his head and laughed. Lord Leighton was one of the greatest scientific minds alive, and also one of the greatest curmudgeons. All the skill he refused to use in getting along with his fellow human beings he put into getting along with computers. So computers that drove other men mad with frustration worked flawlessly for him.