Richard Blade awoke. He felt hard rock under him and small sharp stones jabbing into his bare skin. His head throbbed like a drum and a searing white light dazzled him. He closed his eyes and tried to relax. It had been a remarkably swift and simple transition into Dimension X.

He could not help laughing at that idea, although the laughter made his head hurt more. He supposed a transition into Dimension X could be «swift.» At least it had seemed to him only a few seconds in the nothingness that lay between Home Dimension and Dimension X. How long it really was; he couldn't even guess. Normal concepts of time and space had less than no meaning when a man was passing from an underground room below the Tower of London into some part of infinity.

What made no sense was to call any transition into Dimension X «simple.» To be sure, there hadn't been anything unusual about this trip. He wasn't carrying any equipment and Lord Leighton hadn't sprung some new and exotic experiment ripened in his brilliant, eccentric, and endlessly fertile mind.

Blade had simply smeared himself with smelly black grease to prevent electrical burns and sat down in a chair inside a glass booth in the center of the underground room. Lord Leighton bustled about, attaching scores of cobra-headed metal electrodes to Blade's body, wiring him into the huge computer whose gray crackle-finished consoles rose all around the booth. At last Leighton returned to stand by the main control panel. With the gray-haired man known only as J watching, Leighton pulled the red master switch. Current surged into him, the computer and his own train joined, and for the twenty-seventh time Richard Blade was flung away from the room, from Britain, from the world he knew, into-somewhere else.

Very simple, until you started thinking about all that had gone into preparing this series of events that had become almost a routine.