Leighton gave Blade a gnome's smile. «No, but I wouldn't have minded if they had. All the automatic elements worked perfectly. It was the human element that failed. And people still ask me why I love computers!»

Blade's face and voice hardened. «Perhaps. But I seem to recall that it wasn't a human being who released the Ngaa in this Dimension.»

Leighton's eyes met Blade's-and then the scientist looked away. «Richard, that also was ultimately human error. My error. The KALI computer made only those mistakes I allowed it to make, in my-ah, misplaced-confidence that it was completely self-correcting.»

Blade's face softened again, and he felt a sudden genuine warmth toward Leighton. The old man looked like a cheap horror-movie version of the mad scientist, who will cheerfully risk destroying the world to prove one of his theories. He wasn't. His reaction to the one time he'd actually come close to doing this proved it.

Not that Leighton wasn't as brilliant and eccentric as any man in the history of science. Even his worst enemies didn't deny the brilliance, and his best friends admitted he was eccentric to the point of being maddening. His brilliance had conceived a computer far ahead of anything in existence at the time, and his eccentricity led to the idea of linking it with a human mind. He hoped the resulting combination of human flexibility and machine capacity would produce a super-mind.

For the subject of the experiment he chose Richard Blade, a top field agent for the secret intelligence agency MI6A. Blade was one of the finest combinations of sound mind and sound body in the world, and Leighton expected notable results.

He got them. The computer hurled Blade, mind and body alike, into an alternate reality. They called it Dimension X when he came back to tell them about it. The name was still appropriate, because after years of work, millions of pounds, and many more trips into Dimension X, there were still more questions about it than answers. They couldn't even be sure that all the strange places Blade went to had a distinct physical existence. Could they simply be images his computer-distorted senses fed into his brain?