Ten million pounds, almost every penny of it out of the British taxpayer's pocket, as the prime minister kept reminding Lord Leighton. And as the P.M. commented even more frequently, what had that investment produced? Blade brought something back from every trip, of course. From Zunga he had returned with a ruby the size of a man's fist on a gold chain around his neck. From the land of the Ice Dragons he had returned with the knowledge that somewhere else in the universe there was a non-human intelligent race. But all the wealth, all the knowledge, was in little bits and pieces. There was nothing that the P.M. could show to an inquisitive Parliament to justify those millions of pounds-not yet. As the taxi carried him toward the Tower, Blade was saying to himself, «Perhaps this is the moment of the breakthrough.» He had said it to himself the last half-dozen times, and he had been disappointed the last half-dozen times. But sooner or later luck would run his way-and the Project's, and England's.
Unless it ran out for him? That was possible. He was the only man in the Free World who had gone into Dimension X and returned alive and sane. And there were more times than he cared to remember when he had come closer than he liked to think to not coming back. The prime minister and J had both been sweating blood for the better part of two years on a project to find other men capable of going where Blade had gone. So far all they had was a mass of statistics and not a single man who could make the trip with any real prospect of coming back alive and sane. If they had turned up anyone else, Blade knew he would not be in the taxi on his way to the Tower and the thirteenth trip into Dimension X. Thirteenth? He couldn't help wondering if there would be any notable change in his luck this time.