Things could have been worse, of course. A year ago Leighton would have had to leave all the problems he couldn't tackle on his desk calculator to pile up until the main machine was back on line. That was when the whole top-secret Project Dimension X was concentrated in the complex two hundred feet below the Tower of London. Now things were different, although Leighton wasn't sure they were better.

As the Project grew, the complex got more crowded. The obvious solution was to move some of the Project's work aboveground.

Leighton himself thought this was a good idea. So did J, the quiet gray-haired spymaster in charge of the Project's security. So did Richard Blade, in many ways the most important man of the three. Years after one of Leighton's computer experiments led to the discovery of travel into alternate Dimensions, Richard Blade was still the only living man who could make these dangerous journeys and return alive and healthy.

When Leighton, J, and Richard Blade all agreed on doing something for Project Dimension X, it was as good as done. It took only a few days to find a building for sale in a suburb of London, and only a few weeks to move a good part of the Project into it. They were careful to move only those parts of the Project which wouldn't give away much of the Dimension X secret, although security precautions were as rigid as ever.

Complex Two still needed a great deal of computer capacity. The master computer could not have any terminals outside the underground Complex One without compromising its security. So the new building needed hardware of its own. After a few hundred thousand more pounds were pried loose from the secret funds, Complex Two got its own computer. If Lord Leighton was willing to commute back and forth between the complexes, he could now play with computers twenty-four hours a day.