For a while Leighton nearly did this. His eighty-odd years, his hunchback, and his polio-twisted legs didn't slow him down very much. They didn't slow down his mind at all. It was as quick and fertile as ever, devouring facts and jumping ahead to bold conclusions the same way it had for nearly sixty years. It worked that way when Leighton sat down to consider the problem of Blade's return from Dimension X.

Every time Blade went into Dimension X, he was wired into the master computer so that its electronic mind and his human one were linked. Leighton always took great care to make that link as complete and predictable as possible, and the KALI capsule, which encased Blade's body so that almost every inch of his skin was in contact with wire electrodes, had been a great success. But some of Leighton's experiments along those lines had been less than successful. He still shuddered at the memory of the automated KALI computer, which had unleashed the Ngaa monster on the world. Blade had nearly been killed, more than thirty other people had died, and both the Project and the whole world had been put in a deadly danger, from which Blade had to save them at the risk of his life.

Still, Blade's departure for Dimension X was now pretty much a matter of routine. His return from Dimension X, on the other hand, followed no pattern Leighton could discover. Somehow the computer reached out across space, time, and Dimension to link itself with Blade's mind and twist it back into its normal patterns, so that he once again saw and heard and moved through Home Dimension England. What was more, the computer almost always waited until Blade's work in Dimension X was completed. It seemed as if Blade and the computer remained linked in some way after Blade's departure.