The sky was gray, and a chilly wind blew rain through empty windows, turning the dust on the floor into mud. The tall man standing by the doorway looked out briefly at the foul weather, then shrugged and walked back into the room.

The man was not only tall. He was also heavily built, with a broad chest and muscle-corded arms and legs to match. He still moved with a light step which hinted at speed and coordination as well as sheer muscle. His hair was black, and his skin was deeply tanned under the dirt. His skin also showed marks and ridges which could only be the scars of painful wounds. He was naked except for a loinguard which gleamed in the dim light with a silvery metallic sheen, but in spite of the breeze he was not shivering.

The man's name was Richard Blade. He was probably the only man in any world who'd traveled into more than thirty different Dimensions, fought deadly battles in all of them, and always returned alive.

Richard Blade didn't worry anymore about whether each Dimension he visited could really be called a complete «world.» One Dimension certainly reached out many light-years to the stars, but that didn't mean they all did. In some Dimensions he'd never seen more than an area smaller than his native England. Neither made much difference to his chances of coming back alive. After a while he left the question of the Dimension's size more and more to Lord Leighton, the scientist who'd opened the road to new Dimensions. As long as he came back in one piece, Richard Blade, who was essentially a practical man, was content. Before he started traveling among the Dimensions, he was a field operative for the secret British intelligence agency MI6A.

Lord Leighton was quite a different proposition. Before he discovered the road to new Dimensions, he'd already had a long career as one of Britain's most brilliant scientists. He was born a hunchback, and polio twisted his legs when he was a child, but there was nothing wrong with his mind. Even his best friends would admit that there was a great deal wrong with his manners, which were abominable, but even his worst enemies would admit that his mind was a precision instrument of extraordinary brilliance.