He'd arrived at the Tower of London a few minutes early, then waited under the hard eyes of the Special Branch men who guarded the entrance to the Project. Eventually J arrived, as erect and ageless as ever, looking like a retired civil servant rather than one of the great spymasters of modern times. He'd chosen Blade straight out of Oxford for MI6A. He still headed the agency, but now he was also chief of security for Project Dimension X. He was about the best qualified man for the job, and it also let him keep a watchful eye out for Blade, who was the closest thing to a son he'd ever known.

The two men rode down in the elevator to the Project's complex buried two hundred feet underground. Then they took the walk down the long gleaming corridor to the computer rooms. By now Blade could have walked the corridor blindfolded. As they passed the last of the electronic sentinels which monitored the corridor for intruders, J turned to Blade. «Leighton called me last night, Blade. Said he's got a surprise for us.»

Blade managed to restrain his enthusiasm. A «surprise» from Lord Leighton could be almost anything. It was likely to be a new development the scientist thought he or J would oppose if they knew about it too far in advance. Lord Leighton's creativity and enthusiasm sometimes ran ahead of his good judgment.

«Did he say anything else?»

J nodded. «He said it had to do with the Englor Alloy #2.»

That was somewhat more encouraging. In one Dimension Blade found a country called Englor, strangely like Home Dimension England in many ways, locked in a deadly struggle with an opponent just as strangely like the Soviet Union. Englor's airplanes were built of alloys far beyond anything in Home Dimension, and Blade brought back formulas and samples for several of them.

It turned out that the most powerful electrical field imaginable would flow through an object made of Alloy #2 from Englor as if it weren't there. When Blade traveled into Dimension X, he was surrounded by a strong electrical field and couldn't wear anything which might disrupt its flow. With equipment made of Alloy #2, he might hope to reach Dimension X in something more than his bare skin, armed with something more than his bare hands!