At least Blade knew that he would not have too much trouble finding another congenial woman after he returned from Dimension X, even if Cynthia had given him the brush-off. For Blade, this was simply recognizing a fact. He was inevitably attractive to women. And why not? Six feet plus, two hundred and ten pounds of athletic Englishman, pushing forty but looking ten years younger, radiating charm, vitality, and virility. Not a fluent talker, but not tongue-tied either. And with the indefinable but definite glamor that hangs around a man who always seems to be on the move, whose scars suggest an active and even dangerous life, but who never talks about what he does. To almost all who knew him, Blade's profession was a mystery.

He hoped it would stay that way, considering what it really was. Tomorrow morning Blade would go to the Tower of London. A secret elevator would carry him two hundred feet down to an equally secret underground complex that housed the most advanced computers in the world. These computers were the brainchildren of Lord Leighton, England's most brilliant and most irascible scientist. Blade's brain would be directly linked to these computers.

And then he would be hurled, as naked as the day he was born, into another dimension, where anything and everything might happen. Animals that walked like men, savage warriors, decadent super-civilizations, even nonhuman intelligences from outer space-he had met them all. And so far he had survived each meeting. Thirteen times, to be exact.

Not only natural gifts, but training and experience had kept him alive. He had been one of the top agents for the secret intelligence agency MI6 for the better part of twenty years. He had learned to be a professional survivor long before Lord Leighton had even dreamed of the computer that made the Dimension X Project possible.