A taxi took him to the Tower of London through a chill, gray, unremarkable winter day. And the expressions of the Special Branch men guarding the entrance to the complex were as chill as the weather. Was that look something they were trained to assume, or did it come naturally after one had been a Special Branch operative long enough?

In the complex itself, two hundred feet below, the gloomy weather and the gloomy Special Branch men seemed like a bad dream. Light gleamed off polished floors and walls, and the air was warm. All the guarding was done by invisible electronic sentinels, some of them Lord Leighton's own inventions, others from the Ministry of Defense's bag of tricks. And J was waiting for Blade when the elevator door slid open, to walk with him down the corridor to the computers.

Blade looked more closely than usual at J as they walked side by side. If J was aging at all, he was doing so as imperturbably as he did everything else. Perhaps he had acquired a few more wrinkles in the years since Project Dimension X had begun. Certainly some of his still thick gray hair had definitely begun to turn white. But J still looked more like an aging senior bureaucrat in the Ministry of Agriculture or something equally prosaic than what he was-one of the most experienced and respected spymasters in the world, with a career of achievement going all the way back to World War I.

Certainly nothing showed in J's voice as he chatted with Blade. «Lord Leighton says we're going to be reverting to the old procedure this time.»

«No survival kit?»

«Quite right. He thinks your-'materializing'-in Dimension X well above ground level the last time wasn't an accident. He thinks the extra mass of the survival kit wasn't quite compensated for by the adjustments to the computer, so you went through in an unbalanced state. Physically, that is.»

Blade nodded. «And he's worried that the next time I might pop through into Dimension X a hundred feet up, instead of just thirty?»