«Well, with the election coming up the man must have a lot on his mind.»

«To be sure.» That was one of the reasons J had not only made Richard Blade one of MI6's top agents, but also loved him like a son. Richard could always guess what the other person might be doing, and why. It was a social asset at home and a survival skill in the field. It could help a man charm a hostess at a Mayfair cocktail party and outwit a Russian SMERSH agent in the mountains of Czechoslovakia. Blade had done both.

«In any case,» J continued, «I'd like you to meet me for lunch at my club. Say noon tomorrow. Lord Leighton will be there also.»

«I'll be there, sir.»

«Fine, Richard, fine.»

J shut off the radio-telephone, started the car, and wheeled the Rover down the driveway and out through the front gate. The roof of the big sprawling eighteenth century house shone in the sun after the morning's rain. J grinned. The young earl who now ruled that house might scoff at patriotism and «doing his bit for England,» but he had just done it in spite of himself. He had given Project Dimension X something it had been seeking for quite some time.

Actually, Project Dimension X had been seeking quite a number of different and sometimes incompatible things for quite a long time. Sometimes the Project reminded J of a gigantic fox-hunt over a mist-shrouded and treacherous field, with only a dozen or so hunters and at least twenty foxes. You couldn't hope to catch all of the beasts, but you could at least try chivying them all along in more or less the same direction.

But there was no doubt that helping Project Dimension X was helping England. In a nutshell, the Project involved sending a man into a succession of alternate dimensions, to survive or die. Hopefully he would survive and explore the dimension. And if it had resources or techniques or devices unknown in home dimension, he would bring them back to England with him.