There was only one thing Richard Blade ever did at the Tower of London. He descended two hundred feet below it to a secret laboratory complex, to be strapped into a chair in the heart of a gigantic computer, the most advanced in the world. Then «his lordship»-Lord Leighton, England's most brilliant scientist-pulled a red switch. And Richard Blade vanished from England, to reappear-somewhere else.

That «somewhere else» they called Dimension X.

They would go on calling it Dimension X until they knew more about it, which would be a very long time. But Richard Blade was definitely the farthest-traveling man in the world, because he had been into Dimension X time after time. Each time so far he had returned to England alive and sane. Every journey into Dimension X was a grim battle for survival, and sooner or later he was going to lose one of those battles.

But Richard Blade believed that he owed England his best, everything his superb mind and body together could give. He had believed that when he was one of J's best agents in the secret intelligence agency MI6. He had gone on believing it when he became the only man in the world to travel into Dimension X and return safely.

Chapter 2

Richard Blade was walking along the main corridor of the Project Dimension X complex below the Tower of London. J was walking beside him. The corridor stretched on ahead of the two men, apparently deserted and lifeless, with no ears to hear or eyes to. see anything the two men might do. But Blade knew that every step he took, every word he spoke, every gesture he made, was recorded by supersensitive electronic devices that scanned the corridor more intensively than a hundred human sentries could have done. The ability to travel to other dimensions was the most closely guarded secret in England, one that millions of pounds and a few lives had been spent to protect. Not even England's friends could be trusted with the secret of what Lord Leighton had done, and as for her enemies-