«Hello, Cheeky,» J said.

The missile was a monkeylike creature, about two feet from its head to the base of a long tail. In place of fur, however, Cheeky had glossy blue feathers. In the dusty and decayed grandeur of the old house, he was an exotic splash of color.

He started pulling J's hair with one paw while he ran the other through his feathers, combing out dust and bits of plaster. J knew the hair-pulling was a gesture of affection, but still didn't want to wind up as bald as a tomato because the feather-monkey liked him so much.

Footsteps sounded behind the two men, and they turned to see Richard Blade striding toward them. No matter how tired or work-stained or casually dressed he was, Richard always strode, never just walked, unless he was too badly hurt to be on his feet at all. Standing six feet one, he moved his two hundred and ten pounds of muscle and bone with the deceptively easy grace of a tiger on the prowl-a grace that hid more than a tiger's deadliness.

Of course, if Richard Blade hadn't been as lethal as he was, he almost certainly would have been dead a long time ago, far away. Richard Blade was the other half of the secret of Dimension X-the only man whose qualities of mind and body let him travel time after time into a series of deadly and bizarre parallel worlds, the only living human being who could travel into Dimension X and return alive and sane.

Dimension X was discovered quite by accident, like so much else in the history of science. Lord Leighton was experimenting with hooking up Richard Blade's brain to what was then his most advanced computer, hoping to create a superior combination of human and electronic intelligence. Leighton had, hoped Blade's superior mental and physical abilities would be enhanced by connecting him to a computer, and that Blade would, in turn, improve the computers capabilities. Direct interaction, it was called, but instead of learning all the information stored in the computer, Blade was hurled off into the unknown, from which he returned only by the use of his wits and strength, with a good deal of luck thrown in.