Chapter Two

Lord Leighton's message caught up with Blade the next afternoon at the Sailor's Head Tavern in Folkestone. On all his Channel trips with Annie the eighteenth-century pub on the waterfront had been Blade's message drop. The pubkeeper, a retired Royal Navy petty officer, knew him well and could be trusted to keep his mouth shut about Blade's comings and goings. Besides a discreet landlord, the Sailor's Head also had good beer.

It was over a glass of that beer that Blade read the message. Simple, straightforward, familiar. As he read it, his senses seemed to sharpen until everything in the room seemed to have extra force and vividness-the smells of beer and tobacco and lemon-scented floor cleanser, the sounds of glasses clinking and darts plunking into the board at the back of the room, the stray gleams of watery sunlight wandering in through the windows and striking fire from the copper trays hanging above the bar.

He was going into Dimension X again, and this might be the last time he'd ever see any of these familiar English sights: So far he had always returned, often battered and bruised and lame, but there was always the possibility of something going wrong with either the computer or his own skills. He might be trapped; he might be killed. The lust for adventure was strong in him, but as he looked around the pub, it occurred to him that his Dimension X travels might be too much of a good thing. Then he paid his bill and went outside to where his MG was parked, his equipment already in it. Annie was on her way back to London, so there were no good-byes to be said before he fired up the engine and trundled the little sports car onto the motorway for London.

During his absence the cleaning lady had whirled through Blade's West End apartment like an orderly hurricane. All the carefully cultivated clutter of his bachelor life had been swept away and rearranged in appropriate places-or at least what Mrs. Griggs thought were appropriate places. Blade could not help laughing at the sight. The guerrilla warfare between bachelors and their cleaning ladies had been raging long before he was born and would be going on long after he was dead. Undoubtedly, it would go on until cleaning ladies became reconciled to clutter or bachelors became tidy-neither of which would happen this side of the Day of Judgment.

It was certainly more than silly to worry about Mrs. Griggs' peculiarities, when within another twenty-four hours he was going to-well, what was the correct word for moving into Dimension X? Lord Leighton himself was still trying to pin down the exact relationship of Dimension X to Home Dimension. Were the two dimensions completely parallel. . with only the state of Blade's brain and therefore of his senses standing between them? Or were they merely parallel in some ways and divergent in others, each with some sort of independent continuity? Since their times could get out of phase, Blade suspected the latter. Lord Leighton also suspected the latter and had nearly had kittens about it more than once. However, he had also adjusted the computer so that Dimension X time and Home Dimension time stayed in phase.

In fact, Project Dimension X was developing all sorts of complications that not even Lord Leighton had anticipated the first time he plugged Blade's brain into what now seemed like a primitive and remote ancestor of the computer around which the project centered. There was a search for other suitable men who could survive the trip into Dimension X. . a search so far unsuccessful, although J was making discreet inquiries of American intelligence agencies, the prime minister himself, the British intelligence services, and the armed forces. The stresses of passing into Dimension X were enormous, and once there, a man also had to have the wits, reflexes, and muscles to cope with an environment that might threaten him with anything from Stone Age ape-men to nonhumans from interstellar space.

One other man had passed into Dimension X, to be sure, and had even survived there-until he encountered Blade. But that one man had been Blade's Russian Doppelganger, a carefully trained and carefully chosen twin of Blade himself, created by the KGB. Now he lay dead in Sarma. Finding another twin for Blade among the ranks of the free world's trained soldiers and agents was improbable-and creating one was unacceptable. They would just have to keep on searching and hope for good luck.

There was also a project for finding a way of repeating trips into one dimension, so that it could be explored thoroughly. Now they could only fire Blade off more or less at random. Such a development would also mean that materials could be brought back from Dimension X in large quantities instead of tantalizingly meager samples that turned the scientists assigned to analyzing them green with envy. This had only been done once before, when they had been able to send Blade after his Russian twin into the strange intrigue-riddled world of Sarma. Lord Leighton in particular was consumed by a passion to send Blade back into the world of the Ice Dragons to resume contact with the alien Menel. The prime minister, however, was consumed with an equal passion not to go on pouring out money on Leighton's whims, money that would sooner or later have to be accounted for to Parliament. The Controlled-Return Subproject had finally gone through, but Leighton was predicting that at the present rate of nonprogress, ten years might go by before any major breakthroughs.

And there were other subprojects by the handful, all of them the result of bees that had buzzed into Lord Leighton's white-thatched bonnet some time in the past and given him ideas for new avenues to explore. Not surprisingly, this constant stream of requests for funds to underwrite Lord Leighton's new notions gave the prime minister screaming fits, and constant guerrilla warfare rumbled and muttered between the two men.

All this took place far above Blade's head, much to his relief, and did not affect his own role in the project one way or the other. Of course, if some other man thought equal to the trip turned up, he might have a rest-or possibly a partner. But for the time being, his part in each mission began when he presented himself at the Tower of London and descended to the underground complex to be prepared for his excursion. Which was fine with him-he was an adventurer by temperament. He found the dangers of Dimension X, which he could meet by his own resources of strength and skill, more tolerable than he would have ever found the strain of sitting where Leighton sat, where all his hopes and dreams would be more or less at the mercy of the whims of several million pounds' worth of electronic wizardry. Blade had never been very good at sitting and waiting. He had forced himself to have some tolerance for it; otherwise he wouldn't have lasted very long as an agent. But he knew that he would always be happier in the middle of the action. He would have a real problem of adjustment the day-a good many years off, the doctors told him-when declining physical powers would force him to the sidelines for good.

Blade spent the next twenty-four hours in no particularly useful way. He scrounged dinner, reducing the kitchen to chaos again. He dipped into books from his increasingly well stocked shelves, slept, and scrounged breakfast.

It was a damp, chilly morning, the kind that makes one wonder whether spring is real or just a story to encourage children, when Blade climbed into a taxi and gave the driver directions for the Tower of London. He took no equipment, because so far he had arrived in each new dimension naked as the day he was born. Now if Lord Leighton really wanted to do something useful, Blade thought, he could put his mind to work on a method for sending some gear through the computer. The computer had dropped Blade smack in the middle of battles more than once, and he would much rather have something besides his sheer strength and unarmed combat skills to rely on in a situation like that. A gun would be risky, of course. The current passing through his body might affect the cartridges. But a survival suit with built-in flotation and fragmentation protection, a couple of fighting knives, some emergency rations. . Blade went on mentally listing the items for an ideal Dimension X survival kit and became so involved in the task that the driver had to announce their arrival at the tower three times before Blade heard him.