Leighton stepped up to the master control panel and scanned the lights playing across it. His hand came to rest lightly on the red master switch. Blade's eyes swung toward the switch and focused on it and the long thin hand above it. He saw J do the same.

Then the hand came down on the switch, the switch slid down in its slot, and Blade's world fell apart.

Every bit of the room shook and vibrated wildly, with a tremendous deafening roar. Wild lights in a dozen nightmarish eye-searing colors flashed and flared and ran up and down the walls, across the floor, around the booth.

Cold blue fire played around Blade, long flames jetting out and sparks trailing from his fingers and toes, the tips of his ears and nose, even from his penis.

The roar grew louder. Suddenly a giant spring seemed to uncoil beneath the chair and the booth, hurling them upward. Blade braced himself to be smashed to jelly against the rocky ceiling of the room. The rock seemed to melt away from the blue fire, like piles of sand washed away by an incoming wave. Blade roared up through the rock and into the gray daylight of London.

He climbed higher and the Tower of London dropped away below him, shrinking until it looked no larger than a model he'd played with as a child. In all directions London spread out below him. He could make out the dull gleam of the Thames. the spires of Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament, the dome of Saint. Paul's, the haze from factories farther out in the suburbs and farther down the river.

Still higher. Now the horizon began to curve, and he felt the cold of the stratosphere biting at his fingers and toes like a swarm of icy teeth. Somehow he felt no dizziness, no fading of vision, nothing to suggest that he was short of oxygen even in the thin air around him. It was as if the glass booth was a capsule that kept in the air but could not keep out the cold.

Higher still. He had seen a satellite picture of London once. The scene below was beginning to remind him of that picture. He could not be a hundred miles high over southeastern England. but he was seeing everything that he could have seen from up there. The part of his mind that was still capable of analysis told him that this was a new kind of twisting of his senses by the computer.

That moment of analysis seemed to trigger something in Blade's mind. With horrible suddenness all the remaining sensations of being naked a hundred miles above the earth crashed in on him. The cold was a flaming agony in every part of his body, until he wanted to shout out loud. He saw his skin turn snow white, as his sweat turned to ice crystals in a second.

He wanted to shout, but he couldn't. All the breath in his body was exploding out of his lungs. His blood was not freezing, but it was boiling. He felt heart and veins and arteries rupturing, felt pink foam bubbling up inside of him and saw it spew out of his mouth. The pink foam poured out, formed a great cloud around him, blotted out the star-filled blackness above and the earth below. As his vision faded so did all his other senses, until at last Richard Blade felt nothing at all and died alone in his chair high above the earth.

Chapter 3

Blade slowly drifted back to consciousness. He felt warm breezes on his skin, long damp crass under him, heard the rippling of water. He also felt his head pounding like a furiously beaten drum. He lay quietly until the pounding bean to fade away.

He felt surprised at being alive. The sensations of rising high above the Earth and then freezing and exploding in a vacuum had been much too vivid. He had never felt his own death with such gruesome realism.

But whatever he'd felt, he was still alive. He sat up and began to flex each finger and toe, each muscle of each arm and leg. He was not only alive, but apparently unhurt. As he flexed the fourth finger of his left hand, he felt a stiffness in it that wasn't a torn or bound muscle. He stared down at the finger. The ruby ring seemed to stare back at him.

Blade gave a shout of delight and sprang to his feet. He sprang up too fast for his still shaky coordination. His feet slipped on the wet grass and went out from under him. He sat down again even faster than he'd leaped up, jarring his headache into life again. He sat and turned his hand back and forth, watching the ruby glow like a hot coal as the sunlight struck it.

The ring weighed only a couple of ounces altogether, and the ruby only a couple of carats. Yet they represented something monumental and magnificent to Blade. After all the years of Project Dimension X, he had finally succeeded in bringing something from Home Dimension into Dimension X! It looked as if his guess about the ring had been right. He would certainly have something to tell Lord Leighton when he got back.

Blade realized that the headache was fading away again. Or perhaps he was just feeling too happy and triumphant about the ring to notice minor discomforts. One small ruby ring wasn't a survival kit, or a rifle, or even shorts and a pair of hiking boots. But it could be the start of better things. On his own, and out of his own imagination, he'd made a major breakthrough for the whole Project, and for England.

More cautiously than before, Blade rose to his feet and looked around him. He wanted to orient himself, and also find something to use as a weapon. The next time he tried to take something into Dimension X, he'd try his old commando knife. It had been around him even more than the ring, since he'd taken it on several missions for MI6. It would also be a bloody sight more useful than the ring!

Blade saw that he was standing in knee-high grass on the bank of a small river. The bank sloped downward to his left, then dropped vertically about a yard to the water. To his right the ground sloped gently upward. As the ground rose the grass gave way to clusters of bushes and small trees. Towering beyond them was a solid wall of trees that soared upward a hundred feet or more. Some of the real giants thrust their spreading, vine-tangled crowns up twice that high. The breeze blowing from the forest was warm and heavy with the odors of both growth and decay, of flowers, mold, and damp earth that had never seen the daylight.

There were no fallen branches in sight, at least none that weren't too small or too rotten to be useful. Blade walked over to a limber sapling, about six feet tall and three inches thick at the butt. Gripping it with both hands, he began bending it back and forth, putting all his strength and weight into each heave. The sapling was even tougher than he'd expected, but one by one the fibers of the wood parted. At last one tremendous heave snapped the last few, and the sapling came free in Blade's hands.

By the time he'd stripped off all the branches, he was sweating in the steamy heat and his hands were turning red and smelly with sap. He had his weapon, though. The stripped-down sapling would make a very respectable quarterstaff.

That would be good enough for the moment. Blade had been active in the medieval club at Oxford. Instead of rowing or tennis, he'd worked out with mace, broadsword, and other traditional weapons, including the quarterstaff. In fact, he'd become noted for his deadly skill with the quarterstaff, a skill he'd never lost and one which had saved his life in more than one exotic dimension.

Blade tossed his staff up in the air and caught it with one hand. As always, he felt better with a weapon. Not that he was helpless with only what nature gave him-he held a fifth-dan black belt in karate, and there were very few of the martial arts he couldn't use in a pinch. A weapon, though, always gave him an extra line of defense or an extra method of attack. He could never be sure that wouldn't be important, and in fact it usually was.