So the Project rested entirely on Blade's survival, and was horribly vulnerable because of this. In Dimension X Blade faced dangers that made anything in Home Dimension seem like children's games. He survived them all, but the luck of even the most unkillable man will run out sooner or later.
Blade knew this, hoped for someone else to take over his job, but didn't let the matter worry him. He had to keep going as long as he could. It was a matter of duty, and more than that.
Blade thrived on the life of a secret agent, but it wasn't a completely free life. He was always part of an organization, even if the rest of it was thousands of miles away. He was always operating under rules and restraints, and he was always operating in a twentieth-century world. In Dimension X he was a man alone, nothing between him and a gruesome death but his own skill, strength, and wits.
More time passed, and one morning Richard Blade went through a familiar routine for the twenty-ninth time. He went to the Tower of London and was identified by grimfaced Special Branch men guarding the entrance to the underground complex. He took an elevator two hundred feet down to the complex, then walked a long echoing corridor, guarded by a score of electronic sentinels.
At the door of the computer section J met him, a little grayer than before, perhaps, but still as erect as a sword and quietly concerned about Blade. Together they passed through the rooms full of supporting equipment and entered the main computer room.
There Lord Leighton waited for them, among the towering gray crackle-finished consoles of his great computer. Blade went into a small room carved in the rock wall and prepared himself for his trip. He stripped naked, smeared himself with foul-smelling black grease to prevent electrical burns, and pulled on a loincloth.
Then he came back out into the main room and sat down in a rubber-padded chair standing in a glass booth in the middle of the computer's consoles. J watched as Leighton scurried around Blade, attaching cobra-headed metal electrodes to every part of Blade's body-ears, fingers, toes, even his penis. From each electrode a colored wire trailed off into the computer.
Meanwhile Blade hyperventilated, to fill his system with oxygen. Slowly he felt the tension flow out of him to be replaced by an eager anticipation of what he might find in Dimension X this time.
Leighton finished his work and gave it a final inspection.
He walked to the main control panel and watched the master timer as the computer readied itself for the great moment.
Then J raised a hand in a farewell salute, Lord Leighton's hand came down on the red master switch, and Blade whirled off into Dimension X.
Chapter 2
Most of the time Blade traveled from Home Dimension to Dimension X in an explosive psychedelic bombardment of all his senses. Sometimes it was merely spectacular, sometimes terrifying, sometimes agonizingly painful.
This time there was nothing like that. The computer room and everything in it vanished. In its place was an endless blackness, with silver and golden lights twinkling starlike in a thousand places. Blade felt hints of a terrible cold all around him, felt his skin beginning to prickle-then blackness and all the other sensations vanished. A moment in limbo, then a bone-jarring thud as he landed on a solid surface which seemed to be covered with some sort of padding.
Blade kept his eyes closed and listened for any sounds that could mean immediate danger. He heard the sighing of wind, the creak of branches, and the twitters and chirps of several kinds of birds. Nothing else.
Blade continued to lie still while he counted to twenty, allowing his body to reorient itself. His head ached slightly, but no worse than it would have done from a mild sinus attack. He felt none of the blinding agony which sometimes used to leave him immobile and vulnerable for half an hour. The hyperventilating seemed to prevent that sort of headache.
Blade opened his eyes and sat up. He was sitting as naked as the day he was born on a thick layer of fallen blue needles. He seemed to be on a wooded hillside, surrounded by large trees. Some carried the blue needles and soared up out of sight, while other squatter ones spread wide and trailed long golden leaves. The ground was nearly clear except for fallen needles and occasional patches of waist-high reddish ferns. Upslope Blade caught a glimpse of blue sky and drifting white clouds. He listened again for any sounds except wind and birds, again heard nothing, and headed up the hill.
The top of the hill was farther than he'd expected. He covered at least a mile before he broke out of the trees onto open, rocky ground. A few yards in front of him the ground dropped sharply away into a rugged cliff. Several hundred feet below it ended on the bank of a twisting little river, clear blue where it flowed deep, silvery where it boiled through a stretch of rapids. On the other side of the river the forest began again, an endless carpet of blue and gold with smaller patches of red. Blade had seldom seen such a lush and colorful display of vegetation outside the tropics.
Many miles away across the treetops, the ground swelled into a range of green hills, then abruptly leaped upward into a wall of mountains. The sunlight blazed off snowscapes and glaciers twisting down scarred rocky flanks. Blade could only guess how high the mountains rose, but they looked at least as high as the Alps. They cut off the horizon in all directions except for one narrow valley.
The sky was blue, with faint brownish-gray tinge. Blade sniffed the air. It was brisk and clean, the air of a virgin wilderness a thousand miles from civilization. Whatever tinged the sky didn't seem to be affecting the air.
With a brisk wind blowing, it was almost chilly in the open. From the position of the sun Blade guessed it was early afternoon. He decided to get under cover or at least out of the wind before nightfall. Up here night could be dangerously chilly for a naked man.
Blade began prowling along the cliff, looking for a way down. Along the river he'd be out of the wind, and he'd have drinking water and possibly fish. The river might even give him a trail out of this wilderness to whatever civilization this Dimension might have.
Blade had never landed in a totally uninhabited Dimension and didn't really want to. A Dimension with no intelligent inhabitants might be useful for colonization, but that would need larger-scale transportation into Dimension X. It wouldn't be very useful for Richard Blade, who would have to survive like an animal, with nothing but his bare hands and his wits. There was such a thing as being too alone!
The shadows were getting long before Blade found a place where the cliff had crumbled away to a slope. A stream breaking out of the fallen rocks made them dark and slick, but he'd climbed barehanded under worse conditions before. With a final look at the forest, he lowered himself onto the upper end of the rockfall and began working his way down.
The way down was longer and harder than Blade expected. Several times he had to jump down farther than he liked, landing precariously and picking up a growing collection of bruises. Once he slipped, rolled thirty feet downward, nearly sprained his wrist, and came to a stop just short of a vertical drop onto sharp rocks. It was twilight before he reached the bottom of the rockfall.
In front of him the river swept past the rocks so fast Blade realized it would be suicide to try swimming across here. He moved on downstream, exploring the riverbank.
He was just about resigned to spending the night curled up among the rocks when his luck turned. Beyond a line of boulders, the river formed a broad, dark pool, deep and slow-moving. Blade plunged straight in.