Then in another moment the whole hut and the ground under it seemed to tilt violently on end. Suddenly the floor was vertical. Blade was falling, falling away from Neena, falling down through the wall that had suddenly become a floor, falling down into nothing. The air whistled past him as he fell and he began to tumble head over heels. He tumbled faster and faster, until he was spinning downward like a pinwheel. The blood began to pool in his head and the world around him began to turn red

— until between one second and the next the whirling and the fall and the redness all came to an end. He was sitting in the chair in the computer room below the Tower of London. On his finger glinted the ruby ring; in his hand was the bag of emeralds. On the faces of J and Lord Leighton was relief, and as they stared at the ruby ring, there was also delight and even triumph.

Lord Leighton sat in a chair in his study and looked at his desk. On his desk was a small box filled with cotton wool. On the cotton wool sat Richard Blade's ruby ring. It did not look like much-it never had. But Leighton was happier to see it there than he would have been to see the crown jewels of England in the same place, let alone the sack of emeralds that did sit on the polished wood beside the little box!

That ring was the first object in the whole world-other than Richard Blade himself, of course-to make the round trip into Dimension X and back again. It could now be said that it was not impossible for Blade to go into Dimension X with something other than his bare hands, his bare skin, and his own wits. J would be delighted at that-in fact, he already was.

Lord Leighton was also happy enough. But he would have been even happier if the ring hadn't represented such a theoretical solution to the problem of equipping Blade for his trips into Dimension X. And theoretical solutions had a way of dissolving like mist in the sunlight when you started looking at them more closely.

Besides, even if they were on the right track, they were still a long way from a reliable solution. Leighton remembered the words of his chemistry instructor at Oxford, in those golden days even before World War I. «Leighton,» the man had said, «you will find in time that every theoretical solution generates at least ten practical problems on the way.»

The instructor was long dead-killed on the Somme in 1916, as a matter of fact-but during all those years Leighton had never found anything to disprove those words. They had always been true, and probably always would be, not only for the rest of Leighton's own life but for as long as there was such a thing as experimental science in the world!

Consider what they faced with this ring. Was the secret of its traveling into Dimension X in its composition-its alloying, perhaps?

Perhaps. But how to find out the exact formula, in that case? The jeweler who'd made the ring was long gone, and unfortunately so were all the relevant records, destroyed when his shop was blitzed in 1941.

Take a sample from the ring? That could be done, but there wasn't much to it. Taking that sample could destroy the ring. Certainly it would alter it. That would not only be destroying or damaging their only specimen, it would be destroying some of Richard Blade's personal property. Leighton was normally rather ruthless about minor bits of other people's property, although it was not true that he would have boiled his own mother in oil to ensure meaningful results for an experiment. He made an exception for Richard Blade, however.

Suppose it was not some physical property of the ring that was involved? Suppose Blade's «guess» turned out to make sense after all, that there was some paranormal affinity between a man and something that had been in his possession for as long as the ring?

Leighton didn't know. He did know that he wouldn't get much in the way of useful data by turning the matter over to the existing staff of project psychologists. They would dismiss any notion of paranormal phenomena as arrant, mystical nonsense, unworthy of serious consideration.

Leighton didn't hold that view. He was not a mystic, he was merely a determined nonbeliever in the arrogant, cocksure view of regular psychologists on matters paranormal. He did not consider that arrogance a proper scientific attitude, and he made no secret of his opinion.

That was all very well and good, but it still meant that he would have to go outside the project for anyone to research the paranormal possibilities in this situation.

That would in turn mean more security clearances to be handled, and more work for J-who was already overburdened with work. He was still trying to get Scotland Yard off the trail of the «mystery man» of the train wreck-and without getting the Prime Minister involved, a solution which would cause more problems than it solved!

Besides, the security aspects of hiring paranormal researchers would be even more ticklish than usual. The Russians were decades ahead of the West in everything having to do with the paranormal. They placed great importance on research in the area and financed and staffed their projects accordingly.

Logically, that also meant they put a lot of time into keeping tabs on what paranormal researchers in the West were doing-if anything. When the Russians decided to keep tabs on something abroad, they could be very thorough and were almost always fairly ruthless. It could be a ticklish problem, finding a reliable paranormal researcher and hiring him under circumstances that would not come to the attention of the KGB. Lord Leighton had already tackled one confrontation with the KGB, when Katerina Shumilova tried to sabotage the computer. She had ended up in Dimension X for her pains, and that was the end of her. Next time the solution might not come so easily, and frankly Leighton would be much happier if there were no «next time» at all. But on still another hand, he couldn't let the risk of tangling with the Russians scare him off from a possibly important line of research, otherwise-

Leighton laughed out loud and carefully shifted his mind away from the project. Sitting here working himself into a mild stew over the project's murky future was an exercise in futility. It would solve none of the problems, and it might end up costing him even those few hours of sleep that he still needed. It was time for a nightcap, then bed.

Leighton rose, closed the box on the ring, put it in his pocket, turned off the lights, and went out of the room.