Richard Blade looked up at the forty-foot aluminum mast to the spinnaker fittings at the masthead. Then he looked forward to the big orange spinnaker, straining and pulled drum-tight by the rising wind.

And then he raised his voice to carry over the wind and shouted to be heard below in the cabin of the motorsailer, «Annie! Come on deck and take the wheel while I go forward and drop the spinnaker. It's getting on to blow.»

A muffled acknowledgment floated out from behind the polished teak door. Then the door swung open and Lady Annette Pangborn popped out, mounting the steps to the cockpit with the poise and balance of a seasoned sailor. She was wearing a bikini that concealed only nominal portions of her tanned, fashion-model's body. She slipped gracefully into the padded helmsman's seat and took the chromed wheel from Blade. With a winch handle swinging in one hand he went forward along the heaving deck.

He didn't care much for having to drop the spinnaker. Its two thousand square feet of orange nylon almost gave the deep-keeled motorsailer the performance of a racing sloop. But the blue sky to the southwest was beginning to turn gray and the blue gray waters of the English Channel were beginning to heave up higher and higher in white-capped waves. The motorsailer was lurching and heaving in a way she had not done that morning when they left the French coast behind.

The oiled winch worked smoothly, but he had not expected it to do anything else. Everything aboard Annie's motorsailer was the result of abundant money and good judgment. She had inherited both from four generations of shipping magnates. If Annie ever married, Blade expected that she would do her best to send that same money and judgment on to another few generations. But the English Channel was as likely to turn to onion soup as Annie was to marry.

That was why he was aboard her motorsailer this spring day. Blade had all the assets needed to make him attractive to women. Good looks, an athletic body well over six feet tall, charm, apparent wealth, and (as those women who carried matters far enough discovered) abounding virility. There were always women around him, and among them were always a good many who could not help imagining themselves as Mrs. Blade.

Which was impossible. Richard Blade was not merely the imposing, middle-aged man-about-town he seemed. In reality he was the best secret agent the intelligence office MI6 had ever possessed. He had survived the better part of twenty years of the deadliest sort of fieldwork. And more than fieldwork.

What often seemed like half a lifetime ago, Britain's leading computer expert, Lord Leighton, had conducted an experiment directly linking a man's mind to his latest computer. That man had been Blade. With his combined qualities of mind and body, he had been the perfect-well, call it the perfect guinea pig.

And now he was still a guinea pig. The computer had hurled Blade straight into another dimension with a Dark Ages level of civilization. Only those qualities of mind and body that had led to his selection in the first place kept Blade alive to return to his own dimension. Those same qualities had kept him alive-at times by the narrowest of margins-during nine more trips into nine different dimensions, or at least nine different aspects of what Lord Leighton called Dimension X.

Project Dimension X had been launched the moment Blade returned from his first trip. The value to England of being able to penetrate and explore other dimensions and bring back their wealth or knowledge was obvious. Blade's superior, the man called J, who headed MI6, had reluctantly parted with his best agent. The prime minister himself had funneled generous support in money and trained people to the project. But the key man in the project was still Blade himself. He was still the only man in England able to travel into Dimension X and return alive and sane.

Obviously, either his luck or his endurance would run out sooner or later if they kept sending him back. Blade knew it and took it for granted. J also knew it and was horrified at the thought. Lord Leighton knew it and usually seemed quite indifferent. There was a subproject afoot to find other qualified candidates for trips into Dimension X, and both J and the prime minister had given it their blessing and their personal support. But so far it had produced nothing. Blade was still indispensable.

So he could not marry. Few women could tolerate having their husbands suddenly snatched away on mysterious errands for weeks or months at a time and unexpectedly returning scarred, tanned, and trimmed down. Blade would not ask those few women he could rely on to silently suffer such an existence. His other dimensional travels had already driven away Zoe, the woman he had come closest to marrying-would have married under other circumstances. He would not take the chance of that happening twice. So he sought out those women, like Annie, who were interested in fun, frolic, and freedom.

Now the spinnaker was down, bagged, dropped through the forward hatch, and stowed in the sail locker in the forepeak. The heaving of the motorsailer's deck subsided enough to make Blade's trip aft easier than his trip forward. With only the mainsail and the number-two jib up, the yacht rode easily through the chop.

Annie was holding her on course with no sign of effort when Blade dropped down into the cockpit and squatted beside the wheel. «Think we can make Folkestone with the spinnaker down?» he asked.

She frowned. «Not unless we want to make the approach after dark.»

Blade shook his head.

She grinned and said, «You're as careful as if you'd been at sea for twenty years. Where did you ever learn the habit?»

Blade looked at Annie's windblown beauty and wondered how he would have answered that question if he had not been bound hand, foot, and tongue by the Official Secrets Act. Would he have to tell Annie about the pirates of Neral, whom he had fought both for and against, and about how he had learned seamanship from the sadistic she-pirate named Cayla and the tough old fighter Tuabir aboard the galleys of the pirate Brotherhood? And if he had decided to tell her about these things, could he have made her believe him? Perhaps not. Perhaps the Official Secrets Act had saved him more than once from being branded a madman. There was so much he had learned, so much he had seen, during his adventures. And so much of it would have seemed incredible even to Blade if he had not lived through it himself.

Suddenly a shout of surprise from Annie made him turn and look out across the whitecaps to where her slender arm was pointing. A larger patch of foam was spreading across the sea, breaking up on the fringes as the waves tossed it about. From its center rose a squat black tower, rising still higher as Blade watched, and then a long black hull lifted from beneath the foam and sliced through the waves. One of England's diminishing fleet of submarines was on the surface again, heading into Portsmouth after a long patrol in the depths of the Atlantic.

Blade watched tiny figures appear on the submarine's bridge, and then a patch of white that grew suddenly larger as the wind caught it and whipped it out stiff and brilliant in the sun-the white ensign of the Royal Navy. An impulse to follow what had once been tradition moved Blade. He reached for the halyard of the motorsailer's own flag and pulled gently, so that it dipped twice. Across the water there was a flurry of motion on the submarine's bridge. Blade realized he had caught them by surprise with the traditional gesture. Probably no one aboard the submarine, from the captain on down, had ever witnessed this act. But then the white ensign shivered and moved down and then up with stately grace. Blade smiled-the Royal Navy could usually come up punching.