The technical lecture took them all the way down to the computer room itself. Once they had entered the main room, jammed full from floor to ceiling and almost from wall to wall with the huge gray crackled-finish bulks of the computers and their hanging festoons of riotously colored wiring, Lord L at once returned to the business at hand. He ushered J to a chair, then went over to the main control console and began taking readings from the dials, while Blade went to the dressing chamber to begin his personal preparations.

In spite of the fantastically complex and still not completely predictable processes involved in shifting him into a new dimension, Blade's own preparations had long since become a stereotyped, monotonous routine. He went into the dressing room. He took off all his clothes. He smeared himself all over with a black greasy goo with the consistency of liquid tar and the smell of greatly overaged turpentine, supposed to prevent burns from the electrodes that would be attached all over his body. He put on a loincloth. This was largely a symbolic gesture; he had arrived nine successive times in Dimension X naked as a newborn babe. He stepped out of the dressing room and walked over to the glass booth in the middle of the room, the booth with its rubber floor and its chair that looked remarkably like an American electric chair. He sat down in the chair and waited while the cobra-headed electrodes were attached to every possible and impossible portion of his body until he sat in the middle of an insane tangle of multi-colored wires, radiating off in all directions into the guts of the computer that loomed over him on all sides.

Then, finally, the routine was broken as Lord Leighton turned from the master console to look at him and raise a gnarled and bony hand in a final farewell.