Blade's nerves were screaming. He knew that if he hesitated he would be screaming. The battery of his courage, sapped cumulatively by so many trips into DX, was running low.

«Pull the lever,» he said. «Pull the lever, you damned old fool!»

He had only time to read the amazement and shock on Lord L's face before the red toggle came down. No one had ever spoken to his Lordship in that manner.

The current washed through him like bloody surf. For a moment there was pain, pain that could not be borne and yet must be, and then his body vanished and with it the pain and he was only a brain on a stalk..

The stalk was planted in purple gravel and atop it his brain waved and moved in a hot wind. Lights flashed and bells rang and behind a shadow screen he saw horned figures copulating. A clown ran up from nowhere and smote his raw brain with a bladder and there was more pain. The clown and the pain locked hands and danced off into silver fog. A girl with fur all over her came out of the fog and stood looking at him. She sucked her thumb and stared at him and mouthed words that he could not understand. As his brain watched she grew a penis, a huge pole of flesh, and laughed and began to toy with herself and then went off turning cartwheels.

His brain detached itself from the stalk and began to rise like a balloon into polychromatic clouds wreathed around the base of a gigantic chryselephantine statue. The statue was hermaphroditic and towered into eternity and filled the cosmos and the brain knew that it was seeing GOD.

GOD smiled. GOD smote. The brain fell and fell and fell ….

Chapter 3

At first Blade thought he was in a forest. Gradually, as the computer shock wore off, he realized that he lay not among trees, but among reeds, weeds, amid spindly stalks and bushes. As always he lay still, unmoving, waiting until his senses fully returned and he could assay the situation. It was his usual procedure upon entering Dimension X and so far it had ensured his survival.