Blade came to Northumberland Avenue and turned toward the river. It was an early November day, dour and with what the Scots call a louring sky, and dusk was falling. The amber-silver splash of car lights on Hungerford Bridge was incessant. He came to the Victoria Embankment and swung to his left toward Blackfriars. When he reached the Temple Steps he halted and stood at the rail, gazing out at the busy river, here known as King's Reach, and watched the tugs bully their barges to and fro and admitted that, to a point, Lord L's experiment with the brain crystal was a success. He had just walked the route chosen by his Lordship, who at the moment was in his lab far below the Tower of London. Lord L, using an ordinary street map of London, had penciled a route and fed it into his computer and Blade had obeyed. He had, of course, been cooperating. He had exercised no volition of his own. He felt sure now, as he realized that the computer control had ended, that he could have broken away from the machine at any time he chose. Or could he?

Richard Blade grinned, shrugged his big shoulders and went in search of a taxi. At that hour in London it was not easy and, as he turned back toward Waterloo and then over to the Strand, hailing cab after cab with no luck, it occurred to him that here was a minor irony. Blade was the only man in the world, the only man born, ever to escape his own dimension and go out into X, into spaces that the ordinary mortal was not even capable of conceiving, and he could not get a taxi.

As he waited impatiently at the curb on the Strand, a group of youths approached and demanded «something for the Guy.» They had blacked their faces and wore rags and tatters and carried bags of chalk dust to mark those who did not pay.