Jack Sims eased his car into the company parking lot, wincing as the tires bounced roughly over a high spot in the pavement. Damn, I must have got drunk last night, he thought, trying not to move his aching head. Half remembered images of the party flickered through his mind, but much more sharp were his recollections of that sexual debacle with Angela after they got home.

What the hell was the matter with him? he asked himself bitterly. Two years they had gone together, having no trouble making love, and now, all of a sudden, this. Like most men, Jack hated to put the blame for sexual inadequacy on himself, and had been looking for some time for a way to lay at least some of it on his wife, and, little by little, he was beginning to be successful, at least in his own mind. She just made him feel so… so… tense. No wonder he couldn't hold it back.

And maybe there was a little boredom in the whole thing, too. As a young man, Jack had had a dizzying succession of women, but now, for something like three years the only woman he'd slept with was Angela. Not that she wasn't worth sleeping with, he thought ruefully. Hell, he'd never found a more beautiful woman, no one who turned on more in bed. For just an instant, a faint thought flickered in the back of Jack's mind, a thought perhaps too close to the truth for him to really let live long. Thinking of his wife's passionate responses to his love-making stirred up some old fear, a subtle feeling that somehow she was threatening something in him, in his manhood, and, for a moment, Jack knew he probably had the key, but then it was gone, pushed from his memory by automatic mental defenses. And, besides that, having parked the car, the young man was now entering the plant, and, once in the plant, he tried never to let anything but work occupy his mind. He was ambitious, and felt this was the right way to get ahead.