It was unthinkable that Richard Blade, of all the men in the world, should be impotent. Yet it had happened. He was in the prime of life, with a massive and superbly conditioned body, a keen and highly trained mind, and yet the fact had to be faced-he was a member of the limp phallus club.

He did not believe it at first-could not believe it. Nor could he bring himself to confide in anyone, not even Dr. Saxton Colby, the psychiatrist for Project Dimension X. In any case Dr. Colby-the only medical man in England with a security clearance high enough to enable him to work with the Project-had enough on his mind at the moment. Blade's replacement had gone through the computer once and had returned raving mad. He was now in a sanitarium in Scotland where, as Dr. Colby told J and Lord Leighton, he sat on his bed all day and stared at the wall.

«He repeats,» the doctor said, «one sentence over and over. He never says anything else. Never.»

The worm has a thousand heads. The worm has a thousand heads.

When Lord L and J asked for a prognosis, the doctor had shrugged and had given them a straight answer. «In my opinion the man will never be sane again. He's a vegetable now and he'll remain one. I don't know what he encountered out there in Dimension X, and I don't want to know, but it was horrible enough to drive him right out of his mind. Either that or the computer itself is to blame. The stress of going through the machine, of having the molecular structure of his cortex altered, was enough to send him around the bend.»

J had little to say. He had long been bitterly opposed to the Project. Lord Leighton's viewpoint was different from that of J or Dr. Colby. To the old man it was a simple manifestation of the law of averages. It was bound to happen sooner or later and now it had.