J went over the report again. Same story there, too. Blade was sleeping around-brothels, clubs, bars. When he was in his flat he usually had a woman with him. He wasn't drinking too much, which J supposed was something to be thankful for, but certainly he wasn't living a normal life.

And the doctors! J rifled through the pages of the report. More than a dozen doctors, half of them psychiatrists. Harley Street. Baker Street. Half Moon Street. Even one in Edinburgh. Blade had gone all that way, paid the doctors from his own pocket instead of entering it on his unlimited expense account. Why? What was wrong with Richard Blade?

At the moment Blade was back in Harley Street. He was in the treatment room of a famous specialist and he was also in a bit of a dilemma. He and the specialist, a Dr. Poindexter, were gazing at an X-ray of Blade's skull. The doctor was puzzled and Blade couldn't blame him. That small faint shadow in his left frontal lobe, at the top of his brain in the neocortex, was the thin wafer of crystal implanted some months before so that Blade might receive thought impulses from Home Dimension while he was himself in X Dimension. It had not worked perfectly, there had been lapses, but it hadn't troubled Blade. He had nearly forgotten it was there.

Dr. Poindexter was on it like a hawk. «It could be a tumor,» he said gravely, «though it is early on to be sure. It certainly calls for an exploratory.»

Blade cursed himself for not having foreseen this. He couldn't tell the good man what it was, and he had no intention of allowing his skull to be opened again. Damn security and the Official Secrets Act! There were times when they bound a man like a net of steel cable.

The doctor rubbed his hands. He was cheerful. «Yes, indeed. We shall certainly have to go in there and have a look.»

Blade had been doing a great deal of reading of late. He was not drinking too much, and it had become his habit, after each sexual failure, to go to his flat, lock himself in, and read from a stack of books. Most were overdue and he owed the library a small fortune.