«Look, J, no need for you to worry. I'm in my right mind. I'm not drinking excessively. I'm in excellent health, certified by six doctors, and I'm worried and scared to death. I cannot achieve a hard-on, J, no matter what. Nothing works. I have had hormones shot into me until my arm looks like an addict's. Still nothing. But it's my worry, not yours, so take your man off and put him to doing something useful.»

Blade could not do that. As he turned at last into Berkeley Street and headed for the Square-dare he keep this third date with Lady Margaret French-Taylor? — he knew that he simply didn't have the courage to confess to J, or to any of his friends, his peers, his own class. Why this should be so, he could not fathom. It was juvenile and stupid. And Blade was not a stupid man. In no sense was he a coward, in either a physical or moral way, yet he admitted to himself that not even under torture would he bring himself to tell another man that he was finished sexually.

He walked through Berkeley Square, thinking that it would be easier to tell the truth to a woman. He very nearly had two days ago. Lady Margaret French-Taylor-Meg to her friends and bedmates was the most beautiful woman in London and she was beginning to suspect. Blade grimaced now as he recalled the scene. He had turned coward at the last moment and pleaded too much brandy and fatigue. Meg had looked skeptical….

«I suppose it's possible, Richard, and yet I find it very strange in a big handsome brute like you. Something is dreadfully wrong. Do you suppose it could be me? Something about me, in your subconscious? You detest me? You don't really want me?» Blade tried to laugh it off and felt like all the fools in the world. «Of course I want you, Meg. I don't love you, and I certainly don't hate you, but I certainly do want you.»

They were sitting at the little bar in her bedroom suite, both naked. Meg French-Taylor was a tall woman, just thirty, with firm high breasts and the long sinuous legs of a dancer. She had an Irish skin, moist and creamy; her mouth was voluptuous and her nose patrician. Before her marriage to doddering old Sir Hugh French-Taylor, she had been plain Maggie Kirkbride. She was a successful model and was seen monthly in the ladies' slick magazines. What the ancient knight contrived to do with her was a puzzle to her friends, as well as to the vulgar public, but she did not enlighten them. The truth was that she had married Sir Hugh for his money; he had married her for her beauty. They had made a bargain, each to go his own way. The knight to pursue his young workmen and waiters, she to quench a sexual appetite that had been long abuilding, for she had been chary of giving herself freely until she had status and money. Now that she had it, and her lawyers had all the proper papers signed by the old man locked in their strongboxes, she had let herself go. She was known as the lay of London and didn't care a whit. There was a lot of the natural aristocrat in Meg and now she could afford to let it show.

So now, as she toyed with Richard Blade's penis and got no response, she was not so much frustrated as puzzled. With her beauty and skills, she would have wagered on provoking a response in any man under eighty. Her husband was seventy-odd and she had stirred him on their first night. It had not happened again because he did not really like women sexually, but it had happened. And now from this gorgeous man, Blade, absolutely nothing.

Blade sipped his brandy and stroked her auburn hair. Meg was trying. She was also getting a bit disgusted with him. He was waiting for the gleam of pity in her green eyes, just as he was waiting for her to unsheath her claws. He did not have long to wait.

Meg stood up. «It is just no use, Richard. You must admit that I have tried. Whatever can it be?»

Blade looked at her over his brandy bell. «I don't know, Meg. I'm sorry. The only thing I know is that it can't be you. It isn't your fault.»

Meg took up her glass. She pressed the brandy bell against one buoyant breast, then against the other. Her rose-pink nipples were hard and long.

«I'm going to have to do something,» she told Blade without looking at him, «or you must do something. I'm all stirred up now and I'll never get to sleep unless something happens.»

Blade was silent. It was an invitation that he did not feel like accepting. He had no objections to oral sex-he was a man of the world and had been a womanizer since his teens — but in this instance it was not the answer. Oral sex, to him, was only an adjunct, a pleasant enough fore-interlude to normal sex. And that he could not achieve. To hell, then, with any of it. Such were his feelings at the moment.

Meg spoke her feelings a moment later. She squinted at him and did not quite mask the pity or the contempt or the anger. It was not anything she could help-she was a woman, a disappointed woman, and she was a feline.

«A big chest, broad shoulders and legs like trees; they don't always tell the story, do they, Richard? But who would have guessed? Certainly I didn't. I thought we were going to have a wizard of a time in bed. Now it turns out that you are less than a man.»

Meg had finished her brandy and gone to the phone. She called a man, someone called Reggie, and spoke briefly. When she hung up she looked coldly at Blade, still at the bar, naked on his stool, hating himself and the world and wondering what had happened to him.

Meg put on a robe. «You had better dress and leave,» she told Blade. «I'm expecting someone. He'll be here soon.»

«So I heard.» He began to dress.

Before he left, Meg patted his cheek and kissed him. She smiled. «Richard, dear, don't be so glum. I'm sorry if I was nasty. But try to see my side-I'm one of those women who just have to have it once I get started. I like you a lot, you're very sweet and we can be good friends, but if you're impotent, incapable of satisfying me, then we had better know it, have it right out in the open and-«

He had almost struck her. Not a slap nor a backhand of contempt or insolence, but a blow of fury.

«I am not impotent,» he had yelled. «I am not incapable. I don't know what has happened, I do not understand, but I am neither of those things. I am not, goddamn it, I am not!»

Meg did not guess how near she was to harm. She put her fingers on his mouth. «Richard, please. The people across the hall-and anyway you may be right. I'll tell you what, darling. We'll try again, shall we? Once more, Richard, and then if nothing happens, at least we'll know that we are not for each other. Now you really must go… my friend will be here soon.»

Blade had slunk away, there was no other word for it, humiliated and disgusted. He drove down to Dorset, to his cottage on the Channel, and spent a night with booze and agony….

A taxi nearly struck Blade as he crossed Davies Street. The driver leaned to shake a fist at the big man. «Why the bleeding 'ell don't yer look where yer going, guv! The bloody effing street ain't no place to go dreaming.»

Blade nodded and waved. The man was right. He turned into Mount Row and headed for Carlos Place. Meg was waiting. She had given him this last chance.

Blade could not understand why he was going back to Meg's place. He was a proud man, even an arrogant man at times, and he had no ill opinion of himself. He had earned every decoration the British Government could bestow; he had seven times faced the terrors of Dimension X and survived; in brain and physique he considered himself the equal of any man in the world.

Yet a limp bit of flesh between his legs was making a fool and a coward of him.

He did not really want to go to Meg's flat. He did not want to see Meg again. Or did he? Was he lying to himself? Did he want to see her, for one purpose-to show her how wrong she was?

He had reached her flat now and stood still, his finger poised over the button, hesitating in the foyer like a school boy about to enter his first brothel. People brushed past him, coming and going, and he did not see them.