Ridgeway Mainwaring nodded sharply. “People work best when they’re uncomfortable,” he said authoritatively. “For best results, the human brain should be refrigerated, like a good cut of pork.”

“I cannot be happy when I am freezing,” Gruenfeldt insisted.

“Seneca!” cried George Desmond.

They all looked at him.

“Seneca,” Desmond repeated. “He led a plummy life. He was productive, functioning well on many levels—philosopher, playwright, politician, cocksman—one of his mistresses was the daughter of Germanicus. And he was rich, the possessor of more than five hundred ivory tables. Seneca,” he glared at Treblant, “was a happy man.”

“Some happy,” Treblant sniffed. “So why did he suicide himself?”

“He was forced to, accused of political conspiracy. For all intents and purposes he was murdered.”

The grousing lapsed for a long moment. They sat there, presumably contemplating the end of Seneca, hunched over their coffee cups and brooding within their jackets with patches at the elbows. They were all over the hill and they knew it, put out to pasture. Each was undoubtedly a specialist, confined to his own narrow arena of expertise, a discipline indecipherable to his colleagues. They didn’t talk shop as fellow workers are wont to do. Rather they simply ventilated the esoterica of academics, holding anxiety at bay with their hostile rhetoric and their rudeness.

Karl Gruenfeldt had not yet exhausted his disgruntlement. He zeroed in on the one subject all workers have in common: the enemy in their midst, the Boss.

“I consider myself the victim of Chatterton,” Karl insisted, “no less than Seneca was the victim of imperial Rome. What difference if one is forced to open his veins or to freeze them solid?”

“You make our helmsman sound like one of those bonker scientists in the movies,” Desmond said.

“He does get his ideas in the dark of the moon,” Gorelik declared.

“Ideas are one thing,” Treblant said. “Solutions are harder to come by.”

“If he can cut the mustard,” Wolenciewicz said doggedly, “he should be able to spread it. If he can’t, he shouldn’t be holding the knife.”

“One thing,” Desmond said. “He does keep rooting. If a blind pig roots long enough he’s going to get an acorn.”

“He doesn’t root,” Mainwaring said, “he uproots—not allowing a book in the house. You don’t pull anything up by the roots till you’re bloody well certain it’s dead.”

So they sat there, gassing away like cavemen around a fire, relieving their fossil fears, and I sat alone among them, surrounded by their lost whispers. Why were they fearful? What were those ideas of Chatterton’s, begat in the dark of the moon?

At last they grew bored with each other and filed off, each to his respective room, a clutch of solitudes in search of solutions for God knows what.