A degree of well-bred panic can be observed among those present. In the background, laboratory assistants move about cleaning up dog shit and calibrating instruments. Rats and mice, white and black and a few shades of gray, run clattering on their wheels in a hundred cages.

Pointsman is the only one here maintaining his calm. He appears unruffled and strong. His lab coats have even begun lately to take on a Savile Row serenity, suppressed waist, flaring vents, finer material, rather rakishly notched lapels. In this parched and fallow time, he gushes affluence. After the baying has quieted down at last, he speaks, soothing: “There’s no danger.”

“No danger?” screams Aaron Throwster, and the lot of them are off again muttering and growling.

“Slothrop’s knocked out Dodson-Truck and the girl in one day!”

“The whole thing’s falling apart, Pointsman!”

“Since Sir Stephen came back, Fitzmaurice House has dropped out of the scheme, and there’ve been embarrassing inquiries down from Duncan Sandys—”

“That’s the P.M.’s son-in-law, Pointsman, not good, not good!”

“We’ve already begun to run into a deficit—”

“Funding,” IF you can keep your head, “is available, and will be coming in before long… certainly before we run into any serious trouble. Sir Stephen, far from being ‘knocked out,’ is quite happily at work in Fitzmaurice House, and is At Home there should any of you wish to confirm. Miss Borgesius is still active on the program, and Mr. Duncan Sandys is having all his questions answered. But best of all, we are budgeted well into fiscal ’46 before anything like a deficit begins to rear its head.”

“Your Interested Parties again?” sez Rollo Groast.

“Ah, I noticed Clive Mossmoon from Imperial Chemicals closeted with you day before yesterday,” Edwin Treacle mentions now. “Clive and I took an organic chemistry course or two together back at Manchester. Is ICI one of our, ah, sponsors, Pointsman?”

“No,” smoothly, “Mossmoon, actually, is working out of Malet Street these days. I’m afraid we were up to nothing more sinister than a bit of routine coordination over this Schwarzkommando business.”

“The hell you were. I happen to know Clive’s at ICI, managing some sort of polymer research.”

They stare at each other. One is lying, or bluffing, or both are, or all of the above. But whatever it is Pointsman has a slight advantage. By facing squarely the extinction of his program, he has gained a great bit of Wisdom: that if there is a life force operating in Nature, still there is nothing so analogous in a bureaucracy. Nothing so mystical. It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads. But survival depends on having strong enough desires—on knowing the System better than the other chap, and how to use it. It’s work, that’s all it is, and there’s no room for any extrahuman anxieties—they only weaken, effeminize the will: a man either indulges them, or fights to win, und so weiter. “I do wish ICI would finance part of this,” Pointsman smiles.