‘Well, it’s quite simple really.’ A little of the old fluency was coming back. ‘This man’s a member, and he’s got some bee in his bonnet about sailors, that they need converting more than any other part of the community. He’s tried time and again to hold meetings in the evenings at various seaport towns, and having failed, he’s got the idea that his only hope is to get aboard the ships themselves, while they’re in dock, and go down to the men’s living-­quarters with his tracts and things. He’s regularly in trouble for trying to worm his way into berths that are closed to the public.’

Bunder drank from his glass. He looked meditative.

‘I didn’t notice that he was carrying a case or anything to hold his tracts in.’

‘He’s too clever for that,’ said Charles solemnly. ‘He thinks it would antagonize the men if he were obviously going to distribute literature. He carries them on him. His pockets are bulging with them.’

‘Is that so?’

‘Bulging,’ Charles repeated with great emphasis. His heart was hammering.

Bunder stubbed out his cigarette, and, looking up, held Charles’s eyes firmly with his malicious gaze.

‘Do you know what I think about that story?’

‘What should you think of it?’ Charles managed to croak from a dry throat.

‘I think it’s phony.’

There was a pause that dragged into an eternity.

‘Either he’s shooting a phony line or you are. I wouldn’t know which. That’s the only thing I don’t get.’

Charles was helplessly silent.

‘That bird isn’t a Jehovah’s Witness or anything of the sort. He’s just some little rat who wanted to be on the wharf at the same time as us. I don’t know why, and I don’t know whether he’s fooled you with this crazy yarn, or whether you know what he’s really up to, and daren’t talk because you’re afraid it’s your own fault he’s hooked on to us. Because you’ve opened your mouth too wide.’

Another silence. Centuries went by, geological eras came and went, mountains rose from the sea and subsided again. Whole cycles of evolution developed at their leisure. The hands of the clock, by a laughable illusion, recorded this stretch of aeons as forty-five seconds.

‘Well,’ Charles got out at last, ‘what are you going to do about it?’

‘I’m not going to do anything about it,’ Bunder purred. ‘For one thing it’s not my job to do anything about it. If you’re really sticking your neck out, it’ll have been noticed before now, by those whose job it is to notice these things. They’ll take care of you. Because,’ he finished on a suddenly harsh tone, ‘the rest of us have got to be protected.’

‘Protected,’ said Charles weakly.