There was a loud, non-human scream from Walter’s tyres. Hutchins and June Veeber were stone figures, absolutely immobile. He was about five feet away from the protection of the wall; she, lagging behind, had still one foot on the doorstep. It seemed to Charles’s tricked eyesight that the machine changed its shape, grotesquely, in a twinkling. It appeared enormously elongated, then squat and contracted. Only the helmed figure in the cockpit remained recognizable as he wrenched the wheel violently from side to side. Smearing its locked wheels horribly across the concrete, the car flitted past the two petrified figures like a giant bat. The garage door was not quite wide enough to admit it on its present trajectory, and the rear end smashed into a corner of the wall. Leaping into the air and spinning round, it vanished into the building. An appalling metallic crash announced the presence of the unsuspecting Daimler. Outside, flung pebbles pattered to the ground in the silence.

Hutchins stood swaying and twisting his chalk-white face from side to side in the sunlight. June Veeber leaned back against the lintel of the door with her eyes closed. Charles pushed himself away from the timing apparatus and began to walk towards the garage.

Before he could reach it, Walter came out. At first it seemed that he had been injured. His face was terribly mis-shapen, as if it had been violently knocked sideways. Then Charles realized that it was twisted with rage. His creation had been smashed, the sacred object of his highest endeavours was taken away from him in the moment when it had begun to work its magic. Any normal sensation of relief that he had not been smashed with it was absolutely excluded by his violent passion. As well might one imagine Napoleon feeling warmed and comforted by the thought that he, at least, had not been killed in the Russian campaign. He advanced on Hutchins to murder him. Charles stood help­lessly, paralyzed by his recent shock as well as by his instinctive reluctance to do anything to protect Hutchins. Walter tramped across the yard, his contorted face capped by the dented steel toadstool that had saved his life, his powerful arms swinging loosely by his sides. June Veeber had not yet opened her eyes.

Then Walter sprang his great surprise. The decision he took, at whatever level of consciousness it was reached, stood out for ever in Charles’s mind as having provided the most purely astonishing moment he would ever live through. Halting before Hutchins, who was still too rattled to grasp fully that he was about to be set upon, he gazed at him squarely for a moment, and then spoke in a calm and unwavering voice.

‘I see you’ve got her with you.’

‘Got who with me?’ Hutchins quavered.

‘Murd,’ said Walter, and went into the house.