‘Oh. My. God,’ muttered Lana again. ‘He is turning into a cartoon pirate in front of our eyes, and nobody is doing anything about it.’ She made as though to stand up in disgust, and she has walked out several times before, but then she sat down again with a dramatic groan instead. Walking out would mean sitting outside in the dark drizzle by herself. There really wasn’t anywhere to go.

Carol came forward slowly and reluctantly, stepping over the people in front of her. She normally wears stripes of plastic bags on her chest, woven in and out of her top. But without those, all that was left was a ragged brown T-shirt which contained more holes than material. She had retained one blue plastic bag to cover her breasts, but still, her clothing was now barely decent.

With a sigh, she started. ‘Bees are little flying creatures which have black and white stripes on them.’ She gave another sigh and paused, looking at Dr Jones.

Dr Jones gave an encouraging nod. I’m not sure she would have been so keen for Carol to speak if Old Albert wasn’t scheduled to go next.

‘They make a noise which sounds like buzzzzzzzzz, and they make a nice thing called honey. The thing about honey is that it lasts for ever. When the tombs of the pharaohs were opened in Egypt last century, the honey stored with them a thousand years earlier was found to be completely edible. We’ll probably never see a bee while we’re living on the Jellyfish, though.’

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake!’ Lana stood up. ‘Aren’t we going to talk about it? Aren’t we going to do anything about it? What are we going to do about the boat?’

There were murmurs of approval from all over the room. Carol immediately sat down. Nobody stood up to take her place.

‘Well?’ shouted Lana. ‘We’ve got the boat here, we know that there are other people out there, on land. We know we just have to get to them. What are we going to do? How are we going to do it?’

Cautiously, Dr Jones stepped forward. She raised her hands for quiet.

‘We have two very generous offers of evening lectures tonight. I think we should just listen to those first before we discuss escape plans,’ she said.

I thought Lana was going to explode. She made an incoherent roaring noise which, luckily for her, was drowned out by the rage noises coming from the rest of the people in the room.