Perhaps he would go for another pee after all.
There was no one in the Heads of Departments washroom when he got there except Jellicoe, the head porter. Jellicoe was leaning across a handbasin with his face very close to the mirror, trimming his moustache with a tiny pair of folding scissors. He glanced up at Goldwasser.
‘Hallo, Mr. Goldwasser,’ he said, returning to his moustache.
‘Hallo,’ said Goldwasser, who was never able to decide whether to call the porter Jellicoe or Mr. Jellicoe. He peed, then filled a wash-basin with luxurious quantities of hot water and washed his hands. It was very peaceful in the washroom, the deep calm emphasised by the periodic flushing of the cisterns, and the tiny snip-snip of Jellicoe’s moustache-scissors.
‘I see Dr. Riddle’s published another paper on random distribution,’ said Jellicoe, his mouth somewhat constricted by the operations on his upper lip.
‘Ah,’ said Goldwasser, gazing at himself in the mirror. In general terms he could not doubt that he was clever; too clever, even – too clever by half, if not by three-quarters.
‘Have you read it, sir?’ asked Jellicoe.
‘No,’ said Goldwasser. The only way he could read a newspaper, let alone a learned article, was back to front, from bottom to top of the page, from tailpiece to headline, setting himself and solving outrageous problems of comprehension in every paragraph. On days of unusual greyness he deliberately increased the masochistic pleasure of the perversion by reading each sentence back to front as well.
‘A rather brilliant piece of work,’ said Jellicoe. ‘Or so I thought.’
Goldwasser looked at strip cartoons backwards, too, divining with depressing accuracy what was going to be in the first frame before he got back to it, bored by the logical impossibility of taking each single picture backwards.
‘I hear from a rather reliable source,’ said Jellicoe, ‘that the Queen is coming down here.’
‘Oh?’ said Goldwasser. He also read novels back to front. He could not bear the thought, when he picked up a novel, of suffering the author’s tedious assumption in the early chapters that he knew nothing about the characters and would have to be introduced to them.
‘To pay an official visit to the Institute and open the new wing. What do you think of that, sir?’
‘Hm,’ said Goldwasser. There was just a chance that he might be able to face being introduced to a novelist’s characters after he had discovered whether they finished up dead, married, or resigned to life. But then there wasn’t much interest in learning that someone you knew nothing about was dead, married, or resigned to anything.
‘I think myself,’ said Jellicoe, ‘that in some sense it marks the coming of age of automation research. We are being received into the body academic.’
On the whole, thought Goldwasser, he preferred the television, where they showed you everything the right way round by force majeure, and made no concessions to the aberrant tastes of people like himself, who were too clever to know what was good for them. He dried his hands thoughtfully.