Rowe sighed, and gazed out into the courtyard. Goldwasser had disappeared from his window. He had been visible for quite a long time, picking at his ear. Extraordinarily unappealing habits some people had. Rowe sighed again, energetically screwed his finger about in his ear, and wound a fresh sheet of paper into the typewriter.

‘R is the story of a young man on his way up, who is determined to let nothing stand between him and the blonde in the E-type Jaguar . . .’

Rowe groaned. God in heaven, perhaps it was easier to write the book first and the jacket afterwards, after all. He wondered which way round other writers did it.

Still, the first paragraph was quite good. ‘Exciting new voice’ – that was a pretty striking phrase. It made him feel rather exalted, and yet at the same time strangely humbled, to think that his virtues and talents had been charted with such accuracy, with such a downright willingness to give praise where praise was due.

The book was undoubtedly under way. That was the main thing. He put the various drafts away carefully, so that it would be possible later to follow the evolution of the passage and the development of his thinking, and began to automate a little sport.

4

Inside the old Ethics Department building, bright, wavering reflections danced over the walls, and small unseen impacts re-echoed with dreamlike magnitude. The door swung to behind Goldwasser with a noise like a howitzer going off. Goldwasser winced. Macintosh looked round and nodded at him. He was in his favourite position for ethical research, up on his gantry like the master of a ship on his bridge. He was leaning patiently and impassively on the rail, his great red face expressionless.

‘Come on up,’ he called to Goldwasser, and the words lingered in the air impressively, as if they were written there.

Goldwasser climbed the steel ladder. The gantry spanned Mac­intosh’s test tank. Macintosh had stripped everything out of his department – furniture, walls, floors – and sunk the test tank for his ethical machines. He was a single-minded man.

‘We’re just doing the last experiment of the run,’ said Mac­intosh. Goldwasser said nothing. He always felt rather uneasy about the test tank. It reminded him of the swimming baths, and made him feel defensive about his lack of muscles. At any moment he expected a gang of powerfully-built lower-class extroverts to pounce on him and throw him in. A girl at the far end of the tank giggled quietly at something; it echoed about the building as divine laughter, almost certainly directed at him.

The test tank occasionally reminded Macintosh of the swimming baths, too. In the summer he had once or twice dived in off the gantry fully-dressed, and swum an antique trudgeon up and down, pursued by his staff’s respectable jokes. He did it to demonstrate to himself his spontaneity and casual disregard of convention, and because he had a complete change of clothes in the locker room, and also because a bellyflop stung much less if you were wearing a suit.