‘Well, I hope that meets all your objections to Samaritan I,’ said Macintosh. ‘You see it didn’t even attempt to sacrifice itself for the sandbag.’

‘I see that,’ said Goldwasser. ‘But Macintosh, the only result was that they both went to the bottom.’

‘Oh, Goldwasser,’ said Macintosh, ‘you’re just a rotten cynic.’

5

Nunn put the squash racket he had been flexing down on his desk. He took the opportunity of being at the desk to look up the date of Henley. Then he selected a club from the golf bag in the corner of the office and began practising drives from a tee planted among the parched pile of the carpet.

Nunn was a reasonable man. He knew that the decision-­making faculties of a professional decision-maker like himself had to be nursed. He therefore left all the routine work to his secretary, Miss Fram, and devoted his day to keeping fit. He kept fit with games. He followed a carefully planned schedule of playing games, preparing to play games, washing off the effects of playing games, watching other people play games, talking about playing games, and thinking about talking about playing games. While Miss Fram toiled in the outer office, revising superannuation schemes, engaging laboratory staff, and bargaining with union representatives about differentials in the Tea Room kitchen, Nunn oiled a cricket bat within, occasionally breaking off to ask Miss Fram to get him tickets for the police boxing championships, or to run round to the sports shop and fetch him another dozen shuttlecocks. That way he kept very fresh for when the really big decisions came along.

Anyway, games were important in another way. They gave him something to talk to his subordinates about. He was not, as he often pointed out, a computer man himself. He had spent most of his life as an army intelligence officer, stamping on the toes of obscure agitators in obscure territories, an activity which had given him a good practical grounding in human administration and man management. As an administrator, he found the subject of games was one you could talk to anybody about. He had talked about it to the private soldiers under his command. He had talked about it to the agitators he was interrogating to set them at their ease before he stamped on their toes. He talked about it to all the Heads of Departments at the Institute. Tommies, darkies, long-haired intellectuals – they were all much of a muchness. Talk about games to them and they were all reduced to helpless silence.

He also talked about games to the Director, a practice which involved both the main axes of his life. Nunn put down his golf club and tiptoed across the carpet to a door in one corner which communicated with the Director’s office. He bent down and looked through the keyhole. The Director was sitting at his desk – a large, awkward man sitting at a desk with highly polished and completely empty top. Nunn peered at him with awe. The massive body was entirely immobile. The elbows were rested on the table, the fingers locked together, and the lips pursed against the thumbs, as if the Director was about to imitate the cry of an owl. The small, pale blue eyes gazed out from the large head at a spot about three-quarters of the way along the surface of the desk, just short of the formal penholder. It was impossible to guess what prodigies of automational, philosophical, cybernetic, semantic, organisational, and indeed cosmological thought were taking place inside that massive head. He was clearly a man of heroic attributes, though their exact nature was lost in the sheer loftiness of the whole. Indeed, one of his few known attributes – and it required a definite mental effort to remember that he had any – was his name, which was Chiddingfold.