Nevertheless, she did fight it every inch of the way, and in most of the committees that had anything to do with the matter she eventually won. It was, so she, Goldwasser, Macintosh, and Rowe agreed, a famous victory for the forces of reason.

All the same both the red plush ropes and the dense screen of indoor vegetation were ordered from the contractors. It was Miss Fram, Nunn’s secretary, who was actually responsible for putting the recommendations of the various committees into effect, and she didn’t take too much notice of what committees said. Everyone knew that committees were not very good at this sort of thing. And it seemed to Miss Fram that though the visit ought to be an informal one, informality should not be taken to the point where the Queen would find herself greeted by a fusillade of crab sandwiches and empty liquor bottles.

9

‘Yes,’ said Rowe thoughtfully, ‘yes.’ He might not be as intelligent as Macintosh, he reflected, and in conversation with Macintosh he might not say very much, but at least what he did say was said only after hard and sincere thought. Looking at Macintosh across their empty coffee-cups in the Tea Room at the Institute, he wondered whether he had said enough to make Macintosh fully aware of the fierce intensity of his thought. ‘Yes,’ he said again, as if the words being dragged from him were the sole survivors of an exhausting civil war among themselves, ‘yes.’

‘I like to philosophise a little,’ said Macintosh. ‘As you know, I like to reflect a little on the terrifying grandeur of our work, the sadness and the hugeness of it all.’

‘Yes,’ said Rowe.

‘Take your department, Rowe, Now, you’re producing a programme which will permit all the bingo games in the country to be run simultaneously from one central computer. Well, that’s obvious. It had to come. There’s nothing very revolutionary about putting such a purely mechanical process of randomising and correlating out to a computer.’

‘No, no.’

‘Then you’ll start producing a programme for automating the football results. Again, it had to come. Professional football is becoming increasingly uneconomic, but the pools industry has to carry on somehow. It doesn’t take even the stupidest wee businessman long to see that paying twenty-two men to do nothing but make a random choice between win, lose, and draw is economic madness. Once you’ve done football it won’t take people long to see that you can replace all the racecourses in the country with one quite simple and inexpensive computer. And of course cricket. When takings at the gate have fallen low enough to cure any tendency to sentiment, people will notice that a computer is a far more suitable tool than a cricket team for producing a complex score sheet from the variables of ground moisture, light, surface wear on ball, fallibility of wicket-keeper, and so on. In fact all the complex mass of statistics produced by the sports industry can without exception be produced not only more economically by computer, but also with more significant patterns and more amazing freaks. I take it that the main object of organised sports and games is to produce a profusion of statistics?’