‘But,’ said Rowe, ‘the spectator enjoys watching.’

‘He may, I suppose, but that’s rather beside the point. The hydraulic press operator who is replaced by a computer when his factory is automated may enjoy operating a hydraulic press. But that doesn’t save him from being replaced. A human being, my dear Rowe, is far too complex and expensive an instrument to be wasted on simple finite tasks like operating presses, filling up football pools, and watching cricket. The whole world of sport, I believe, will gradually become an entirely enclosed one, unvisited by any human being except the maintenance engineers. Computers will play. Computers will watch. Computers will comment. Computers will store results, and pit their memories against other computers in sports quiz programmes on the television organised by computers and watched by computers.’

‘Y-e-e-e-s,’ said Rowe.

‘Still, that’s all your department. I expect you have all this covered already.’

‘Well, you know . . .’

‘There’s lots to do, Rowe. I’m hog-tied by my Samaritan programme, as you know, but if I had the time to move into my new wing I’d like to take over some of the work Riddle and Plushkov are doing in the Political and International Affairs departments. If diplomacy and party politics were conducted by computers, Rowe, there’d be much less danger of them being deflected from sound old preconceived ideas by intransigent realities. That’s how I should like to see our affairs conducted, because that’s the way I’m made myself. I have a strange drive to monomania, Rowe, a subconscious desire to be automatable.’

‘I see.’

‘Then again, I’d rather like to open a Rituals Department. If only I had the time! We could do everything from the Trooping the Colour and the Honours Lists, down to the official opening of the new wing. Oh, the money and time and manpower we could save! And the unspeakable load of boredom we could lift from people’s shoulders! But, then, if only I had the time to go into the new wing, there’s no end to the things I could start programming. One of my pet projects is a programme for eliminating middlemen from the distributive trades by calculating their usual profit for them without the need to have them involved. And have I told you about my idea of programming a computer to write pornographic novels? They’re all permutations of a very small range of finite variables – you could do it on quite a simple computer. Or sex manuals – even fewer basic possibilities, and an apparently insatiable market for permutations of them. Still, I think I prefer pornography myself. It has a certain stark, logical grandeur which I enjoy – among other things, of course.’

‘Yes,’ said Rowe. His mind, when Macintosh stopped speaking, went on to traverse great terrains of still unthought thoughts. It was tumultuous, raging country. If he could just struggle to a vantage point and look down on it quietly for a moment he could map it out in words. Far wilder regions than even Macintosh had explored, their fantastic contours almost clear to the inward eye. If he could just . . . just . . .