For a start they had formed something of a democratic bloc. But Macintosh had entirely lost interest in the whole question after two meetings. Goldwasser remained interested in theory, but could not make his mind run slow enough to remain in contact with the actual progress of the committees’ business, and over and over again found himself emerging from a day-dream about the cube root of the speed of light to hear Mrs. Plushkov saying: ‘. . . take that as generally agreed? Minute it, then, will you, Miss Fram?’ Haugh, of course, could always see the force of the other side’s arguments, and Riddle, it was felt, was becoming a little boring in her vociferous opposition to everything. Depressed by the Chiddingfold incident, and by the somewhat ambiguous state in which her relations with Goldwasser had been left by the events around the waste-paper basket, she even felt she was boring herself.

And Rowe’s views were changing. It was no longer totally obvious to him that it was ludicrous to erect crush-barriers outside the Institute and assemble local crowds to put behind them. If he began to think, the people who got things done did in fact get things done they could not be the fools that people who did not have to get things done sometimes took them for. If, they got things done they must be fairly sound and reasonable people. And if they were fairly sound and reasonable people, the things they got done must be fairly sound and reasonable things to do.

The whole field of arguments both For and Against had always seemed to him to be incredibly confused. He wasn’t exactly sure, he realised when he put a snap question to himself in the middle of the night, what the arguments were for and against. He couldn’t see exactly where the arguments for left off and the arguments against started. Or rather, he could see some of the arguments on both sides. Or to be even more precise, he could almost see some of the arguments on both sides.

The only thing he could see with absolute clarity in this wild lunar landscape was himself. There he stood, he could see, making sense of the terrible complexities around him with a hard intellectual pertinacity and an engaging modesty. ‘Devastating analysis of the problems of our time,’ said the extracts from the reviews that seemed to hang in the sky above the chaos below. ‘A refreshing ability to go straight to the heart of the matter.’ ‘Here is a man who refuses to be fooled.’

Around this sharply-etched central figure other, slightly less well-defined faces could be discerned among the tangled thickets of argument. Macintosh, Plushkov, Chiddingfold, Nunn – they all looked to him hopefully for a lead. He found himself backing away from the thickets containing Riddle and Goldwasser. There was something about them . . . well, something that didn’t exactly inspire confidence. Not their sexual eccentricities, of course. It could scarcely be that, seeing that he was a man of whom the reviewers had written – or would write, as soon as the opportunity arose – ‘His broad understanding of the world of human nature is proverbial.’ There were enough small high breasts in his novel to guarantee his broad-mindedness on that score. But there was something about them that was not quite sound. Those petitions that Riddle put about, for instance. Not really the sort of thing sound people did. And Goldwasser. It was difficult to pin down exactly what he objected to about Goldwasser. He had an intuitive feeling that he was not a very good judge of literature. Then again, there was something rather flippant about him. He was a man whose loyalty to his friends could not in certain circumstances be relied on. Well, to put it rather crudely, he was not a man to whom one would want to show, say, a book on which one was working.