What they were trying to do was to time the various sections of the visit against a stop-watch, since the Coordinating Committee was advised by the Sub-Committee on Timing that these occasions always had to be rehearsed down to the last second. But it was not easy. The ‘Balmoral’ scissors, the jewelled switch, the gas-fired golden taper, and all the rest of the equipment had not yet arrived from the Empire Ceremonial Supply Company, and there was still no apparatus of any sort in the new wing itself. The missing links were replaced by a variety of more or less unsatisfactory substitutes and hypotheses, as were all the official guests whose hands would have to be shaken on the day, and one or two of the senior staff, like Nunn and Macintosh, who were impressive enough not to be argued with when they said they were too busy to attend. So, for the sake of rehearsals, Rowe was Vulgurian, Riddle was Nunn, and Goldwasser was Macintosh, which meant that Plushkov had to be Riddle and Haugh Goldwasser. No, Riddle had to be Goldwasser, and . . . or was it Rowe who was Goldwasser?

The only point on which everyone was clear was that the principal deficiency, the Queen herself, was being supplied by Nobbs. He was not an ideal surrogate sovereign, or even a willing one, but when the Joint Committee for Understudying had appealed to Heads of Departments to spare someone for the job, Goldwasser had spared Nobbs before anyone else could think.

Now Goldwasser was regretting his generosity. It was bad enough to have Nobbs about the laboratory all day, humping his resentful bag of ill-articulated bones back and forth, catching the corners of desks with his thighs and knocking them slightly out of line. But to spend his days shaking Nobbs’s limp hand over and over again, and calling him ‘ma’am,’ was less agreeable still. As the rehearsals wore on, Goldwasser became increasingly concerned about the hand’s remarkable limpness. So far as Goldwasser could tell, it was not exactly a natural limpness. Nobbs kept his hand limp when he shook hands because he had read that the firm grasp he had affected as an adolescent to create the impression of a strong character was merely an affectation designed to create the impression of a strong character. But then Nobbs wore a beard because he had read that since it was generally believed that only men with weak chins wore beards, no one with a weak chin would wear a beard for fear of being thought to have a weak chin; therefore, it could be deduced that anyone who wore a beard had in fact a strong chin; and in this way Nobbs grew a beard to hide his weak chin. Or so Goldwasser believed. Altogether there was something about Nobbs that was two-faced – or not so much two-faced as three-faced, with one face watching the other two.