Macintosh allowed himself to be piqued by this comparison. He let himself be piqued from time to time when he considered that Goldwasser had passed a certain reasonable bound of destructiveness in his criticism, in the belief that an occasional dose of pique was good for Goldwasser. He stopped speaking to him, and passed into the usual channels an anonymous minute appointing Goldwasser the chairman of a committee to install experiments in the new wing.

The information passed back and forth about the administrative machine, and it was some time before it reached Goldwasser himself. As soon as he heard, he hurried across to Macintosh’s laboratory to tell him about it.

The noise in the Ethics Department was worse than ever. Goldwasser could hear it, like a football crowd trapped inside a bathroom, even as he was crossing the courtyard. When he got inside the door he saw why. The sides of the test tank were crowded with shouting spectators. Not only the staff of the department, but the Institute’s gardener, some of the cleaning women, and a great number of secretaries and lab boys from other departments. As Goldwasser struggled to find a way through them, to see what they were shouting about, it occurred to him that a considerable number of the people who were elbowing him back with such impersonal rudeness had no connection with the Institute at all.

‘What’s all this?’ he asked a young man called Gaunt, a junior technician from his own department.

‘Oh, hallo,’ said Gaunt. ‘It’s the Samaritan IVs.’

‘Get in there, boy!’ shouted a weatherbeaten little man just in front of Goldwasser. ‘Hurt him, boy! What are you waiting for, lad?’

‘Walk over him!’ roared another man, wearing an unbuttoned grey trench-coat with the belt hanging down, just behind Goldwasser. ‘Tread on him! Stamp on him!’

By the time Goldwasser had edged through to a sight of the tank the crowd was silent. It seemed to be some sort of lull. In the water one of the test rafts bobbed up and down, with a machine labelled Samaritan IV aboard it.

Suddenly Goldwasser realised there was something in the water next to the raft, wallowing darkly. A pair of variometer dials rose briefly above the surface and gazed vacantly at the crowd for a moment. It was another Samaritan IV.

‘What the devil . . . ?’ whispered Goldwasser to the weatherbeaten man.

‘He’s finished,’ said the man. ‘The referee ought to stop the fight.’

But just at that moment, with a great silver plume of water, the Samaritan overboard hurled itself at the raft and seized its fellow by the base-plate. The crowd roared. The Samaritan on the raft began to belabour the other one about the dials. At each crash or clank the crowd shouted louder.

‘Look at him!’ bellowed the man in the trench-coat to Goldwasser. ‘Isn’t he a lovely, scientific fighter?’