2

The whole of the William Morris Institute of Automation Research rang with the bongling and goingling of steel scaffolding poles being thrown down from a great height. The new Ethics Wing was almost finished. It was not before time. The noise and other inconveniences caused by the building of it had considerably reduced the amount of automation the Institute had researched into during the past two years. Experts had calculated that if the revolutionary new computer programmes being designed at the Institute had gone ahead without interruption, they should have put some two million professional men out of work over the course of the next ten years. Now there was a risk that some of these two million would still find themselves in work, or at any rate only partly out of work. But then, said the optimists, for progress to be made someone always had to suffer.

Dr. Goldwasser, the Head of the Newspaper Department, was suffering already. Each fresh bongle or goingle made him jump and each time he jumped he became more irritated. He didn’t want his staff to see him jumping, in case they thought he had weak nerves. On the other hand, he didn’t want them to see him making a fourth trip within three hours to the lavatory, where it was quiet, in case they thought he had a weak bladder.

He looked restlessly out of the window, to see if he could see how other people were coping. The only other person he could see was Rowe, the Head of the Sport Department, in his laboratory on the other side of the courtyard. Rowe seemed to be absorbed, which probably meant he was at work not on the automation of sport, but on the novel he was said to be writing. He alternately bent over his desk, pulling locks of hair over his eyes, and gazed vacantly out of his window, screwing his little finger around inside his right ear. At intervals he removed the finger and inspected it absently, as if he hoped he might have brought up traces of oil or uranium ore. Goldwasser was rather impressed by the spectacle of creation actually taking place, and after a bit found himself screwing his little finger around inside his right ear in sympathy.

He wondered if he should go along and drop in for a chat with Rowe. It could be quite strengthening. Rowe was certainly less clever than himself, and it had come to the point, Gold­wasser tacitly­ admitted, where he found it definitely helpful to his morale to talk to people he was absolutely sure were less clever than he was. Not stupid people, to whom he was unable to say anything at all, but to clever people who were just not quite clever enough to be challenging. It left a wide field of potential comforters – almost everyone in the Institute except Macintosh, the Head of the Ethics Department.

Agh! Macintosh! He was Goldwasser’s closest friend, and the very thought of him filled Goldwasser with a warm, familiar irritation. He irritated Goldwasser in two ways – sometimes by seeming to be too stupid to talk to, and sometimes by seeming to be possibly cleverer than Goldwasser. Even more irritating than either state was the ambiguity of fluctuating between the two.