`I mean, animals may not be intelligent, but they're not as stupid as a lot of human beings. You look at the primate areas in some zoos which are equipped with metal green architect-designed `trees' which, in a minimalist sort of way, reproduce the shape of the tree, but don't actually include any of the features that a monkey might find interesting about a tree: leaves and bark and stuff. It may look like a tree to an architect, but architects are a lot more stupid than monkeys. We just got a brochure through from the States for exactly this - fibreglass trees. The whole brochure was designed to show us how proud they were of what they could sell us here in Mauritius, and showing the particular paints they had for painting lichen on trees. I mean it's bloody ridiculous, who are these people? OK. Let's feed the bird. You watching?
The bird was watching. It's hard to avoid saying that it was watching like a hawk. It was watching like a kestrel.
Richard swung his arm back. The kestrel's head followed his movement precisely. With a wide underarm swing Richard lobbed the small mouse high up into the air. For a second or so, the kestrel just watched it, jittering its legs very slightly on the branch as it engaged in monumental feats of differential calculus. The mouse reached the top of its steep parabola, its tiny dead weight turning slowly in the air.
At last the kestrel dropped from its perch, and swung out into the air as if on the end of a long pendulum, the precise length, pivotal position and swing speed of which the kestrel had calculated. The arc it described intersected sweetly with that of the falling mouse, the kestrel took the mouse cleanly into its talons, swept on up into another nearby tree and bit its head off.
'He eats the head himself,' said Richard, `and takes the rest of the mouse to the female in the nest.'
We fed the kestrel a few more mice, sometimes throwing them in the air, and sometimes leaving them on the hemispherical rock for it to dive for at its leisure. At last the bird was fed up and we left.
The term `fed up' actually comes from falconry. Most of the vocabulary of falconry comes from middle English, and zoologists have adopted a lot of it.
For instance 'Teeking' describes the process by which the bird cleans its beak of meat after eating, by rubbing it along a branch. `Mutes' are the white trails along cliffs where the bird has been sitting. These are more normally called `bird droppings' of course, but in falconry talk they're `mutes'. `Rousing' is the action of shaking its wings and body, which is generally a sign that the bird is feeling very comfortable and relaxed.
When you train a falcon you train it by hunger, using it as a tool to manipulate the bird's psychology. So when the bird has had too much to eat it won't co-operate and gets annoyed by any attempts to tell it what to do. It simply sits in the top of a tree and sulks. It is `fed up'.
Richard became extremely fed up that evening, and with reason. It was nothing to do with eating too much, though it had a little to do with what other people liked to eat. A Mauritian friend came round to see him and brought her boss with her, a Frenchman from the nearby island of Reunion who was visiting the island for a few days and staying with her.
His name was Jacques, and we all took an instant dislike to him, but none so strongly as Richard, who detested him on sight.
He was a Frenchman of the dapper, arrogant type. He had lazy supercilious eyes, a lazy, supercilious smile and, as Richard later put it, a lazy, supercilious, and terminally stupid brain.
Jacques arrived at the house and stood around looking lazy and supercilious. He clearly did not quite know what he was doing in this house. It was not a very elegant house. It was full of battered, second-hand furniture, and had pictures of birds stuck all over the walls with drawing pins. He obviously wanted to slouch moodily against a wall, but could not find a wall that he was prepared to put his shoulder to, so he had to slouch moodily where he was standing.
We offered him a beer, and he took one with the best grace he could muster. He asked us what we were doing here, and we said we were making a programme for the BBC and writing a book about the wildlife of Mauritius.
`But why? he said, in a puzzled tone. `There is nothing here.'
Richard showed admirable restraint at first. He explained quite coolly that some of the rarest birds in the world were to be found on Mauritius. He explained that that was what he and Carl and the others were there for: to protect and study and breed them.
Jacques shrugged and said that they weren't particularly interesting or special.
'Oh?' said Richard, quietly.
`Nothing with any interesting plumage.'
`Really? said Richard.
'I prefer something like the Arabian cockatoo,' said Jacques with a lazy smile.
'Do you.'
'Me, I live on Reunion,' said Jacques.
`Do you.,
'There are certainly no interesting birds there,' said Jacques.
`That's because the French have shot them all,' said Richard.
He turned around smartly and went off into the kitchen to wash up, very, very loudly. Only when Jacques had gone did he return. He stalked back into the room carrying an unopened bottle of rum and slammed himself into the corner of a battered old sofa.
`About five years ago,' he said, 'we took twenty of the pink pigeons that we had bred at the centre and released them into the wild. I would estimate that in terms of the time, work and resources we had put into them they had cost us about a thousand pounds per bird. But that's not the issue. The issue is holding on to the unique life of this island. But within a short time all of those birds we had bred were in casseroles. Couldn't believe it. We just couldn't believe it.
'Do you understand what's happening to this island? It's a mess. It's a complete ruin. In the fifties it was drenched with DDT which found its way straight into the food chain. That killed off a lot of animals. Then the island was hit with cyclones. Well, we can't help that, but they hit an island that was already terribly weakened by all the DDT and logging, so they did irreparable damage. Now with the continued logging and burning of the forest there's only ten per cent left, and they're cutting that down for deer hunting. What's left of the unique species of Mauritius is being overrun by stuff that you can find all over the world - privet, guava, all this crap.
`Here, look at this.'
He handed the bottle to us. It was a locally brewed rum called Green Island.
`Read what it says on the bottle.'
Underneath a romantic picture of an old sailing ship approaching an idyllic tropical island was a quotation from Mark Twain, which read, 'You gather the idea that Mauritius was made first and then heaven; and that heaven was copied after Mauritius.'
'That was less than a hundred years ago,' said Richard. `Since then just about everything that shouldn't be done to an island has been done to Mauritius. Except perhaps nuclear testing.'
There is one island in the Indian Ocean, close to Mauritius, which is miraculously unspoilt, and that is Round Island. In fact it isn't a miracle at all, there's a very simple reason for it, which we discovered when we talked to Carl and Richard about going there.
You can't,' said Carl. `Well, you can try, but I doubt if you'd manage it.'
°Why not?' I asked.
'Waves. You know, the sea,' said Carl. 'Goes like this.' He made big heaving motions with his arms.
`It's extremely difficult to get on,' said Richard. 'It has no beaches or harbours. You can only go there on very calm days, and even then you have to jump from the boat to the island. It's quite dangerous. You've got to judge it exactly right or you'll get thrown against the rocks. We haven't lost anybody yet, but...'
They almost lost me.
We hitched a ride on a boat trip with some naturalists going to Round Island, anchored about a hundred yards from the rocky coastline and ferried ourselves across in a dinghy to the best thing that Round island has to offer by way of a landing spot - a slippery outcrop called Pigeon House Rock.
A couple of men in wetsuits first leapt out of the dinghy into the tossing sea, swam to the rock, climbed with difficulty up the side of it and at last slithered, panting on to the top.
Everyone else in turn then made the trip across in the dinghy, three or four at a time. To land, you had to make the tricky jump across on to the rock, matching the crests of the incoming waves to the top of the rock, and leaping just an instant before the wave reached its height, so that the boat was still bearing you upwards. Those already on the rock would be tugging at the dinghy's rope, shouting instructions and encouragement over the crashing of the waves, then catching and hauling people as they jumped.
I was to be the last one to land.
By this time the sea swell was getting heavier and rougher, and it was suggested that I should land on the other side of the rock, where it was a lot steeper but a little less obviously slippery with algae.
I tried it. I leaped from the edge of the heaving boat, lunged for the rock, found it to be every bit as slippery as the other side, merely much steeper, and slithered gracelessly down it into the sea, grazing my legs and arms against the jagged edges. The sea closed over my head. I thrashed about under the surface trying desperately to get my head up, but the dinghy was directly above me, and kept bashing me against the rockface whenever I tried to make for the surface.
OK, I thought, I've got the point. This is why the island is relatively unspoilt. I made one more lunge upwards, just as those on shore succeeded at last in pushing the boat away from me. This allowed me to get my head up above water and cling on to a crack in the rock. With a lot more slipping and sliding and thrashing in the heavy swell I managed finally to manoeuvre myself up to within arm's reach of Mark and the others, who yanked me urgently up and on to the rock. I sat in a spluttering, bleeding heap protesting that I was fine and all I needed was a quiet corner to go and die in and everything would be all right.
The sea had been swelling heavily for the two or three hours it had taken us to reach the island and it seemed as if my stomach had heaved something approaching my entire body weight into the sea, so by this time I was feeling pretty wobbly and strung out and my day on Round island passed in rather a blur. While Mark went with Wendy Strahm, the botanist, to try and find some of the species of plants and animals that exist only here on this single island, I went and sat in the sun near a palm tree called Beverly and felt dazed and sorry for myself.
I knew that the palm tree was called Beverly because Wendy told me that was what she had christened it. It was a bottle palm, so called because it is shaped like a Chianti bottle, and it was one of the eight that remain on Round Island, the only eight wild ones in the world.
Who on earth, I wondered, as I sat next to Beverly in a sort of companionable gloom, gets to name the actual islands?
I mean, here was one of the most amazing islands in the world. It looked utterly extraordinary, as if the moon itself was rising from the sea - except that where the moon would be cold and still, this was hot and darting with life. Though it appeared to be dusty and barren at first sight, the craters with which the surface was pocked were full of dazzling white-tailed tropicbirds, brilliant Telfair's skinks and Guenther's geckos.
You would think that if you had to come up with a name for an island like this you'd invite a couple of friends round, get some wine and make an evening of it. Not just say, oh it's a little bit round, let's call it `Round Island'. Apart from anything else it isn't even particularly round. There was another island just visible on the horizon, which was much more nearly round, but that is called Serpent Island, presumably to honour the fact that, unlike Round island, it hasn't got any snakes on it. And there was yet another island I could see which sloped steadily from a peak at one end down to the sea at the other, and that, unaccountably, was called Flat Island. I began to see that whoever had named the islands probably had made a bit of an evening of it after all.
The reason that Round island has remained a refuge for unique species of skinks, geckos, boas, palm trees, and even grasses that died out long ago on Mauritius is not simply that it is hard for man to get on to the island, but that it has proved completely impossible for rats to get ashore. Round Island is one of the largest tropical islands in the world (at a bit over three hundred acres) on which rats do not occur.
Not that Round Island is undamaged - far from it. A hundred and fifty years ago, before sailors introduced goats and rabbits on to the island, it was covered in hardwood forest, which the foreign animals destroyed. That is why from a distance and to the untutored eye, such as mine, the island appeared to be more or less barren at first sight. Only a naturalist would be able to tell you that the few odd-shaped palms and clumps of grass dotted about the place on the hot, dry, dusty land were unique and unspeakably precious.
Precious to whom? And why?
Does it actually matter very much to anyone other than a bunch of obsessed naturalists that the eight bottle palm trees on Round Island are the only ones to be found in the wild anywhere in the world? Or that the Hyophorbe amarfcaulis (a palm tree so rare that it doesn't have any name other than its scientific one) standing in the Curepipe Botanic Gardens in Mauritius is the only one of its kind in existence? (The tree was only discovered by chance while the ground on which it stands was being cleared in order to construct the Botanic Gardens. It was about to be cut down.)
There is no `tropical island paradise' I know of which remotely matches up to the fantasy ideal that such a phrase is meant to conjure up, or even to what we find described in holiday brochures. It's natural to put this down to the discrepancy we are all used to finding between what advertisers promise and what the real world delivers. It doesn't surprise us much any more.
So it can come as a shock to realise that the world we hear described by travellers of previous centuries (or even previous decades) and biologists of today really did exist. The state it's in now is only the result of what we've done to it, and the mildness of the disappointment we feel when we arrive somewhere and find that it's a bit tatty is only a measure of how far our own expectations have been degraded and how little we understand what we've lost. The people who do understand what we've lost are the ones who are rushing around in a frenzy trying to save the bits that are left.
The system of life on this planet is so astoundingly complex that it was a long time before man even realised that it was a system at all and that it wasn't something that was just there.
To understand how anything very complex works, or even to know that there is something complex at work, man needs to see little tiny bits of it at a time. And this is why small islands have been so important to our understanding of life. On the Galapagos islands, for instance, animals and plants which shared the same ancestors began to change and adapt in different ways once they were divided from each other by a few miles of water. The islands neatly separated out the component parts of the process for us, and it was thus that Charles Darwin was able to make the observations which led directly to the idea of Evolution.
The island of Mauritius gave us an equally important but more sombre idea - extinction.
The most famous of all the animals of Mauritius is a large, gentle dove. A remarkably large dove, in fact: its weight is closest to that of a well-fed turkey. Its wings long ago gave up the idea of lifting such a plumpy off the ground, and withered away into decorative little stumps. Once it gave up flying it could adapt itself very well to the Mauritian seasonal cycle, and stuff itself silly in the late summer and autumn, when fruit is lying rich on the ground, and then live on its fat reserves, gradually losing weight, during the leaner, dry months.
It didn't need to fly anyway, since there were no predators that wished it any harm and it, in turn, is harmless itself. In fact the whole idea of harm is something it has never learnt to understand, so if you were to see one on the beach it would be quite likely to walk right up to you and take a look, provided it could find a path through the armies of giant tortoises parading round the beach. There's never even been any reason for humans to kill it because its meat is tough and bitter.
It has a large, wide, downturned bill of yellow and green, which gives it a slightly glum and melancholic look, small, round eyes like diamonds, and three ridiculously little plumes sticking out of its tail. One of the first Englishmen to see this large dove said that 'for shape and rareness it might antagonise the Phoenix of Arabia'.
None of us will ever see this bird, though, because, sadly, the last one was clubbed to death by Dutch colonists in about 1680.
The giant tortoises were eaten to extinction because the early sailors regarded them much as we regard canned food. They just picked them off the beach and put them on their ships as ballast, and then, if they felt hungry they'd go down to the hold, pull one up, kill it and eat it.
But the large, gentle dove - the dodo - was just clubbed to death for the sport of it. And that is what Mauritius is most famous for: the extinction of the dodo.
There had been extinctions before, but this was a particularly remarkable animal, and it only lived in the naturally limited area of the island of Mauritius. There were, very clearly and obviously, no more of them. And since only dodos could make a new dodo, there never would be any more of them ever again. The facts were very clearly and starkly delineated for us by the boundaries of the island.
Up until that point it hadn't really clicked with man that an animal could just cease to exist. It was as if we hadn't realised that if we kill something, it simply won't be there any more. Ever. As a result of the extinction of the dodo we are sadder and wiser.
We finally made it to Rodrigues, a small island dependency of Mauritius, to look for the world's rarest fruitbat, but first of all we went to look at something that Wendy Strahm was very keen for us to see - so much so that she rearranged her regular Rodrigues-visiting schedule to take us there herself.
By the side of a hot and dusty road there was a single small bushy tree that looked as if it had been put in a concentration camp.
The plant was a kind of wild coffee called Ramus mania, and it had been believed to be totally extinct. Then, in 1981, a teacher from Mauritius called Raymond Aquis was teaching at a school in Rodrigues and gave his class pictures of about ten plants that were thought to be extinct on Mauritius.
One of the children put up his hand and said, 'Please, sir, we've got this growing in our back garden.'
At first it was hard to believe, but they took a branch of it and sent it to Kew where it was identified. It was wild coffee.
The plant was standing by the side of the road, right by the traffic and in considerable danger because any plant in Rodrigues is considered fair game for firewood. So they put a fence round it to stop it being cut down.
Immediately they did this, however, people started thinking, 'Aha, this is a special plant,' and they climbed over the fence and started to take off little branches and leaves and pieces of bark. Because the tree was obviously special, everybody wanted a piece of it and started to ascribe remarkable properties to it - it would cure hangovers and gonorrhoea. Since not much goes on in Rodrigues other than home entertainments it quickly became a very sought-after plant, and it was rapidly being killed by having bits cut off it.
The first fence was soon rendered useless and a barbed wire fence was put around that. Then another barbed wire fence had to be put around the first barbed wire fence, and then a third barbed wire fence had to be put around the second till the whole compound covered a half acre. Then a guard was installed to watch the plant as well.
With cuttings from this one plant Kew Gardens is currently trying to root and cultivate two new plants, in the hope that it might then be possible to reintroduce them into the wild. Until they succeed, this single plant standing within its barbed wire barricades will be the only representative of its species on earth, and it will continue to need protecting from everyone who is prepared to kill it in order to have a small piece. It's easy to think that as a result of the extinction of the dodo we are now sadder and wiser, but there's a lot of evidence to suggest that we are merely sadder and better informed.
At dusk that day we stood by the side of another road, where we had been told we would have a good view, and watched as the world's rarest fruitbats left their roost in the forest and flapped across the darkening sky to make their nightly forage among the fruit trees.
The bats are doing just fine. There are hundreds of them.
I have a terrible feeling that we are in trouble.

Sifting through the  embers

There's a story I heard when I was young which bothered me because I couldn't understand it. It was many years before I discovered it to be the story of the Sybilline books. By that time all the details of the story had rewritten themselves in my mind, but the essentials were still the same. After a year of exploring some of the endangered environments of the world I think I finally understand it.
It concerns an ancient city - it doesn't matter where it was or what it was called - it was a thriving, prosperous city set in the middle of a large plain. One summer, while the people of the city were busy thriving and prospering away, a strange old beggar woman arrived at the gates carrying twelve large books, which she offered to sell to them. She said that the books contained all the knowledge and all the wisdom of the world, and that she would let the city have all twelve of them in return for a single sack of gold.
The people of the city thought this was a very funny idea. They said she obviously had no conception of the value of gold and that probably the best thing was for her to go away again.
This she agreed to do, but first, she said, she was going to destroy half of the books in front of them. She built a small bonfire, burnt six of the books of all knowledge and all wisdom in the sight of the people of the city and then went on her way.
Winter came and went, a hard winter, but the city just about managed to flourish through it and then, the following summer the old woman was back.
'Oh, you again,' said the people of the city. 'How's the knowledge and wisdom going??
'Six books,' she said, `just six left. Half of all the knowledge and wisdom in the world. Once again I am offering to sell them to you.'
'Oh yes?' sniggered the people of the city.
`Only the price has changed.'
`Not surprised.'
`Two sacks of gold.'
'What?
'Two sacks of gold for the six remaining books of knowledge and wisdom. Take it or leave it.'
'It seems to us,' said the people of the city, `that you can't be very wise or knowledgeable yourself or you would realise that you can't just go around quadrupling an already outrageous price in a buyer's market. If that's the sort of knowledge and wisdom you're peddling then, frankly, you can keep it at any price.'
'Do you want them or not?'
No.
`very well. I will trouble you for a little firewood.'
She built another bonfire, and burnt three of the remaining books in front of them and then set off back across the plain.
That night one or two curious people from the city sneaked out and sifted through the embers to see if they could salvage the odd page or two, but the fire had burnt very thoroughly and the old woman had raked the ashes. There was nothing.
Another hard winter took its toll on the city and they had a little trouble with famine and disease, but trade was good and they were in reasonably good shape again by the following summer when, once again, the old woman appeared.
`You're early this year,' they said to her.
`Less to carry,' she explained, showing them the three books she was still carrying. `A quarter of all the knowledge and wisdom in the world. Do you want it?'
`What's the price?'
`Four sacks of gold.'
'You're completely mad, old woman. Apart from anything else our economy's going through a bit of a sticky patch at the moment. Sacks of gold are completely out of the question.'
`Firewood, please.'
`Now wait a minute,' said the people of the city, `this isn't doing anybody any good. We've been thinking about all this and we've put together a small committee to have a look at these books of yours. Let us evaluate them for a few months, see if they're worth anything to us, and when you come back next year perhaps we can put in some kind of a reasonable offer. We are not talking sacks of gold here, though.'
The old woman shook her head. 'No,' she said. `Bring me the firewood.'
'It'll cost you.'
`No matter,' said the woman, with a shrug. `The books will burn quite well by themselves.'
So saying, she set about shredding two of the books into pieces which then burnt easily. She set off swiftly across the plain and left the people of the city to face another year.
She was back in the late spring.
`Just the one left,' she said, putting it down on the ground in front of her. `So I was able to bring my own firewood.'
`How much?' said the people of the city.
`Sixteen sacks of gold.'
'We'd only budgeted for eight.'
`Take it or leave it.'
'Wait here.'
The people of the city went off into a huddle and returned half an hour later.
`Sixteen sacks is all we've got left,' they pleaded. `Times are hard. You must leave us with something.'
The old woman just hummed to herself as she started to pile the kindling together.
`All right!' they cried at last, opened up the gates of the city and led out two oxcarts, each laden with eight sacks of gold, `but it had better be good.'
`Thank you,' said the old woman, `it is. And you should have seen the rest of it.'
She led the two oxcarts away across the plain with her, and left the people of the city to survive as best they could with the one remaining twelfth of all the knowledge and wisdom that had been in the world.

Mark's  last word ...

Was this really our last chance to see these animals? Unfortunately, there are too many unknowns for there to be a simple answer. With strenuous efforts in the field, the populations of some have actually begun to rise. But it is clear that if those efforts were suspended for a moment, the kakapos, the Yangtze river dolphins, the northern white rhinos and many others would vanish almost immediately.
Not that a large population necessarily guarantees an animal's future survival, as experience has shown many times in the past. The most famous example is the North American passenger pigeon, which was once the commonest bird that ever lived on earth. Yet it was hunted to extinction in little more than fifty years. We didn't learn any lessons from that experience: ten years ago, there were 1.3 million elephants in Africa, but so many have been killed by poachers that today no more than 600,000 are left.
On the other hand, even the smallest populations can be brought back from the brink. Juan Fernandez fur seal numbers dropped from millions to fewer than one hundred by 1965; today, there are three thousand. And in New Zealand in 1978, the population of Chatham island robins was down to one pregnant female, but the dedication of Don Merton and his team saved the species from extinction and there are now more than fifty.
The kakapo may also be on a slow road to recovery. Soon after we returned to England, we received the following letter from New Zealand:

P.O. Box 3 Stewart Island
Dear Douglas and Mark, I hope this reaches you quickly - I have some good news from kakapo country on southern Stewart Island At 08.45 hrs on 25 August 1989 one of our dog. handlers, Alan Munn, and his English setter `Ari' located a new female kakapo near Lees Knob, at an altitude of 380 metres. `Jane' weighed 1.25 kg and she scrarked a lot when Alan picked her up. She had just finished moulting but looked in good condition, so in a few days she will be flown to her new home - Codfish Island. Once again, thanks very much for your visit. It certainly helped give those Big Green Budgies some of the attention they deserve.
Yours sincerely,
Andy Roberts (kakapo project manager)
for R Tindal, District Conservator,
Department of Conservation, Rakiura.

We later received some further good news about the kakapos. Two more females have been found on Stewart Island and transferred to Codfish, bringing the total kakapo population up to forty-three.
Meanwhile, on little Barrier Island, several of the males there have been booming for the first time including, to everyone's delight, a nine-year-old called `Snark'. Born on Stewart Island in 1981, Snark was the only kakapo chick to have been seen by anyone this century.
But the best news of all was still to come. just before going to press, a very excited Don Merton telephoned to say that a newly made kakapo nest has just been found on Little Barrier island. Inside the nest, which was built by a nine-year-old female called `Heather', was a single kakapo egg.
Transferring kakapos to Little Barrier and Codfish Islands has been a calculated risk - but it is the only hope of saving the kakapo from extinction. Heather's nest is the first encouraging sign that the project is actually working and now everyone is waiting nervously to see if her egg will hatch and if she can raise the chick in her adopted home.
We also received a letter from Kes Hillman-Smith in Zaire to say that three baby northern white rhinos have been born in Garamba since we left, bringing the total population up to twenty-five. The enthusiastic park staff have named them 'Mpiko', meaning courage; `Molende', meaning perseverance; and `Minzoto', meaning a star.
It's important to recognise that not every conservation strategy necessarily works: we are often experimenting in the dark. During the early stages of the Garamba project a lot of pressure was put on the Zairois to have all of their northern white rhinos captured and taken into captivity. The government of Zaire would not agree to this. They said that the rhinos belong to them and they didn't want them to go to zoos in other parts of the world. Fortunately it seems that this was the right decision. Northern white rhinos, it turned out, do not breed well in captivity - the last one was born in -1982 - whereas more than ten have been born in the same period in the wild.
The news from Mauritius has been more mixed. The kestrels are doing well and Carl believes that there could now be as many as a hundred of them in the wild, including twelve breeding pairs. However, the population of truly wild pink pigeons has dropped to fewer than ten. Some of the pigeons that have been bred in captivity are being released again. So far, they have escaped the hunters and appear to be doing well.
As for the echo parakeets, at least one of them has died since we saw them, though some of the others have been attempting to breed. In November 1989, Carl found a parakeet nest with three eggs inside. One of these mysteriously disappeared soon afterwards, so he decided to risk removing the others to the captive breeding centre for safe-keeping. Both eggs hatched successfully and the chicks are fit and well.
Perhaps most important of all (for non-ornithologists) the wild population of Rodrigues fruitbats has just passed the one thousand mark.
In contrast, after the radio series had been broadcast, we received a disturbing letter from a couple who had been working in China:

Dear Douglas and Mark,
We enjoyed the Yangtze dolphin programme - but listened with a touch of guilt! We recently spent three months working in a number of factories in Nanjing. We had a wonderful time with the people and ate well. To honour us when we left, one of them cooked a Yangtze dolphin, so really there should be 201.
Sorry about that.

Yours,

PS Sorry, it was two dolphins - my husband reminds me that he was guest of honour and had the embryo.

There is probably little hope of saving the dolphins in the Yangtze river itself, despite all the time and effort invested in protecting them. Perhaps in semi-captivity, in the reserve at Tongling and the new one at Shi Shou, they will stand a chance - though it could never be the same as being wild and free. Meanwhile, of course, the noise and pollution continue.
No one knows how many other species are this close to extinction. We don't even know how many species of animals and plants there are altogether in the world. A staggering 1.4 million have been found and identified so far, but some experts believe that there are another 30 million yet to be discovered. It's not surprising when you consider that we know more about the surface of the moon than we do about parts of our own planet. Many animals and plants are disappearing even before we are aware of their existence, perhaps hidden away somewhere in the depths of an unexplored sea or in a quiet corner of a tropical rain forest.
And it's not only the tiny, obscure creatures that have managed to escape our attention. There have been some exciting new discoveries in the rainforests of Madagascar, for example, since Douglas and I were there looking for the aye-aye in 1985. Field researchers have found two new species of lemur: one, called the golden bamboo lemur, has beautiful golden eyebrows, orange cheeks and a rich reddish-brown coat; the other has a shock of golden orange on the top of its head and has been named the golden-crowned sifaka.
Both lemurs are extremely rare - and virtually unknown. What roles do they play in Madagascar's rain forests? Do they have any direct relevance to our own lives? What are the main threats to their survival? We don't know. They could become extinct before the experts learn enough to save them. Wildlife conservation is always a race against time. As zoologists and botanists explore new areas, scrabbling to record the mere existence of species before they become extinct, it is like someone hurrying through a burning library desperately trying to jot down some of the titles of books that will now never be read
Extinctions, of course, have been happening for millions of years: animals and plants were disappearing long before people arrived on the scene. But what has changed is the extinction rate. For millions of years, on average, one species became extinct every century. But most of the extinctions since prehistoric times have occurred in the last three hundred years.
And most of the extinctions that have occurred in the last three hundred years have occurred in the last fifty.
And most of the extinctions that have occurred in the last fifty have occurred in the last ten.
It is the sheer rate of acceleration that is as terrifying as anything else. We are now heaving more than a thousand different species of animals and plants off the planet every year.
There are currently five billion human beings and our numbers are continually growing. We are fighting for space with the world's wildlife, which has to contend with hunting, pollution, pesticides and, most important of all, the loss of habitat. Rain forests alone contain half the world's species of animals and plants, yet an area the size of Senegal is being destroyed every year.
There are so many threatened animals around the world that, at the rate of one every three weeks, it would have taken Douglas and me more than three hundred years to search for them all. And if we had decided to include threatened plants as well, it would have taken another thousand years.
In every remote corner there are people like Carl Jones and Don Merton who have devoted their lives to saving them. Very often, their determination is all that stands between an endangered species and extinction.
But why do they bother? Does it really matter if the Yangtze river dolphin, or the kakapo, or the northern white rhino, or any other species live on only in scientists' notebooks?
Well, yes it does. Every animal and plant is an integral part of its environment: even Komodo dragons have a major role to play in maintaining the ecological stability of their delicate island homes. If they disappear, so could many other species. And conservation is very much in tune with our own survival. Animals and plants provide us with life-saving drugs and food, they pollinate crops and provide important ingredients for many industrial processes. Ironically, it is often not the big and beautiful creatures but the ugly and less dramatic ones which we need most.
Even so, the loss of a few species may seem almost irrelevant compared to major environmental problems such as global warming or the destruction of the ozone layer. But while nature has considerable resilience, there is a limit to how far that resilience can be stretched. No one knows how close to the limit we are getting. The darker it gets, the faster we're driving.
There is one last reason for caring, and I believe that no other is necessary. It is certainly the reason why so many people have devoted their lives to protecting the likes of rhinos, parakeets, kakapos and dolphins. And it is simply this: the world would be a poorer, darker, lonelier place without them.

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency


 To  my  mother,  who  liked  the bit about the
                 horse


Author's Note

     The physical descriptions of St  Cedd's  College  in  this
book, in so far as they are specific at all, owe a little to my
memories  of  St  John's College, Cambridge, although I've also
borrowed indiscriminately from  other  colleges  as  well.  Sir
Isaac  Newton  was  at Trinity College in real life, and Samuel
Taylor Coleridge was at Jesus.
     The point is  that  St  Cedd's  College  is  a  completely
fictitious   assemblage,  and  no  correspondence  is  intended
between any institutions or characters in  this  book  and  any
real  institutions  or  people,  living, dead, or wandering the
night in ghostly torment.
     This book was written and typeset on  an  Apple  Macintosh
Plus  computer  and  LaserWriter  Plus  printer using MacAuthor
word= processing software.
     The completed document was then printed using  a  Linotron
100  at  The  Graphics  Factory, London SW3, to produce a final
high-resolution image of the text. My thanks to Mike Glover  of
Icon Technology for his help with this process.
     Finally,  my  very special thanks are due to Sue Freestone
for all her help in nursing this book into existence.

Chapter One...


     This time there would be no witnesses.
     This time there was just  the  dead  earth,  a  rumble  of
thunder,  and the onset of that interminable light drizzle from
the north-east by which so many of the world's  most  momentous
events seem to be accompanied.
     The  storms of the day before, and of the day before that,
and the floods of the previous week, had now abated. The  skies
still  bulged  with  rain,  but  all  that actually fell in the
gathering evening gloom was a dreary kind of prickle.
     Some wind whipped across the  darkening  plain,  blundered
through  the low hills and gusted across a shallow valley where
stood a structure, a kind of tower, alone  in  a  nightmare  of
mud, and leaning.
     It  was  a  blackened  stump  of a tower. It stood like an
extrusion of magma from one of the more  pestilential  pits  of
hell,  and  it  leaned  at a peculiar angle, as if oppressed by
something altogether more terrible than  its  own  considerable
weight. It seemed a dead thing, long ages dead.
     The  only  movement  was that of a river of mud that moved
sluggishly along the bottom of the valley  past  the  tower.  A
mile  or  so  further  on,  the  river  ran  down  a ravine and
disappeared underground.
     But as the evening darkened it became  apparent  that  the
tower was not entirely without life. There was a single dim red
light guttering deep within it.
     The  light  was  only just visible - except of course that
there was no one to see, no witnesses, not this  time,  but  it
was  nevertheless  a  light. Every few minutes it grew a little
stronger and a little  brighter  and  then  faded  slowly  away
almost to nothing. At the same time a low keening noise drifted
out on the wind, built up to a kind of wailing climax, and then
it too faded, abjectly, away.
     Time  passed,  and then another light appeared, a smaller,
mobile light. It emerged at ground level and moved in a  single
bobbing  circuit  of the tower, pausing occasionally on its way
around. Then it, and the shadowy  figure  that  could  just  be
discerned carrying it, disappeared inside once more.

     An  hour  passed,  and  by  the end of it the darkness was
total. The world seemed dead, the night a blankness.
     And then the glow appeared again near  the  tower's  peak,
this  time  growing  in  power  more  purposefully.  It quickly
reached the peak of brightness it had previously attained,  and
then kept going, increasing, increasing. The keening sound that
accompanied  it  rose  in pitch and stridency until it became a
wailing scream. The scream screamed on and on till it became  a
blinding noise and the light a deafening redness.
     And then, abruptly, both ceased.
     There was a millisecond of silent darkness.
     An  astonishing  pale  new  light billowed and bulged from
deep within the mud beneath the  tower.  The  sky  clenched,  a
mountain  of  mud  convulsed,  earth  and  sky bellowed at each
other, there was a horrible pinkness,  a  sudden  greenness,  a
lingering  orangeness  that  stained  the  clouds, and then the
light sank and the night at last was  deeply,  hideously  dark.
There was no further sound other than the soft tinkle of water.
     But  in  the  morning  the  suri rose with an unaccustomed
sparkle on a day that was, or seemed to be, or at  least  would
have  seemed  to  be if there had been anybody there to whom it
could seem to be anything at all, warmer, clearer and  brighter
- an  altogether tivelier day than any yet known. A clear river
ran through the shattered remains of the valley.
     And time began seriously to pass.

Chapter Two...


     High on a rocky promontory sat an Electric Monk on a bored
horse.  From  under  its  rough  woven  cowl  the  Monk   gazed
unblinkingly down into another valley, with which it was having
a problem.
     The  day  was  hot, the sun stood in an empty hazy sky and
beat down upon the grey rocks and the scrubby,  parched  grass.
Nothing  moved,  not  even  the  Monk. The horse's tail moved a
little, swishing slightly to try and move  a  little  air,  but
that was all. Otherwise, nothing moved.
     The  Electric  Monk  was  a  labour-saving  device, like a
dishwasher or a  video  recorder.  Dishwashers  washed  tedious
dishes  for  you,  thus  saving  you the bother of washing them
yourself, video recorders watched tedious television  for  you,
thus  saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric
Monks believed  things  for  you,  thus  saving  you  what  was
becoming  an  increasingly  onerous task, that of believing all
the things the world expected you to believe.
     Unfortunately this Electric Monk had  developed  a  fault,
and had started to believe all kinds of things, more or less at
random.  It  was  even  beginning to believe things they'd have
difficulty believing in Salt Lake City. It had never  heard  of
Salt  Lake  City,  of  course.  Nor  had  it  ever  heard  of a
quingigillion, which was roughly the number  of  miles  between
this valley and the Great Salt Lake of Utah.
     The  problem  with the valley was this. The Monk currently
believed that the valley  and  everything  in  the  valley  and
around  it, including the Monk itself and the Monk's horse, was
a  uniform  shade  of  pale  pink.  This  made  for  a  certain
difficulty  in  distinguishing  any  one  thing  from any other
thing, and therefore made  doing  anything  or  going  anywhere
impossible,  or  at  least  difficult  and dangerous. Hence the
immobility of the Monk and the boredom of the horse, which  had
had  to  put  up with a lot of silly things in its time but was
secretly of the opinion that this was one of the silliest.
     How long did the Monk believe these things?
     Well, as far as the Monk was concerned, forever. The faith
which moves mountains, or at least believes  them  against  all
the  available  evidence  to  be  pink, was a solid and abiding
faith, a great rock against which the world could hurl whatever
it would, yet it would not be shaken. In  practice,  the  horse
knew, twenty= four hours was usually about its lot.
     So  what of this horse, then, that actually held opinions,
and was sceptical about things? Unusual behaviour for a  horse,
wasn't it? An unusual horse perhaps?
     No.  Although  it  was certainly a handsome and well-built
example of its species,  it  was  none  the  less  a  perfectly
ordinary  horse,  such  as convergent evolution has produced in
many of the places that life is to be found. They  have  always
understood  a great deal more than they let on. It is difficult
to be sat on all  day,  every  day,  by  some  other  creature,
without forming an opinion about them.
     On  the  other  hand,  it is perfectly possible to sit all
day, every day, on top of another creature  and  not  have  the
slightest thought about them whatsoever.
     When  the  early  models of these Monks were built, it was
felt to be important that they  be  instantly  recognisable  as
artificial objects. There must be no danger of their looking at
all  like  real  people.  You wouldn't want your video recorder
lounging around on the sofa all day while it was  watching  TV.
You  wouldn't  want  it  picking  its  nose,  drinking beer and
sending out for pizzas.
     So the Monks were built with  an  eye  for  origiality  of
design  and  also  for practical horse-riding ability. This was
important. People, and indeed things, looked more sincere on  a
horse.  So  two  legs  were  held  to be both more suitable and
cheaper than the more normal primes of seventeen,  nineteen  or
twenty-three; the skin the Monks were given was pinkish-looking
instead of purple, soft and smooth instead of crenellated. They
were  also  restricted to just the one mouth and nose, but were
given instead an additional eye, making for a  grand  total  of
two. A strange= looking creature indeed. But truly excellent at
believing the most preposterous things.
     This  Monk  had  first gone wrong when it was simply given
too  much  to  believe  in  one  day.  It  was,   by   mistake,
cross-connected to a video recorder that was watching eleven TV
channels  simultaneously,  and this caused it to blow a bank of
illogic circuits. The video recorder only had to watch them, of
course. It didn't have to believe them all as well. This is why
instruction manuals are so important.
     So after a hectic week of believing that  war  was  peace,
that  good  was bad, that the moon was made of blue cheese, and
that God needed a lot of money sent to a  certain  box  number,
the  Monk  started  to  believe that thirty-five percent of all
tables were hermaphrodites, and then broke down. The  man  from
the  Monk shop said that it needed a whole new motherboard, but
then pointed out that the new improved Monk  Plus  models  were
twice  as powerful, had an entirely new multi-tasking, Negative
Capability feature that allowed them  to  hold  up  to  sixteen
entirely   different   and   contradictory   ideas   in  memory
simultaneously without generating any irritating system errors,
were twice as fast and at least three times as  glib,  and  you
could  have a whole new one for less than the cost of replacing
the motherboard of the old model.
     That was it. Done.
     The faulty Monk was turned out into the  desert  where  it
could  believe  what  it  liked, including the idea that it had
been hard done by. It was allowed  to  keep  its  horse,  since
horses were so cheap to make.
     For  a  number  of  days  and  nights,  which it variously
believed  to  be  three;  forty-three,  and  five  hundred  and
ninety-eight  thousand  seven  hundred and three, it roamed the
desert, putting its simple  Electric  trust  in  rocks,  birds,
clouds  and a form of non-existent elephant-asparagus, until at
last it fetched up here,  on  this  high  rock,  overlooking  a
valley  that  was  not,  despite the deep fervour of the Monk's
belief, pink. Not even a little bit.
     Time passed.

Chapter Three...


     Time passed.
     Susan waited.
     The more Susan waited, the more the doorbell didn't  ring.
Or  the  phone.  She looked at her watch. She felt that now was
about the time that she could legitimately begin to feel cross.
She was cross already, of course, but that had been in her  own
time,  so to speak. They were well and truly into his time now,
and even allowing for traffic, mishaps, and  general  vagueness
and  diIatoriness,  it  was now well over half an hour past the
time that he had  insisted  was  the  latest  time  they  could
possibly afford to leave, so she'd better be ready.
     She tried to worry that something terrible had happened to
him, but  didn't believe it for a moment. Nothing terrible ever
happened to him, though she was beginning to think that it  was
time it damn well did. If nothing terrible happened to him soon
maybe she'd do it herself. Now there was an idea.
     She  threw  herself  crossly into the armchair and watched
the news on television. The news made her  cross.  She  flipped
the remote control and watched something on another channel for
a bit. She didn't know what it was, but it also made her cross.
Perhaps  she  should  phone. She was damned if she was going to
phone. Perhaps if she phoned he would phone  her  at  the  same
moment and not be able to get through.
     She refused to admit that she had even thought that.
     Damn him, where was he? Who cared where he was anyway? She
didn't, that was for sure.
     Three  times in a row he'd done this. Three times in a row
was enough. She angrily flipped channels one more  time.  There
was  a  programme  about  computers  and  some  interesting new
developments in the field of things you could do with computers
and music.
     That was it. That was really it. She  knew  that  she  had
told  herself  that  that was it only seconds earlier, but this
was now the final real ultimate it.
     She jumped to her feet and went to the phone, gripping  an
angry  Filofax.  She  flipped  briskly through it and dialled a
number.
     "Hello, Michael? Yes, it's Susan. Susan Way.  You  said  I
should  call  you  if  I  was  free this evening and I said I'd
rather be dead in a ditch, remember? Well, I suddenly  discover
that  I  am  free, absolutely, completely and utterly free, and
there isn't a decent ditch for miles  around.  Make  your  move
while  you've  goI  your chance is my advice to you. I'll be at
the Tangiers Club in half an hour."
     She  pulled  on  her  shoes  and  coat,  paused  when  she
remembered  that  it  was  Thursday  and  that she should put a
fresh, extra-long  tape  on  the  answering  machine,  and  two
minutes later was out of the front door. When at last the phone
did  ring  the  answering  machine  said sweetly that Susan Way
could not come to the phone just at the moment, but that if the
caller would like to leave a message, she  would  get  back  to
them as soon as possible. Maybe.

Chapter Four...


     It was a chill November evening of the old-fashioned type.
     The  moon looked pale and wan, as if it shouldn't be up on
a night like this. It rose unwillingly and  hung  like  an  ill
spectre.  Silhouetted  against  it,  dim  and  hazy through the
dampness which  rose  from  the  unwholesome  fens,  stood  the
assorted  towers and turrets of St Cedd's, Cambridge, a ghostly
profusion of buildings thrown up over centuries, medieval  next
to Victorian, Odeon next to Tudor. Only rising through the mist
did they seem remotely to belong to one another.
     Between  them scurried figures, hurrying from one dim pool
of light to another, shivering, leaving wraiths of breath which
folded themselves into the cold night behind them.
     lt was seven o'clock. Many of the figures were heading for
the college dining hall which divided First Court  from  Second
Court,  and  from  which warm light, reluctantly, streamed. Two
figures in particular seemed ill-matched. One, a young man, was
tall, thin and angular; even muffled inside a heavy  dark  coat
he walked a little like an affronted heron.
     The  other was small, roundish, and moved with an ungainly
restlessness, like a number  of  elderly  squirrels  trying  to
escape  from  a  sack.  I-iis  own age was on the older side of
completely indeterminate. If you picked a number at random,  he
was  probably  a  little  older  than  that, but - well, it was
impossible to tell. Certainly his face was heavily  lined,  and
the  small  amount  of  hair  that  escaped  from under his red
woollen skiing hat was thin, white, and had very much  its  own
ideas about how it wished to arrange itself. He too was muffled
inside  a heavy coat, but over it he wore a billowing gown with
very faded purple trim, the badge  ofhis  unique  and  peculiar
academic office.
     As they walked the older man was doing all the talking. He
was pointing  at  items  of interest along the way, despite the
fact that it was too dark to see any of them. The  younger  man
was  saying  "Ah  yes,"  and  "Really?  How interesting..." and
"Well,  well,  well,"  and  "Good  heavens."  His  head  bobbed
seriously.
     They  entered,  not through the main entrance to the hall,
but through a small doorway on the east side of the court. This
led to the Senior Combination Room and a dark-panelled anteroom
where the Fellows of the college assembled to slap their  hands
and make "brrrrrr" noises before making their way through their
own entrance to the High Table.
     They  were  late and shook off their coats hurriedly. This
was complicated for the older man by  the  necessity  first  of
taking  off  his professorial gown, and then of putting it back
on again once. his coat was off, then of stuffing  his  hat  in
his  coat  pocket,  then of wondering where he'd put his scarf,
and then of realising  that  he  hadn't  brought  it,  then  of
fishing  in  his  coat  pocket  for  his  handkerchief, then of
fishing in his  other  coat  pocket  for  his  spectacles,  and
finally  of  finding  them  quite  unexpectedly  wrapped in his
scarf, which it turned out he had brought after all but  hadn't
been wearing despite the damp and bitter wind blowing in like a
witch's breath from across the fens.
     He  bustled the younger man into the hall ahead of him and
they took the last two vacant seats at the High Table,  braving
a  flurry  of  frowns  and raised eyebrows for interrupting the
Latin grace to do so.
     Hall was full tonight. It was always more popular with the
undergraduates in the colder months. More unusually,  the  hall
was  candlelit,  as  it  was  now  only  on  very  few  special
occasions. Two long, crowded  tables  stretched  off  into  the
glimmering  darkness.  By candlelight, people's faces were more
alive, the hushed sounds of their voices, the clink of  cutlery
and  glasses, seemed more exciting, and in the dark recesses of
the great hall, all the centuries  for  which  it  had  existed
seemed  present  at once. High Table itself formed a crosspiece
at the top, and was raised about a foot above the  rest.  Since
it  was  a  guest  night,  the  table  was set on both sides to
accommodate the extra numbers, and many  diners  therefore  sat
with their backs to the rest of the hall.
     "So, young MacDuff," said the Professor once he was seated
and flapping  his  napkin  open, "pleasure to see you again, my
dear fellow. Glad you could come. No  idea  what  all  this  is
about," he added, peering round the hall in consternation. "All
the  candles and silver and business. Generally means a special
dinner in honour of someone or something no  one  can  remember
anything about except that it means better food for a night."
     He  paused  and  thought  for a moment, and then said, "It
seems odd, don't you think, that the quality of the food should
vary inversely with the brightness of the lighting.  Makes  you
wonder what culinary heights the kitchen staff could rise to if
you  confined them to perpetual darkness. Could be worth a try,
I think. Got some good vaults in  the  college  that  could  be
turned  over  to  the  purpose. I think I showed you round them
once, hmmm? Nice brickwork."
     All this came as something of a relief to  his  guest.  It
was  the  first  indication  his host had given that he had the
faintest recollection who he was.  Professor  Urban  Chronotis,
the  Regius Professor of Chronology, or "Reg" as he insisted on
being called had a memory that he himself had once compared  to
the   Queen  Alexandra  Birdwing  Butterfly,  in  that  it  was
colourful, flitted prettily hither and thither,  and  was  now,
alas, almost completely extinct.
     When  he  had  telephoned  with  the invitation a few days
previously, he had seemed extremely  keen  to  see  his  former
pupil,  and yet when Richard had arrived this evening, a little
on the late side, admittedly, the Professor had thrown open the
door apparently in anger, had started  in  surprise  on  seeing
Richard,  demanded to know if he was having emotional problems,
reacted in annoyance to being reminded gently that it  was  now
ten  years  since  he  had  been  Richard's  college tutor, and
finally  agreed  that  Richard  had  indeed  come  for  dinner,
whereupon he, the Professor, had started talking rapidly and at
length  about  the  history of the college architecture, a sure
sign that his mind was elsewhere entirely.
     "Reg" had never actually taught Richard, he had only  been
his  college tutor, which meant in short that he had had charge
of his general welfare, told him when the exams were and not to
take drugs, and so on. Indeed, it was not entirely clear if Reg
had ever taught anybody at all and what, if anything, he  would
have  taught them. His professorship was an obscure one, to say
the least, and since he dispensed with his lecturing duties  by
the  simple  and  time-honoured technique of presenting all his
potential students with an exhaustive list  of  books  that  he
knew  for  a  fact had been out of print for thirty years, then
flying into a tantrum if they failed to find them, no  one  had
ever  discovered the precise nature of his academic discipline.
He had, of course, long ago taken the  precaution  of  removing
the  only  extant  copies of the books on his reading list from
the university and college libraries, as a result of  which  he
had plenty of time to, well, to do whatever it was he did.
     Since Richard had always managed to get on reasonably well
with the  old  fruitcake,  he had one day plucked up courage to
ask him what, exactly, the Regius Professorship  of  Chronology
was. It had been one of those light summery days when the world
seems  about to burst with pleasure at simply being itself, and
Reg had been in an  uncharacteristically  forthcoming  mood  as
they had walked over the bridge where the River Cam divided the
older parts of the college from the newer.
     "Sinecure,  my  dear fellow, an absolute sinecure," he had
beamed. "A small amount of money for a very small, or shall  we
say non-existent, amount of work. That puts me permanently just
ahead  of  the  game, which is a comfortable if frugal place to
spend your life. I recommend it." He leaned over  the  edge  of
the  bridge and started to point out a particular brick that he
found interesting. "But what sort of study is  it  supposed  to
be?"  Richard had pursued. "Is it history? Physics? Philosophy?
What?"
     "Well," said Reg, slowly, "since  you're  interested,  the
chair was originally instituted by King George III, who, as you
know,  entertained  a  number of amusing notions, including the
belief that one of the trees in Windsor Great Park was in  fact
Frederick the Great.
     "It  was his own appointment, hence `Regius'. His own idea
as well, which is somewhat more unusual."
     Sunlight played along  the  River  Cam.  People  in  punts
happily  shouted  at  each  other  to  fuck  off.  Thin natural
scientists who had spent months  locked  away  in  their  rooms
growing  white  and  fishlike, emerged blinking into the light.
Couples walking along the bank got so excited about the general
wonderfulness of it all that they had  to  pop  inside  for  an
hour.
     "The poor beleaguered fellow," Reg continued, "George III,
I mean,  was,  as  you may know, obsessed with time. Filled the
palace with clocks. Wound them incessantly. Sometimes would get
up in the middle of the night and prowl round the palace in his
nightshirt winding clocks. He  was  very  concerned  that  time
continued  to  go forward, you see. So many terrible things had
occurred in his life that he was terrified  that  any  of  them
might  happen again if time were ever allowed to slip backwards
even for a moment. A very understandable  fear,  especially  if
you're  barking  mad,  as  I'm  afraid  to  say,  with the very
greatest sympathy for the poor fellow, he undoubtedly  was.  He
appointed   me,  or  rather  I  should  say,  my  office,  this
professorship,  you  understand,  the  post  that  I   am   now
privileged  to  hold  to  -  where was I? Oh yes. He instituted
this,  er,  Chair  of  Chronology  to  see  if  there  was  any
particular  reason  why one thing happened after another and if
there was any way of stopping it.  Since  the  answers  to  the
three questions were, I knew immediately, yes, no, and maybe, I
realised I could then take the rest of my career off."
     "And your predecessors?"
     "Er, were much of the same mind."
     "But who were they?"
     "Who were they? Well, splendid fellows of course, splendid
to a man.  Remind  me to tell you about them some day. See that
brick? Wordsworth was once sick on that brick. Great man."
     All that had been about ten years ago.
     Richard glanced around the great dining hall to  see  what
had  changed  in  the  time,  and  the  answer  was, of course,
absolutely nothing. In the dark  heights,  dimly  seen  by  the
flickering  candlelight,  were  the  ghostly portraits of prime
ministers, archbishops, political reformers and poets,  any  of
whom might, in their day, have been sick on that same brick.
     "Well,"  said Reg, in a loudly confidential whisper, as if
introducing the subject of nipple-piercing  in  a  nunnery,  "I
hear  you've  suddenly  done  very  well for yourself, at last,
hmmm?"
     "Er, well,  yes,  in  fact,"  said  Richard,  who  was  as
surprised at the fact as anybody else, "yes, I have."
     Around the table several gazes stiffened on him.
     "Computers,"  he  heard somebody whisper dismissively to a
neighbour further down  the  table.  The  stiff  gazes  relaxed
again, and turned away.
     "Excellent,"  said  Reg.  "I'm  so  pleased  for  you,  so
pleased.
     "Tell me," he went on, and it was a moment before  Richard
realised that the Professor wasn't talking to him any more, but
had turned to the right to address his other neighbour, "what's
all  this  about,  this,"  he  flourished a vague hand over the
candles and college silver, "... stuff?"
     His neighbour,  an  elderly  wizened  figure,  tumed  very
slowly  and  looked at him as if he was rather annoyed at being
raised from the dead Iike this.
     "Coleridge," he said in a thin rasp, "it's  the  Coleridge
Dinner  you  old fool." He turned very slowly back until he was
facing the front again. His name was Cawley, he was a Professor
of Archaeology and Anthropology, and it was frequently said  of
him,  behind  his  back,  that  he regarded it not so much as a
serious  academic  study,  more  as  a  chance  to  relive  his
childhood.
     "Ah,  is  it,"  murmured  Reg, "is it?" and turned back to
Richard. "It's the Coleridge Dinner,"  he  said  knowledgeably.
"Coleridge  was  a  member  of the college, you know," he added
after a moment.  "Coleridge.  Samuel  Taylor.  Poet.  I  expect
you've  heard  of him. This is his Dinner. Well, not literally,
of course. It would be cold by now." Silence. "Here, have  some
salt."
     "Er,   thank  you,  I  think  I'll  wait,"  said  Richard,
surprised. There was no food on the table yet.
     "Go on, take it," insisted the Professor,  proffering  him
the heavy silver salt cellar.
     Richard  blinked  in bemusement but with an interior shrug
he reached to take it. In the moment that he blinked,  however,
the salt cellar had completely vanished.
     He started back in surprise.
     "Good one, eh?" said Reg as he retrieved the missing cruet
from behind  the  ear  of  his  deathly  right-hand  neighbour,
provoking a surprisingly girlish giggle from somewhere else  at
the table. Reg smiled impishly. "Very irritating habit, I know.
It's next on my list for giving up after smoking and leeches."
     Well,  that  was  another  thing that hadn't changed. Some
people pick their noses, others habitually beat up  old  ladies
on  the streets. Reg's vice was a harmless if peculiar one - an
addiction to childish conjuring tricks. Richard remembered  the
first  time he had been to see Reg with a problem - it was only
the normal Angst that periodically takes  undergraduates
into its grip, particularly when they have essays to write, but
it had seemed a dark and savage weight at the time. Reg had sat
and   listened   to  his  outpourings  with  a  deep  frown  of
concentration, and  when  at  last  Richard  had  finished,  he
pondered  seriously, stroked his chin a lot, and at last leaned
forward and looked him in the eye.
     "I suspect that your problem," he said, "is that you  have
too many paper clips up your nose."
     Richard stared at him.
     "Allow  me  to  demonstrate," said Reg, and leaning across
the desk he pulled from Richard's nose a chain of eleven  paper
clips and a small rubber swan.
     "Ah,  the  real  culprit,"  he  said, holding up the swan.
"They come in cereal packets, you know, and  cause  no  end  of
trouble.  Well,  I'm  glad  we've had this little chat, my dear
fellow. Please feel free to disturb me again if  you  have  any
more such problems."
     Needless to say, Richard didn't.
     Richard  glanced  around  the  table  to  see if there was
anybody else he recognised from his time at the college.
     Two places away to the left  was  the  don  who  had  been
Richard's  Director  of Studies in English, who showed no signs
of recognising him at all. This  was  hardly  surprising  since
Richard  had  spent  his  three years here assiduously avoiding
him, often to the extent of growing a beard and  pretending  to
be someone else.
     Next  to  him  was a man whom Richard had never managed to
identify. Neither, in fact, had anyone else. He  was  thin  and
vole= like and had the most extraordinarily long bony nose - it
really was very, very long and bony indeed. In fact it looked a
lot   like   the   controversial  keel  which  had  helped  the
Australians win the America's Cup in I983, and this resemblance
had been much remarked upon at the time, though not  of  course
to his face. No one had said anything to his face at all.
     No one.
     Ever.
     Anyone meeting him for the first time was too startled and
embarrassed by his nose to speak, and the second time was worse
because  of  the  first time, and so on. Years had gone by now,
seventeen in all. In all that time  he  had  been  cocooned  in
silence.  In  hall  it  had  long been the habit of the college
servants to position a separate set of salt, pepper and mustard
on either side of him, since no one could ask him to pass them,
and to ask someone sitting on the other side  of  him  was  not
only  rude  but completely impossible because of his nose being
in the way.
     The other odd thing about him was a series of gestures  he
made  and  repeated  regularly  throughout  every evening. They
consisted of tapping each of the fingers of his  left  hand  in
order,  and then one of the fingers of his right hand. He would
then occasionally tap some other part of his body,  a  knuckle,
an  elbow or a knee. Whenever he was forced to stop this by the
requirements of eating he would start blinking each of his eyes
instead, and occasionally nodding. No one, of course, had  ever
dared to ask him why he did this, though all were consumed with
curiosity.
     Richard couldn't see who was sitting beyond him.
     In  the  other  direction, beyond Reg's deathly neighbour,
was Watkin, the Classics Professor, a man of terrifying dryness
and oddity. His heavy rimless glasses were almost  solid  cubes
of  glass  within  which  his eyes appeared to lead independent
existences like goldfish. His  nose  was  straight  enough  and
ordinary,  but  beneath  it  he  wore  the  same beard as Clint
Eastwood. His eyes gazed swimmingly  around  the  table  as  he
selected  who was going to be spoken at tonight. He had thought
that his prey might be one of the guests, the  newly  appointed
Head   of   Radio   Three,  who  was  sitting  opposite  -  but
unfortunately  he  had  already  been  ensnared  by  the  Music
Director  of  the  college and a Professor of Philosophy. These
two were busy explaining to the harassed man  that  the  phrase
"too much Mozart" was, given any reasonable definition of those
three  words,  an inherently self-contradictory expression, and
that any sentence  which  contained  such  a  phrase  would  be
thereby  rendered  meaningless  and could not, consequently, be
advanced as  part  of  an  argument  in  favour  of  any  given
programme=  scheduling  strategy.  The  poor  man  was  already
beginning to grip his cutlery  too  tightly.  His  eyes  darted
about  desperately  looking for rescue, and made the mistake of
lighting on those of Watkin.
     "Good evening," said Watkin with smiling charm, nodding in
the most  friendly  way,  and  then  letting  his  gaze  settle
glassily  on  to  his  bowl  of  newly arrived soup, from which
position it would not allow itself to be moved.  Yet.  Let  the
bugger  suffer  a  little.  He wanted the rescue to be worth at
least a good half dozeo radio talk fees.
     Beyond Watkin, Richard suddenly discovered the  source  of
the  little  girlish  giggle  that  had greeted Reg's conjuring
trick. Astonishingly enough it was a little girl. She was about
eight years old with blonde hair  and  a  glum  look.  She  was
sitting occasionally kicking pettishly at the table leg.
     "Who's that?" Richard asked Reg in surprise.
     "Who's what?" Reg asked Richard in surprise.
     Richard   inclined   a   finger   surreptitiously  in  her
direction. "The girl," he whispered,  "the  very,  very  little
girl. Is it some new maths professor?"
     Reg  peered  round  at  her.  "Do  you  know,"  he said in
astonishment,  "I  haven't  the  faintest  idea.  Never   known
anything like it. How extraordinary."
     At  that moment the problem was solved by the man from the
BBC, who suddenly wrenched himself out  of  the  logical  half=
nelson into which his neighbours had got him, and told the gir1
off  for  kicking the table. She stopped kicking the table, and
instead kicked the air with redoubled vigour. He  told  her  to
try and enjoy herself, so she kicked him. This did something to
bring a brief glimmer of pleasure into her glum evening, but it
didn't  last. Her father briefly shared with the table at large
his feelings about baby-sitters who let people down, but nobody
felt able to run with the topic.
     "A major season of Buxtehude,"  resumed  the  Director  of
Music,  "is  of course clearly long overdue. I'm sure you'll be
looking forward  to  remedying  this  situation  at  the  first
opportunity."
     "Oh,  er,  yes,"  replied  the girl's father, spilling his
soup, "er, that is. . . he's not the same one as Gluck, is he?"
     The little girl kicked  the  table  leg  again.  When  her
father  looked sternly at her, she put her head on one side and
mouthed a question at him.
     "Not now," he insisted at her as quietly as he could.
     "When, then?"
     "Later. Maybe. Later, we'll see."
     She hunched grumpily back in her  seat.  "You  always  say
later," she mouthed at him.
     "Poor  child,"  murmured  Reg.  "There isn't a don at this
table who doesn't behave exactly like that  inside.  Ah,  thank
you."  Their  soup  arrived,  distracting  his  attention,  and
Richard's.
     "So tell me," said Reg, after they had both had  a  couple
of  spoonsful and arrived independently at the same conclusion,
that it was not a taste explosion, "what you've been up to,  my
dear  chap.  Something  to do with computers, I understand, and
also to do with music. I thought you read English when you were
here= though only, I realise, in your spare time." He looked at
Richard significantly over the rim  of  his  soup  spoon.  "Now
wait,"  he  interrupted  before  Richard  even  had a chance to
start, "don't I vaguely remember that  you  had  some  sort  of
computer when you were here? When was it? 1977?"
     "Well, what we called a computer in 1977 was really a kind
of electric abacus, but..."
     "Oh,  now,  don't underestimate the abacus," said Reg. "In
skilled hands it's a  very  sophisticated  calculating  device.
Furthermore  it  requires  no  power,  can  be  made  with  any
materials you have to hand, and never goes bing in  the  middle
of an important piece of work."
     "So an electric one would be particularly pointless," said
Richard.
     "True enough," conceded Reg.
     "There  really wasn't a lot this machine could do that you
couldn't do yourself in half the time with a lot less trouble,"
said Richard, "but it was, on the  other  hand,  very  good  at
being a slow and dim-witted pupil."
     Reg looked at him quizzically.
     "I  had no idea they were supposed to be in short supply,"
he said. "I could hit a dozen with a bread roll from where  I'm
sitting."
     "I'm  sure.  But  look  at it this way. What really is the
point of trying to teach anything to anybody?"
     This question seemed to provoke a  murmur  of  sympathetic
approval from up and down the table.
     Richard continued, "What I mean is that if you really want
to understand  something, the best way is to try and explain it
to someone else. That forces you to sort it  out  in  your  own
mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you
have  to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And
that's really the essence of programming. By  the  time  you've
sorted  out  a  complicated  idea into little steps that even a
stupid  machine  can  deal  with,  you've   certainly   learned
something  about  it  yourself. The teacher usually learns more
than the pupil. Isn't that true?"
     "It would be hard to learn much less than my pupils," came
a low growl from somewhere on the table, "without undergoing  a
pre-frontal lobotomy."
     "So  I  used  to  spend days struggling to write essays on
this 16K machine that would have taken a couple of hours  on  a
typewriter,  but  what was fascinating to me was the process of
trying to explain to the machine what it was I wanted it to do.
I virtually wrote my own word  processor  in  BASIC.  A  simple
search and replace routine would take about three hours."
     "I forget, did you ever get any essays done at all?"
     "Well,  not as such. No actual essays, but the reasons why
not were absolutely fascinating.  For  instance,  I  discovered
that..."
     He broke off, laughing at himself.
     "I was also playing keyboards in a rock group, of course,"
he added. "That didn't help."
     "Now,  that  I  didn't  know,"  said  Reg.  "Your past has
murkier things in it than I  dreamed  possible.  A  quality,  I
might  add,  that it shares with this soup." He wiped his mouth
with his napkin very carefully. "I must go and have a word with
the kitchen staff on day. I would like to  be  sure  that
they  are  keeping  the right bits and throwing the proper bits
away. So. A  rock  group,  you  say.  Well,  well,  well.  Good
heavens."
     "Yes,"  said  Richard. "We called ourselves The Reasonably
Good Band, but in fact we weren't. Our intention was to be  the
Beatles of the early eighties, but we got much better financial
and legal advice than the Beatles ever did, which was basically
'Don't  bother', so we didn't. I left Cambridge and starved for
three years."
     "But didn't I bump into you during that period," said Reg,
"and you said you were doing very well?"
     "As a road sweeper, yes. There was an awful lot of mess on
the roads. More than enough,  I  felt,  to  support  an  entire
career.  However,  I  got  the sack for sweeping the mess on to
another sweeper's patch."
     Reg shook his head. "The wrong career for you,  I'm  sure.
There are plenty of vocations where such behaviour would ensure
rapid preferment."
     "I  tried a few - none of them much grander, though. And I
kept none of them very long, because I was always too tired  to
do  them properly. I'd be found asleep slumped over the chicken
sheds or filing cabinets - depending on what the job was.  Been
up  all  night  with  the computer you see, teaching it to play
`Three Blind Mice'. It was an important goal for me."
     "I'm sure," agreed  Reg.  "Thank  you,"  he  said  to  the
college  servant  who took his half-finished plate of soup from
him, "thank you very much. `Three Blind Mice', eh? Good.  Good.
So  no  doubt  you  succeeded eventually, and this accounts for
your present celebrated status. Yes?"
     "Well, there's a bit more to it than that."
     "I feared there might be. Pity you didn't  bring  it  with
you though. It might have cheered up the poor young lady who is
currently having our dull and crusty company forced upon her. A
swift  burst  of  `Three  Blind Mice' would probably do much to
revive her spirits." He leaned forward to  look  past  his  two
right=  hand  neighbours  at  the  girl,  who was still sitting
sagging in her chair.
     "Hello," he said.
     She looked up in  surprise,  and  then  dropped  her  eyes
shyly, swinging her legs again.
     "Which  do you think is worse," enquired Reg, "the soup or
the company?"
     She gave a  tiny,  reluctant  laugh  and  shrugged,  still
looking down.
     "I  think you're wise not to commit yourself at this stage
" continued Reg. "Myself, I'm waiting to see the carrots before
I make any judgments. They've been boiling  them  since  the  '
weekend,  but  I fear it may not be enough. The only thing that
could possibly be worse than the carrots is  Watkin.  He's  the
man  with  the silly glasses sitting between us. My name's Reg,
by the way. Come over and kick me when you have a moment."  The
girl  giggled  and glanced up at Watkin, who stiffened and made
an appallingly unsuccessful attempt to smile good= naturedly.
     "Well, little girl," he said to her awkwardly,  and
she  had  desperately  to  suppress  a  hoot of laughter at his
glasses. Little conversation therefore ensued, but the girl had
an ally, and began to enjoy herself  a  tiny  little  bit.  Her
father gave her a relieved mile.
     Reg  turned  back  to Richard, who said, suddenly, "Do you
have any family?"
     "Er... no," said Reg, quietly. "But tell me. After  'Three
Blind Mice', what then?"
     "Well,  to cut a long story short, Reg, I ended up working
for WayForward Technologies..."
     "Ah, yes, the famous Mr Way. Tell me, what's he like?"
     Richard was  always  faintly  annoyed  by  this  question,
probably because he was asked it so often.
     "Both better and worse thъn he's represented in the press.
I like him a lot, actually. Like any driven man he can be a bit
trying  at  times, but I've known him since the very early days
of the company when neither he nor I had a bean to  our  names.
He's  fine. It's just that it's a good idea not to let him have
your  phone  number  unless  you  possess  an  industrial-grade
answering machine.
     "What? Why's that?"
     "Well,  he's  one  of those people who can only think when
he's talking. When he has ideas, he has to  talk  them  out  to
whoever  will  listen.  Or,  if  the  people themselves are not
available, which is  increasingly  the  case,  their  answering
machines will do just as well. He just phones them up and talks
at  them.  He  has  one  secretary whose sole job is to collect
tapes from people he might have phoned, transcribe  them,  sort
them  and  give  him  the  edited  text  the next day in a blue
folder."
     "A blue one, eh? "
     "Ask me why he doesn't simply use a tape  recorder,"  said
Richard with a shrug.
     Reg  considered  this.  "I  expect  he  doesn't use a tape
recorder because he doesn't like talking to himself," he  said.
"There is a logic there. Of a kind."
     He  took  a  mouthful  of  his  newly  arrived  porc au
poivre and ruminated on it for a while before gently laying
his knife and fork aside again for the moment.
     "So what," he said at last, "is the role of young  MacDuff
in all this?"
     "Well,  Gordon  assigned  me  to  write  a  major piece of
software  for  the  Apple  Macintosh.  Financial   spreadsheet,
accounting, that so of thing, powerful, easy to use, lots
of  graphics.  I asked him exactly what he wanted in it, and he
just said, `Everything. I want the top  piece  of  all-singing,
all-dancing business software for that machine.' And being of a
slightly whimsical turn of mind I took him literally.
     "You  see, a pattern of numbers can represent anything you
like, can be used to map any surface, or modulate  any  dynamic
process  -  and  so on. And any set of company accounts are, in
the end, just a pattern of numbers. So I sat down and  wrote  a
program  that'll  take  those numbers and do what you like with
thm. If you just want a bar graph it'll do them as a  bar
graph,  if  you want them as a pie chart or scatter graph it'll
do them as a pie chart or scatter graph. If  you  want  dancing
girls  jumping  out  of  the  pie  chart  in  order to distract
attention from the figures the pie chart  actually  represents,
then  the  program  will  do that as well: Or you can turn your
figures into, for  instance,  a  flock  of  seagulls,  and  the
formation  they  fly  in and the way in which the wings of each
gull beat  will  be  determined  by  the  performance  of  each
division   of   your  company.  Great  for  producing  animated
corporate logos that actually mean something.
     "But the silliest feature of all was that  if  you  wanted
your company accounts represented as a piece of music, it could
do  that  as  well. Well, I thought it was silly. The corporate
world went bananas over it."
     Reg regarded him solemnly from  over  a  piece  of  carrot
poised  delicately  on  his  fork  in front of him, but did not
interrupt.
     "You see, any aspect of a piece of music can be  expressed
as  a  sequence  or  pattern  of  numbers,"  enthused  Richard.
"Numbers can express the pitch of notes, the length  of  notes,
patterns of pitches and lengths. . "
     "You mean tunes," said Reg. The carrot had not moved yet.
     Richard grinned.
     "Tunes  would  be a very good word for it. I must remember
that."
     "It would help you speak more easily."  Reg  returned  the
carrot  to  his  plate,  untasted. "And this software did well,
then?" he asked.
     "Not so much here. The yearly  accounts  of  most  British
companies   emerged   sounding   like   the   Dead  March  from
Saul, but in Japan they went for it like a pack of rats.
It produced lots of cheery company anthems that  started  well,
but if you were going to criticise you'd probably say that they
tended  to  get  a  bit  loud  and  squeaky  at  the  end.  Did
spectacular business in the States, which was the  main  thing,
commercially.  Though  the thing that's interesting me most now
is what happens if you leave the accounts out of it.  Turn  the
numbers  that represent the way a swallow's wings beat directly
into music.  What  would  you  hear?  Not  the  sound  of  cash
registers, according to Gordon."
     "Fascinating,"  said  Reg, "quite fascinating," and popped
the carrot at last into his mouth. He turned and leaned forward
to speak to his new girlfriend.
     "Watkin loses," he pronounced. "The carrots have  achieved
a  new  all-time  low. Sorry, Watkin, but awful as you are, the
carrots, I'm afraid, are world-beaters."
     The girl giggled more easily than last time and she smiled
at him. Watkin was trying to take all this good-naturedly,  but
it  was  clear as his eyes swam at Reg that he was more used to
discomfiting than being discomfited.
     "Please, Daddy, can I now?" With her new-found, if slight,
confidence, the girl had also found a voice.
     "Later," insisted her father.
     "This is already later. I've been timing it."
     "Well..." He hesitated, and was lost.
     "We've been to Greece," announced the girl in a small  but
awed voice.
     "Ah,  have  you  indeed,"  said Watkin, with a little nod.
"Well, well. Anywhere in particular, or just Greece generally?"
     "Patmos," she said decisively. "It was beautiful. I  think
Patmos  is  the most beautiful place in the whole world. Except
the ferry never came when it said  it  would.  Never,  ever.  I
timed it. We missed our flight but I didn't mind."
     "Ah,  Patmos,  I see," said Watkin, who was clearly roused
by the news. "Well, what you have to understand, young lady, is
that the Greeks, not content with dominating the culture of the
Classical world, are also responsible for  the  greatest,  some
would  say the only, work of true creative imagination produced
this century as well. I refer of  course  to  the  Greek  ferry
timetables.  A  work  of  the sublimest fiction. Anyone who has
travelled in the Aegean will confirm this. Hmm,  yes.  I  think
so."
     She frowned at him.
     "I found a pot," she said.
     "Probably  nothing,"  interrupted her father hastily. "You
know the way it is- Everyone who goes to Greece for  the  first
time thinks they've found a pot, don't they? Ha, ha."
     There  were  general  nods. This was true. Irritating, but
true.
     "I found it in the harbour,"  she  said,  "in  the  water.
While we were waiting for the damn ferry."
     "Sarah! I've told you..."
     "It's  just  what  you called it. And worse. You called it
words I didn't think  you  knew.  Anyway,  I  thought  that  if
everyone  here was meant to be so clever, then someone would be
able to tell me if it was a proper ancient Greek thing or  not-
I  think it's very old. Will you please let them see it,
Daddy?"
     Her father shrugged hopelessly and started to  fish  about
under his chair.
     "Did  you know, young lady," said Watkin to her, "that the
Book of Revelation was written on Patmos?  It  was  indeed.  By
Saint  John  the Divine, as you know. To me it shows very clear
signs of having been written while waiting  for  a  ferry.  Oh,
yes,  I  think so. It starts off, doesn't it, with that kind of
dreaminess you get when you're killing time, getting bored, you
know, just making things up, and then gradually grows to a sort
of  climax  of  hallucinatory  despair.  I   find   that   very
suggestive.  Perhaps you should write a paper on it." He nodded
at her.
     She looked at him as if he were mad.
     "Well, here it is," said her father,  plonking  the  thing
down on the table. "Just a pot, as you see. She's only six," he
added with a grim smile, "aren't you, dear?"
     "Seven," said Sarah.
     The  pot  was quite small, about five inches high and four
inches  across  at  its  widest  point.  The  body  was  almost
spherical,  with  a  very  narrow  neck extending about an inch
above the body. The neck ad about  half  of  the  surface
area  were  encrusted  with hard= caked earth, but the parts of
the pot that could be seen were of a rough, ruddy texture.
     Sarah took it and thrust it into  the  hands  of  the  don
sitting on her right.
     "You look clever," she said. "Tell me what you think."
     The  don  took  it,  and  turned  it  over with a slightly
supercilious air. "I'm sure if you scraped away  the  mud  from
the  bottom," he remarked wittily, "it would probably say `Made
in Birmingham'."
     "That old, eh?" said Sarah's father with a  forced  laugh.
"Long time since anything was made there."
     "Anyway,"  said  the  don,  "not my field, I'm a molecular
biologist. Anyone else want to have a look?"
     This  question  was  not  greeted  with  wild   yelps   of
enthusiasm,  but  nevertheless  the pot was passed from hand to
hand around the far end of the table in a desultory fashion. It
was goggled  at  through  pebble  glasses,  peered  at  through
horn-rims, gazed at over half-moons, and squinted at by someone
who  had left his glasses in his other suit, which he very much
feared had now gone to the cleaner's. No one seemed to know how
old it was, or to care very much. The young girl's  face  began
to grow downhearted again.
     "Sour  lot,"  said  Reg  to Richard. He picked up a silver
salt cellar again and held it up.
     "Young lady," he said, leaning forward to address her.
     "Oh,  not  again,  you  old  fool,"  muttered   the   aged
archaeologist  Cawley,  sitting back and putting his hands over
his ears.
     "Young lady," repeated Reg,  "regard  this  simple  silver
salt cellar. Regard this simple hat."
     "You haven't got a hat," said the girl sulkily.
     "Oh," said Reg, "a moment please," and he went and fetched
his woolly red one.
     "Regard,"  he said again, "this simple silver salt cellar.
Regard this simple woolly hat. I put the  salt  cellar  in  the
hat,  thus,  and  I  pass  the hat to you. The next part of the
trick, dear lady... is up to you."
     He handed the hat  to  her,  past  their  two  intervening
neighbours,  Cawley  and  Watkin.  She  took the hat and Iooked
inside it.
     "Where's it gone?" she asked, staring into the hat.
     "It's wherever you put it," said Reg.
     "Oh," said Sarah, "I see. Well... that wasn't very good."
     Reg shrugged. "A humble trick, but it gives me  pleasure,"
he said, and turned back to Richard. "Now, what were we talking
about?"
     Richard  looked  at  him  with a slight sense of shock. He
knew that the Professor had always been  prone  to  sudden  and
erratic  mood  swings,  but  it  was  as  if all the warmth had
drained out of  him  in  an  instant.  He  now  wore  the  same
distracted  expression  Richard had seen on his face when first
he had arrived at his door that evening, apparently  completely
unexpected.  Reg  seemed  then  to sense that Richard was taken
aback and quickly reassembled a smile.
     "My dear chap!" he said. "My  dear  chap!  My  dear,  dear
chap! What was I saying?"
     "Er, you were saying 'My dear chap'."
     "Yes,  but  I  feel  sure it was a prelude to something. A
sort of short toccata on the theme of what  a  splendid  fellow
you  are prior to introducing the main subject of my discourse,
the nature of which I currently forget. You have no idea what I
was about to say?"
     "No."
     "Oh. Well, I suppose I should be pleased. If everyone knew
exactly what I was going to say, then there would be  no  point
in  my saying it, would there? Now, how's our young guest's pot
doing?"
     In fact it had reached Watkin, who pronounced  himself  no
expert  on  what  the ancients had made for themselves to drink
out of, only on what they had written as a result. He said that
Cawley was the one  to  whose  knowledge  and  experience  they
should all bow, and attempted to give the pot to him.
     "I  said,"  he  repeated,  "yours  was  the  knowledge and
experience to which we should bow. Oh, for heaven's sake,  take
your hands off your ears and have a l-ok at the thing."
     Gently,  but  firmly, he drew Cawley's right hand from his
ear, explained the situation to him once again, and handed  him
the   pot.   Cawley  gave  it  a  cursory  but  clearly  expert
examination.
     "Yes," he said, "about two  hundred  years  old,  I  would
think.  Very  rough.  Very  crude  example of its type. Utterly
without value, of course."
     He put it down peremptorily and gazed  off  into  the  old
minstrel gallery, which appeared to anger him for some reason.
     The  effect  on  Sarah was immediate. Already discouraged,
she was thoroughly downcast by this. She bit her lip and  threw
herself  back  against her chair, feeling once again thoroughly
out of place and childish. Her father gave her a  warning  look
about misbehaving, and then apologised for her again.
     "Well,  Buxtehude,"  he  hurried on to say, "yas, good old
Buxtehude. We'll have to see what we can do. Tell me..."
     "Young   lady,"   interrupted   a   voice,   hoarse   with
astonishment,  "you  are  clearly a magician and enchantress of
prodigious powers!"
     All eyes turned to Reg, the old show-off. He was  gripping
the pot and staring at it with manic fascination. He turned his
eyes  slowly  to  the  little  girl,  as  if for the first time
assessing the power of a feared adversary.
     "I bow to you," he whispered. "I, unworthy though I am  to
speak  in  the  presence of such a power as yours, beg leave to
congratulate you on one of the finest feats of  the  conjurer's
art it has been my privilege to witness!"
     Sarah stared at him with widening eyes.
     "May  I show these people what you have wrought?" he asked
earnestly.
     Very faintly she  nodded,  and  he  fetched  her  formerly
precious,  but  now  sadly  discredited, pot a sharp rap on the
table.
     It split into two irregular parts,  the  caked  clay  with
which  it was surrounded falling in jagged shards on the table.
One side of the pot fell away, leaving the rest standing.
     Sarah's eyes goggled at  the  stained  and  tarnished  but
clearly  recognisable  silver  college  salt  cellar,  standing
jammed in the remains of the pot.
     "Stupid old fool," muttered Cawley.
     After the general disparagement and condemnation  of  this
cheap parlour trick had died down - none of which could dim the
awe in Sarah's eyes - Reg turned to Richard and said, idly:
     "Who  was  that friend of yours when you were here, do you
ever see him? Chap  with  an  odd  East  European  name.  Svlad
something. Svlad Cjelli. Remember the fellow?"
     Richard looked at him blankly for a moment.
     "Svlad?"  he  said. "Oh, you mean Dirk. Dirk Cjelli. No. I
never stayed in touch. I've bumped into him a couple  of  times
in  the street but that's all. I think he changes his name from
time to time. Why do you ask?"

Chapter Five...


     High on his rocky promontory the Electric  Monk  continued
to  sit  on a horse which was going quietly and uncomplainingly
spare.  From  under  its  rough  woven  cowl  the  Monk   gazed
unblinkingly  down  into the valley, with which it was having a
problem, but the problem was a new and hideous one to the Monk,
for it was this
- Doubt.
     He never suffered it for long, but when he did, it  gnawed
at the very root of his being.
     The  day  was  hot; the sun stood in an empty hazy sky and
beat down upon the grey rocks and the scrubby,  parched  grass.
Nothing  moved,  not  even  the  Monk.  But strange things were
beginning to fizz in its brain, as they did from time  to  time
when  a  piece of data became misaddressed as it passed through
its input buffer.
     But then the Monk began to believe, fitfully and nervously
at first, but then with a great searing white  Hame  of  belief
which overturned all previous beliefs, including the stupid one
about the valley being pink, that somewhere down in the valley,
about  a  mile  from  where he was sitting, there would shortly
open up a mysterious doorway into a strange and distant  world,
a doorway through which he might enter. An astounding idea.
     Astoundingly  enough, however, on this one occasion he was
perfectly right.
     The horse sensed that something was up.
     It pricked up its ears and gently shook its head.  It  had
gone  into  a sort of trance looking at the same clump of rocks
for so long, and was on the verge of imagining them to be  pink
itself. It shook its head a little harder.
     A  slight  twitch on the reins, and a prod from the Monk's
heels and they were off, picking their way carefully  down  the
rocky  incline.  The  way  was  difficult. Much of it was loose
shale - loose brown and grey shale, with the  occasional  brown
and  green  plant clinging to a precarious existence on it. The
Monk noticed this without embarrassment. It was an older, wiser
Monk now, and had put childish things behind it. Pink  valleys,
hermaphrodite  tables,  these  were  all natural stages through
which one had to pass on the path to true enlightenment.
     The sun beat hard on them. The Monk wiped  the  sweat  and
dust  off  its  face and paused, leaning forward on the horse's
neck. It peered down through the  shimmering  heat  haze  at  a
large  outcrop  of  rock which stood out on to the floor of the
valley. There, behind that outcrop, was where the Monk thought,
or rather passionately believed to the core of its  being,  the
door  would  appear.  It  tried  to focus more closely, but the
details of the view swam confusingly in the hot rising air.
     As it sat back in its saddle, and was about  to  prod  the
horse onward, it suddenly noticed a rather odd thing.
     On  a flattish wall of rock nearby, in fact so nearby that
the Monk was surprised not to have noticed  it  before,  was  a
large  painting.  The  painting  was  crudely drawn, though not
without a certain stylish sweep of line, and seemed  very  old,
possibly  very,  very  old indeed. The paint was faded, chipped
and patchy, and it was difficult to discern  with  any  clarity
what  the  picture  was.  The  Monk approached the picture more
closely. It looked like a primitive hunting scene.
     The group of purple, multi-limbed creatures  were  clearly
early  hunters.  They  carried  rough  spears,  and were in hot
pursuit of a large horned and armoured creature, which appeъred
to have been wounded in the hunt already. The colours were  now
so dim as to be almost non-existent. In fact, all that could be
clearly  seen was the white of the hunters' teeth, which seemed
to shine with a whiteness whose  lustre  was  undimmed  by  the
passage of what must have been many thousands of years. In fact
they  even  put  the Monk's own teeth to shame, ad he had
cleaned them only that morning.
     The Monk had seen paintings like this before, but only  in
pictures or on the TV, never in real life. They were usually to
be  found in caves where they were protected from the elements,
otherwise they would not have survived.
     The Monk looked more carefully at the  immediate  environs
of  the  rock  wall  and  noticed that, though not exactly in a
cave, it was nevertheless protected by a large overhang and was
well sheltered from the wind and rain.  Odd,  though,  that  it
should have managed to last so long. Odder still that it should
appear  not  to  have  been  discovered. Such cave paintings as
there were were all famous and familiar images,  but  this  was
not one that he had ever seen before.
     Perhaps this was a dramatic and historic find he had made.
Perhaps  if  he  were  to  return to the city and announce this
discovery he would be welcomed back, given  a  new  motherboard
after  all  and allowed to believe - to believe - believe what?
He paused, blinked, and shook his head  to  clear  a  momentary
system error.
     He pulled himself up short.
     He  believed  in  a door. He must find that door. The door
was the way to... to...
     The Door was The Way.
     Good.
     Capital letters were always the best way of  dealing  with
things you didn't have a good answer to.
     Brusquely  he  tugged  the horse's head round and urged it
onward and downward.  Within  a  few  minutes  more  of  tricky
manoeuvring  they  had  reached  the  valley  floor, and he was
momentarily disconcerted to discover that the fine top layer of
dust that had settled on the brown parched earth was  indeed  a
very  pale  brownish  pink,  particularIy  on  the banks of the
sluggish trickle of mud which was all that remained, in the hot
season, of the river that flowed through the  valley  when  the
rains  came.  He dismounted and bent down to feel the pink dust
and run it through his fingers. It was very fine and  soft  and
felt  pleasant  as  he  rubbed it on his skin. It was about the
same colour, perhaps a little paler.
     The horse was  looking  at  him.  He  realised,  a  little
belatedly perhaps, that the horse must be extremely thirsty. He
was  extremely  thirsty himself, but had tried to keep his mind
off it. He unbuckled the water flask from the  saddle.  It  was
pathetically  light.  He  unscrewed the top and rook one single
swig. Then he poured a little into his cupped hand and  offered
it to the horse, who slurped at it greedily and briefly.
     The horse looked at him again.
     The  Monk  shook  his  head sadly, resealed the bottle and
replaced it. He knew, in that small part of his mind  where  he
kept  factual  and  logical information, that it would not last
much longer, and that, without it, neither would they.  It  was
only  his  Belief  that kept him going, currently his Belief in
The Door.
     He brushed the pink dust from his rough  habit,  and  then
stood  looking  at  the  rocky  outcrop,  a  mere hundred yards
distant.  He  Iooked  at  it  not  without   a   slight,   tiny
trepidation.  Although  the  major part of his mind was firm in
its eternal and unshakeable Belief that there would be  a  Door
behind the outcrop, and that the Door would be The Way, yet the
tiny  part  of his brain that understood about the water bottle
could not help but recall past disappointments  and  sounded  a
very tiny but jarring note of caution.
     If he elected not to go and see The Door for himself, then
he could  continue  to  believe  in it forever. It would be the
lodestone of his life (what little was left  of  it,  said  the
part of his brain that knew about the water bottle).
     If  on  the  other hand he went to pay his respects to the
Door and it wasn't there... what then?
     The horse whinnied impatiently.
     The answer, of course, was very simple.  He  had  a  whole
board  of  circuits  for  dealing with exactly this problem, in
fact this was the very heart of his function. He would continue
to believe in it whatever the facts turned out to be, what else
was the meaning of Belief?
     The Door would still be there, even if the door was not.
     He pulled himself together. The Door would be  there,  and
he must now go to it, because The Door was The Way.
     Instead  of  remounting  his horse, he led it. The Way was
but a short way, and he should enter the presence of  the  Door
in humility.
     He  walked,  brave  and  erect,  with  solemn slowness. He
approached the rocky outcrop. He  reached  it.  He  turned  the
corner. He looked.
     The Door was there.
     The horse, it must be said, was quite surprised.
     The  Monk  fell  to  his knees in awe and bewilderment. So
braced was he for dealing  with  the  disappointment  that  was
habitually  his  lot  that, though he would pever know to admit
it, he was completely unprepared for this.  He  stared  at  The
Door in sheer, blank system error.
     It  was  a  door such as he had never seen before. All the
doors he knew were great steel-reinforced  things,  because  of
all  the  video recorders and dishwashers that were kept behind
them, plus of course all the expensive Electric Monks that were
needed to believe in it all. This one was  simple,  wooden  and
small,  about  his  own  size. A Monk-size door, painted white,
with a single, slightly dented brass knob  slightly  less  than
halfway  up  one side. It was set simply in the rock face, with
no explanation as to its origin or purpose.
     Hardly knowing  how  he  dared,  the  poor  startled  Monk
staggered  to his feet and, leading his horse, walked nervously
forward towards it. He reached out and touched it.  He  was  so
startled  when  no  alarms  went  off  that  he jumped back. He
touched it again, more firmly this time.
     He let his hand drop slowly to  the  handle  -  again,  no
alarms. He waited to be sure, and then he turned it, very, very
gently.  He  felt  a  mechanism  release.  He  held his breath.
Nothing. He drew the door towards him, and it came  easily.  He
looked inside, but the interior was so dim in contrast with the
desert  sun  outside that he could see nothing. At last, almost
dead with wonder, he cntered, pulling the horse in after him.

     A few minutes later, a figure that had been sitting out of
sight around the next outcrop of rock finished rubbing dust  on
his  face,  stood up, stretched his limbs and made his way back
towards the door, patting his clothes as he did so.

Chapter Six...


     "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
     A stately pleasure-dome decree:"

     The reader clearly belonged to the school of thought which
holds that a sense of the seriousness or greatness of a poem is
best imparted by reading it in a silly  voice.  He  soared  and
swooped  at  the  words  until  they seemed to duck and run for
cover.

     "Where Alph, the sacred river ran
     Through caverns measureless to man
     Down to a sunless sea."

     Richard relaxed back into his seat. The words  were  very,
very  familar  to  him,  as  they  could not help but be to any
English graduate of St Cedd's College, and they settled  easily
into his min l.
     The  association  of  the  college wit-Coleridge was
taken very  seriously  indeed,  despite  the  man's  well-known
predilection for certain recreational pharmaceuticals under the
influence  of  which his, his greatest work, was composed, in a
dream.
     The entire manuscript was lodged in  the  safe-keeping  of
the  college  library,  and  it  was  from  this itself, on the
regular occasion of the Coleridge Dinner,  that  the  poem  was
read.

     "So twice five miles of fertile ground
     With walls and towers were girdled round:
     And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
     Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
     And here were forests ancient as the hills,
     Enfolding sunny spots of greenery."

     Richard  wondered how long it took. He glanced sideways at
his former Director of Studies and was disturbed by the  sturdy
purposefulness  of  his  reading  posture.  The  singsong voice
irritated him at first, but after a while it began to lull  him
instead,  and he watched a rivulet of wax seeping over the edge
of a candle that was burning low now and throwing  a  guttering
light over the carnage of dinner.

     "But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
     Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
     A savage place! as holy and enchanted
     As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
     By woman wailing for her demon-lover!"

     The small quantities of claret that he had allowed himself
during  the course of the meal seeped warmly through his veins,
and soon his own mind began to wander, and  provoked  by  Reg's
question  earlier  in  the  meal,  he  wondered what had lately
become of his former... was friend the  word?  He  seemed  more
like  a  succession  of extraordinary events than a person. The
idea of him actually having friends as such seemed not so  much
unlikely, more a sort of mismatching of concepts, like the idea
of the Suez crisis popping out for a bun.
     Svlad  Cjelli.  Popularly  known  as  Dirk, though, again,
"popular" was hardly right. Notorious, certainly; sought after,
endlessly speculated about, those too were true.  But  popular?
Only in the sense that a serious accident on the motorway might
be  popular  -  everyone slows down to have a good look, but no
one will get too close to the flames. Infamous  was  more  like
it. Svlad Cjelli, infamously known as Dirk.
     He  was  rounder  than  the average undergraduate and wore
more hats. That is to say, there was just the one hat which  he
habitually wore, but he wore it with a passion that was rare in
one  so young. The hat was dark red and round, with a very flat
brim, and it appeared to move as if balanced on gimbals,  which
ensured  its  perfect  horizontality  at all times, however its
owner moved his head. As a hat it was a remarkable rather  than
entirely successful piece of persona! decoration. It would make
an  elegant  adornment, stylish, shapely and flattering, if the
wearer were a small bedside lamp, but not otherwise.
     People gravitated around him, drawn in by the  stories  he
denied  about  himself,  but  what  the source of these stories
might be, if not his own denials, was never entirely clear.
     The tales had to do with  the  psychic  powers  that  he'd
supposedly  inherited  from his mother's side of the family who
he claimed, had lived at the smarter end of Transylvania.  That
is  to  say,  he didn't make any such claim at all, and said it
was the most absurd nonsense. He strenuously denied that  there
were  bats  of  any kind at all in his family and threatened to
sue anybody who put about such malicious fabrications,  but  he
affected  nevertheless to wear a large and flappy leather coat,
and had one of those machines in his room which are supposed to
help cure bad backs if you hang upside down from them. He would
allow people to discover him hanging from this machine  at  all
kinds  of  odd  hours  of the day, and more particularly of the
night, expressly so that he could vigorously deny that  it  had
any significance whatsoever.
     By  means of an ingenious series of strategically deployed
denials of the most exciting and exotic things, he was able  to
create the myth that he was a psychic, mystic, telepathic, fey,
clairvoyant, psychosassic vampire bat.
     What did "psychosassic" mean?
     lt was his own word and he vigorously denied that it meant
anything at all.

     "And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
     As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
     A mighty fountain momently was forced:
     Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
     Huge fragments vaulted..."

     Dirk had also been perpetually broke. This would change.
     lt  was  his  room-mate who started it, a credulous fellow
called Mander, who, if the truth were known, had probably  been
specially selected by Dirk for his credulity.
     Steve  Mander  noticed that if ever Dirk went to bed drunk
he would talk in his sleep. Not only  that,  but  the  sort  of
things  he  would  say  in his sleep would be things like, "The
opening up of trade routes to the mumble mumble burble was  the
turning  point  for  the  growth  of empire in the snore footle
mumble. Discuss."
     "... like rebounding hail
     Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:"

     The first time this happened Steve Mander sat bolt upright
in bed. This was shortly before  prelim  exams  in  the  second
year,  and  what  Dirk  had  just said, or judiciously mumbled,
sounded remarkably like a very likely question in the  Economic
History paper.
     Mander  quietly  got  up,  crossed  over to Dirk's bed and
listened  very  hard,  but  other   than   a   few   completely
disconnected   mumblings   about   Schleswig-Holstein  and  the
Franco-Prussian war, the latter being largely directed by  Dirk
into his pillow, he learned nothing more.
     News,  however,  spread  -  quietly,  discreetly, and like
wildfire.

     "And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
     It flung up momently the sacred river."

     For the next month Dirk  found  himself  being  constantly
wined  and  dined  in the hope that he would sleep very soundly
that  night  and  dream-speak  a  few  more   exam   questions.
Remarkably, it seemed that the better he was fed, and the finer
the  vintage  of  the  wine  he was given to drink, the less he
would tend to sleep facing directly into his pillow.
     His scheme, therefore, was to exploit  his  alleged  gifts
without  ever  actually claiming to have them. ln fact he would
react  to  stories  about  his  supposed   powers   with   open
incredulity, even hostility.

     "Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
     Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
     Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
     And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
     And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
     Ancestral voices prophesying war!"

     Dirk  was  also,  he  denied,  a  clairaudient.  He  would
sometimes hum tunes in his sleep that  two  weeks  later  would
turn  out  to  be  a  hit  for  someone.  Not  too difficult to
organise, really.
     In fact, he had always done the bare minimum  of  research
necessary  to support these myths. He was lazy, and essentially
what he did was allow people's enthusiastic credulity to do the
work for him. The laziness was  essential  -  if  his  supposed
feats  of  the  paranormal had been detailed and accurate, then
people  might  have  been  suspicious  and  looked  for   other
explanations.  On  the other hand, the more vague and ambiguous
his "predictions" the more other people's own wishful  thinking
would close the credibility gap.
     Dirk never made much out of it - at least, he appeared not
to. In  fact,  the  benefit  to himself, as a student, of being
continually wined and dined at other people's expense was  more
considerable  than anyone would expect unless they sat down and
worked out the figures.
     And, of course, he never claimed - in  fact,  he  actively
denied= that any of it was even remotely true.
     He  was  therefore  well placed to execute a very nice and
tasty little scam come the time of finals.

     "The shadow of the dome of pleasure
     Floated midway on the waves;
     Where was heard the mingled measure
     From the fountain and the caves.
     It was a miracle of rare device,
     A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!"

     "Good heavens ...!" Reg suddenly seemed to  awake  with  a
start  from  the  light  doze  into which he had gently slipped
under the influence of the wine and the  reading,  and  glanced
about  himself  with  blank  surprise, but nothing had changed.
Coleridge's words sang through a  warm  and  contented  silence
that  had settled on the great hall. AfterХanother quick frown,
Reg settled back into another doze, but this  time  a  slightly
more attentive one.

     "A damsel with a dulcimer
     In a vision once I saw:
     It was an Abyssinian maid,
     And on her dulcimer she played,
     Singing of Mount Abora."

     Dirk  allowed  himself  to  be  persuaded  to  make, under
hypnosis, a firm prediction about what questions would  be  set
for examination that summer.
     He  himself  first  planted the idea by explaining exactly
the sort of thing that he would never, under any circumstances,
be prepared to do, though in many ways he would like  to,  just
to  have  the  chance  to  disprove  his  alleged  and strongly
disavowed abilities.
     And it was on these grounds, carefully prepared,  that  he
eventually  agreed  -  only  because  it would once and for all
scotch the whole silly - immensely, tediously silly - business.
He would make his predictions by  means  of  automatic  writing
under  proper  supervision, and they would then be sealed in an
envelope and deposited at the bank until after the exams.
     Then they would be opened to see  how  accurate  they  had
been after the exams.
     He was, not surprisingly, offered some pretty hefty bribes
from a  pretty  hefty  number  of  people  to  let them see the
predictions he had written down, but he was absolutely  shocked
by the idea. That, he said, would be dishonest...

     "Could I revive within me
     Her symphony and song,
     To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
     That with music loud and long,
     I would build that dome in air,
     That sunny dome ! Those caves of ice ! "

     Then,  a short time later, Dirk allowed himself to be seen
around town wearing something of a vexed and solemn expression.
At first he waved aside enquiries as to what it  was  that  was
bothering  him,  but eventually he let slip that his mother was
going to have to undergo some extremely expensive  dental  work
which, for reasons that he refused to discuss, would have to be
done privately, only there wasn't the money.
     From  here,  the  path downward to accepting donations for
his mother's supposed medical  expenses  in  return  for  quick
glances   at   his   written  exam  predictions  proved  to  be
sufficiently steep and well-oiled for him to be  able  to  slip
down it with a minimum of fuss.
     Then it further transpired that the only dentist who could
perform  this  mysterious dental operation was an East European
surgeon now  living  in  Malibu,  and  it  was  in  consequence
necessary to increase the level of donations rather sharply.
     He  still  denied,  of course, that his abilities were all
that they were cracked up to be, in fact he  denied  that  they
existed  at all, and insisted that he would never have embarked
on the exercise at all if it wasn't to disprove the whole thing
- and also, since other people seemed, at their  own  risk,  to
have  a  faith in his abilities that he himself did not, he was
happy to indulge them to the extent of letting them pay for his
sainted mother's operation.
     He could only emerge well from this situation.
     Or so he thought.

     "And all who heard should see them there
     And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
     His flashing eyes, his floating hair!"

     The exam papers Dirk produced under hypnosis, by means  of
automatic  writing,  he had, in fact, pieced together simply by
doing the same minimum research that any student  taking  exams
would  do,  studying  previous exam papers, and seeing what, if
any, patterns emerged, and  making  intelligent  guesses  about
what  might  come  up. He was pretty sure of getting (as anyone
would be) a strike rate that was sufficiently high  to  satisfy
the  credulous,  and sufficiently low for the whole exercise to
look perfectly innocent.
     As indeed it was.
     What completely blew him out of the water,  and  caused  a
furore  which  ended  with him being driven out of Cambridge in
the back of a Black Maria, was  the  fact  that  all  the  exam
papers  he  sold  turned  out to be the same as the papers that
were actually set.
     Exactly. Word for word. To the very comma.

     "Wave a circle round him thrice
     And close your eyes with holy dread,
     For he on honey-dew hath fed,
     And drunk the milk of Paradise. . "

     And that, apart from a  flurry  of  sensational  newspaper
reports which exposed him as a fraud, then trumpeted him as the
real  thing  so  that they could have another round of exposing
him as a fraud again and then trumpeting him as the real  thing
again, ntil they got bored and found a nice juicy snooker
player to harass instead, was that.
     In  the  years  since then, Richard had run into Dirk from
time to time and had usually been greeted  with  that  kind  of
guarded  half smile that wants to know if you think it owes you
money before it blossoms into one that hopes you will  lend  it
some.  Dirk's regular name changes suggested to Richard that he
wasn't alone in being treated like this.
     He felt a tug of sadness that someone who  had  seemed  so
shiningly  alive  within  the  small  confines  of a university
community should have seemed to fade so much in  the  light  of
common  day.  And  he  wondered  at Reg's asking after him like
that, suddenly and out of the blue, in what  seemed  altogether
too airy and casual a manner.
     He  glanced  around  him  again,  at  his  lightly snoring
neighbour, Reg; at little Sarah rapt in  silent  attention;  at
the  deep  hall  swathed  in  darkly  glimmering  light; at the
portraits of old prime ministers and poets  hung  high  in  the
darkness  with  just  the odd glint of candlelight gleaming off
their teeth;  at  the  Director  of  English  Studies  standing
reading  in  his  poetry-reading  voice;  at the book of "Kubla
Khan" that the Director of English Studies held  in  his  hand;
and  finally,  surreptitiously,  at  his watch. He settled back
again.
     The voice continued, reading the  second,  and  altogether
stranger part of the poem...