“No.” Hutchman was fairly sure he had seen the girl in question, but he had no desire to get involved in a conversation — in any case, his viewing time had been brief. He had glanced up from a book and noticed an unusually pneumatic female figure on the screen, then Vicky had walked into the room and switched the set off. Accusation and disgust had spread like Arctic ice across her features. He had waited all evening for an explosion, but this time she seemed to be burning on a slow fuse.

“Singer!” Spain said indignantly. “It isn’t hard to see how she got on that show. I thought those balloons of hers were going to come right out every time she took a breath.”

What’s going on here? Hutchman thought.That’s exactly what Vicky said last night. What are they getting steamed up about? And why do they get at me about it? I’ve never exercised the droit du casting director.

“…makes me laugh is all the fuss about too much violence on television,” Spain was saying. “They never stop to think about what seeing all these half-naked women does to a kid’s mind.”

“Probably makes them think about sex,” Hutchman said stonily.

“Of course it does!” Spain was triumphant. “What did I tell you?”

Hutchman closed his eyes. This… this thing standing before me is an adult member of the so-called human race. God help us. Now is the time for all good parties to come to the aid of the men. Vicky gets jealous of electron patterns on a cathode-ray tube. Spain prefers to see shadows of the Cambodian war — those tortured women holding dead babies with the blue-rimmed bullet holes in their downy skulls. But would this charred sheet of paper in my pocket really change anything? I CAN MAKE NEUTRONS DANCE TO A NEW TUNE — but what about the chorea which affects humanity?

“…all at it, all those whores you see on the box are at it. All on the game. I wish I’d been born a woman, that’s all I can say. I’d have made a fortune.” Spain gave a throaty laugh.

Hutchman opened his eyes. “Not from me, you wouldn’t.”

“Am I not your type, Hutch? Not intellectual enough?”

Hutchman glanced at the large varnished pebble he used for a paperweight and imagined smashing Spain’s head with it Plea: justifiable insecticide. “Get out of my office, Don — I have work to do.”

Spain sniffed, producing a glutinous click in the back of his nose, and went through into the connecting office, closing the door behind him. The gray abstract of his figure on the frosted glass hovered in the region of Muriel’s desk for a few minutes, accompanied by the sound of drawers being opened and papers riffled, then faded as he moved into his own room. Hutchman watched the pantomime with increasing self-disgust for the way in which he had never once come right out and told Spain what he thought of him. I can make neutrons dance to a new tune, but I shrink from telling a human tick to fasten onto someone else. He took a bulky file marked “secret” from the secure drawer of his desk and tried to concentrate on the project which was paying his salary.

Jack was a fairly conventional ground-to-air missile employing the simplest possible guidance-and-control system, that of radio command from the firing station. It was, in fact, a modification of an earlier Westfield defensive missile which had suffered from an ailment common to its breed — loss of control sensitivity as the distance between it and the launcher/control console complex increased. Westfield had conceived the idea of transferring part of the guidance-and-control system to a second missile — Jill — fired a fraction of a second later, which would follow Jack and relay data on its position relative to a moving target. The system was an attempt to preserve the simplicity of command-link guidance and yet obtain the accuracy of a fully automated targetseeking device. If it worked it would have a respectable range, high reliability, and low unit cost. As a senior mathematician with Westfield, Hutchman was ehgaged on rationalizing the maths, paring down the variables to a point where Jack and Jill could be directed by something not very different from a conventional firecontrol computer.

The work was of minimal interest to him — being a far cry from the formalism of quantum mechanics — but the Westfield plant was close to Vicky’s hometown. She refused to consider moving to London, or Cambridge (there had been a good offer from Brock at the Cavendish), or any other center where he could have followed his own star; and he was too committed to their marriage to think about separating. Consequently he worked on the mathematics of many-particle systems in his spare time, more for relaxation than anything else. Relaxation! The thoughts he had been trying to suppress twisted upward from a lower level of his mind.

Our own government, the Russians, the Americans, the Chinese, the French — any and all of them would snuff me out in a second if they knew what is in my pocket. I can make neutrons dance to a new tune!

Shivering slightly, he picked up a pencil and began work, but concentration was difficult. After a futile hour he phoned the chief photographer and arranged a showing of all recent film on the Jack-and-Jill test firings.

In the cool anonymous darkness of the small theater scenes of water and grainy blue sky filled his eyes, became the only reality, making him feel disembodied. The dark smears of the missiles hovered and trembled and swooped, exhausting clouds of hydraulic fluid into the air at every turn, until their motors flared out and they dropped into the sea, slowly, swinging below the orange mushrooms of their recovery chutes. Jack fell down and broke his crown, and Jill…

“They’ll never be operational,” a voice said in his ear. It was that of Boyd Crangle, assistant chief of preliminary design, who had come into the room unnoticed by Hutchman. Crangle had been opposed to the Jack-and-Jill project from its inception.

“Think not?”

“Not a chance,” Crangle said with crisp confidence. “All the aluminium we use in this country’s aerospace industry — it ends up being melted down and made into garbage cans because our aircraft and missiles are obsolescent before they get into the air. That’s what you and I help to produce, Hutch. Garbage cans. It would be much better, more honest, and probably more profitable if we cut out the intermediate stage and went into full-scale manufacture of garbage cans.”

“Or ploughshares.”

“Or what?”

“The things we ought to beat our swords into.”

“Very profound, Hutch.” Crangle sighed heavily. “It’s almost lunchtime — let’s go out to the Duke and have a pint.”

“No thanks, Boyd. I’m going home for lunch, taking half a day off.” Hutchman was mildly surprised by his own words, but realized he really did need to get away for a few hours on his own and face the fact that the equations he had written on a single scrap of paper could make him the most important man in the world. There were decisions to be made.

The drive to Crymchurch took less than half an hour on clear, almost-empty roads which looked slightly unfamiliar through being seen at an unfamiliar time of day. It was a fresh October afternoon and the air which lapped at the open windows of the car was cool. Turning into the avenue where he lived, Hutchman was suddenly struck by the fact that autumn had arrived — the sidewalks were covered with leaves, gold and copper coins strewn by extravagant beeches. September gets away every year, he thought. The favourite month always runs through my fingers before I realize it’s begun.

He parked outside the long, low house which had been a wedding present from Vicky’s father. Her car was missing from the garage which probably meant she was shopping in the town before picking up David at school. He had deliberately avoided calling her to say he would be home. When Vicky was working up to an emotional explosion it was very difficult for Hutchman to think constructively about anything, and this afternoon he wanted his mind to be cold and dark as an ancient wine cellar. Even as he let himself into the house the thought of his wife triggered a spray of memory shards, fragments of the past stained with the discordant hues of old angers and half-forgotten disappointments. (The time she had found Muriel’s home-telephone number in his pocket and convinced herself he was having an affair: I’ll kill you, Luke — steak knife’s serrated edge suddenly pressed into his neck, her eyes inhuman as pebbles — I know what’s going on between you and that fat tart, and I’m not going to let you get away with it… another occasion: a computer Operator had haemorrhaged in the office and he had driven her home — Why did she come to you? You helped her to get rid of something!… a receding series of mirrored bitternesses: How dare you suggest there’s anything wrong with my mind! Is a woman insane if she doesn’t want a filthy disease brought into the house, to her and her child? David’s eyes beseeching him, lenses of tears: Are you and Mum going to separate, Dad? Don’t leave. I’ll do without pocket money. I’ll never wet my pants again.)