Score: Hadley 2, Adams 2.

At this, Hadley broke into a hysterical frenzy, perspiration streaming down his face and his body. His shirt showed a dozen or more large wet patches. Jonathan Adams spoke for the first time, “Can you not be quiet, man, even when you are but a hairsbreadth from death?”

It all depended on Blanche White, the girl Hadley treated with such callous disregard. She had stood there longer than any of the others, turning things over and over in her mind. She knew nothing of Adams. It never occurred to her that she was deciding between Hadley and a man of quite an opposite temper, that Adams would hardly have dared to ask her to go out with him, that if he had—if by some miracle Adams had conquered his shyness and had done to her what Hadley had done—Adams would have stood by her fully and completely. She knew nothing of this, she knew only of her own plight: “If he’s dead, there can’t be a divorce. So his wife won’t need me. She’ll have lots, of course, because she’s his wife. But she won’t help me, she’ll just laugh and say I was a fool, the same as he did. He wouldn’t help me much, but he’d see I was all right. That’s what he said, he’d see I was all right. He’ll help me because it’s his kid, that’s why. Oh, God, I hope it’s not him.”

Score: Hadley 3, Adams 2.

The sergeant whipped away the sheet from the corpse. The bruised body of Jonathan Adams lay there on the slab. During the mid-morning, Arthur Hadley was found wandering in fields about two miles from the place of the accident. Reconstruction showed Adams to have taken the full force of the collision, coming in as he did from behind. Hadley was hit hard, but with the protection of the steering wheel in front and of the bulk of a heavy car behind, he suffered only comparatively minor injuries. After a couple of days, his memory returned to the point when he had left Blanche White, out at his special place in the country. He was never able to recover anything further than this.

Superficially, it might seem from the geometry of the accident as if it must inevitably have been Adams who was killed, Hadley who survived. This simple-minded interpretation takes no account of the possibility that Adams might have cut his car still further in on the near side. Had he done so, the two cars would have locked together, spun off the road, and come to rest as the front of Hadley’s car crashed against a tree. The decision rested on Adams, on his split-second reaction to Hadley’s car blundering in front of him. Now, Adams’ split-second reaction depended on electronic neurological activity in his brain, which in the last analysis turned on a single quantum event, on whether the event took place or not. Until the winding sheet was whipped away from the body in the morgue, the wave function representing the event was still in what physicists call a “mixed state.” Let it be added, for the sake of the smart physicist, that a clue to the solution of the deepest problem of theoretical physics—the condensation of the Schroedinger wave function—is to be found in the manner in which our jury of five arrived at their decision.

In the sequel, Hadley just managed to keep his businesses on an even keel. Jennifer tried unsuccessfully for a divorce. Hadley paid Blanche White well enough for the girl to keep her mouth shut. It wasn’t the first time he’d had to pay out, and it wouldn’t be the last. What the hell did it matter, really, a few quid? Mike Johnson was sent as manager of the new business at Sheffield. This more or less terminated his affair with Jennifer, although there were rare meetings between them which sputtered on for a year or two.

During the final scene in the morgue, it had at last become clear to Adams, a gentle, rather brave man, exactly where his life had gone wrong. Adams was a man who felt commitments so deeply that he hesitated to make any at all. It was because he felt even a mild commitment to a woman implied a complete commitment that he had remained a bachelor. Just because he felt he must give a great deal if he gave at all, life had passed him by. He was without connections anywhere, if one excepts the trivia of everyday life in his Oxford College.

Hadley was the exact opposite. He accepted the deepest of commitments and then gave little when he should have given much. But Hadley did give a little, which was why, goat and lousy bully that he was, the vote fell to him.

It may be thought the vote an unfair one, taken in Hadley’s territory. But Adams had no territory for the vote to be taken in. Moreover, Adams started with a vote in hand, since it was hardly conceivable for Renfrew to make his choice in any other way. Adams only needed to split Hadley’s territory down the middle to give himself a three-to-two victory. Everyone in Hadley’s territory voted sharply in their own self-interest. Only Renfrew’s vote was altruistic, for in truth Renfrew was himself a strong candidate for Adams’ chair.

In one of his finest passages, Rabelais advises us all to become debtors. As the debtor grows older, the whole world wishes him well, the great man points out, for only if the debtor stays alive can his creditors have any hope of recovering their lendings. As a rich man grows older, the world gathers around, waiting for him to die, as a group of vultures might gather to plan the distribution of his flesh before the last breath was out of his body. The same truth applies more deeply than even Rabelais saw. It applies at the deepest levels of emotion. Adams was the creditor, Hadley the debtor.

Angus Carruthers was a wayward, impish genius. Genius is not the same thing as high ability. Men of great talent commonly spread their efforts, often very effectively, over a wide front. The true genius devotes the whole of his skill, his energies, his intelligence, to a particular objective, which he pursues unrelentingly.

Early in life, Carruthers became skeptical of human superiority over other animals. Already in his early teens, he understood exactly where the difference lies—it lies in the ability of humans to pool their knowledge through speech, in the ability through speech to educate the young. The challenging problem to his keen mind was to find a system of communication every bit as powerful as language that could be made available to others of the higher animals. The basic idea was not original, it was the determination to carry the idea through to its conclusion that was new. Carruthers pursued his objective inflexibly down the years.

Gussie had no patience with people who talked and chattered to animals. If animals had the capacity to understand language, wouldn’t they have done it already, he said, thousands of years ago? Talk was utterly and completely pointless. You were just damned stupid if you thought you were going to teach English to your pet dog or cat. The thing to do was to understand the world from the point of view of the dog or cat. Once you’d got yourself into their system, it would be time enough to think about trying to get them into your system.

Gussie had no close friends. I suppose I was about as near to being a friend as anyone, yet even I would see him only perhaps once in six months. There was always something refreshingly different when you happened to run into him. He might have grown a black spade beard, or he might just have had a crewcut. He might be wearing a flowing cape, or he might be neatly tailored in a Bond Street suit. He always trusted me well enough to show off his latest experiments. At the least they were remarkable, at the best they went far beyond anything I had heard of, or read about. To my repeated suggestions that he simply must “publish,” he always responded with a long, wheezy laugh. To me it seemed just plain common sense to publish, if only to raise money for the experiments, but Gussie obviously didn’t see it this way. How he managed for money I could never discover. I supposed him to have a private income, which was very likely correct.