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‘I’ll see O’Kearn tomorrow morning. But he mustn’t think this is the whim of one isolated individual. You must come with me.’
    After some further discussion it was decided that a delegation would present itself to the senior
Nobel
: Fawell, Yranne, Mrs Betty Han and Zarratoff. These four carried enough weight and represented a sufficiently wide and varied range of the sciences,to be able to speak on behalf of all of them. Having decided this, Fawell asked Betty another question: ‘You spoke to us of two conditions which are essential for success, Betty. What, in your opinion, is the second?’
    ‘Enthusiasm. It will be necessary to create a surge of passion about our plan…’
    They all looked at her with curiosity. The reason was that Mrs Betty Han had a rather unique way of speaking about enthusiasm and passion. She did it with the calm of a mathematician demonstrating a geometric theorem. She continued, ‘The competition organised by the
Nobels
has made a move in the right direction. But I doubt if that will be enough.’
    ‘So?’
    ‘So later we’ll seek means of provoking it. They are available.’
    As they separated to go about their preparations, Fawell noticed the absent-minded expression on the face of the mathematician Yranne, which was in contrast to the animation of his colleagues.
    ‘Something not right?’ he asked him. ‘Don’t you agree that we should make an appeal to O’Kearn and the
Nobels
?’
    The other shook his head.
    ‘It’s just a simple, bizarre idea. I can make neither head nor tail of it. It’s hardly worth dwelling on.’
    ‘But?’
    ‘After listening to your story, I suddenly found myself asking if it wouldn’t be preferable to make an appeal to Joë.’

5.
    It was the fourth day of the competition. The thirteen candidates had taken their seats in the great amphitheatre again, where three
Nobels
took it in turns to supervise them. Fawell removed some pages full of scribbles from his briefcase and quickly readthem again. It was his work from the previous three days. He had two reasons for being satisfied: first the awareness of having dealt with the topic well, and secondly he felt that his mind was freer, having finished a necessary but rather boring stage. Today he would finally be able to tackle the essential points.
    That first part of his programme dealt with the resolution, as soon as possible, of the material problems which hindered the development of the world by keeping it in a condition of poor health and permanent anxiety. If he gave first priority to these issues, it was just as much because he reckoned that nothing serious could be realised on Earth as long as men were suffering from hunger, sickness and the slavery of work, as because of his quite Machiavellian intention of provoking surprise among the examiners. They no doubt expected that someone like him, a specialist in nuclear physics, would mobilise the world, as a matter of urgency, in favour of an accelerated and finally coherent programme of atomic research. This was in fact what his instinct and his scientific belief suggested to him at first. But on reflection it seemed to him that some preliminary preparation was vital and that to delay was the sign of a mind with lofty and far-reaching views, of the kind which would be suitable for the head of a world state.
    In addition he recalled quite a lively argument against the
Nobels
during a meeting in which the structure of such a state was envisaged. The physicists were only concerned about the progress of their science, that is to say in accessing complete knowledge about inorganic matter by analysis of infinitesimally small particles. They had agreed, when curtly reminded by their colleagues, the physiologists and medical doctors, that planet Earth was itself not a negligible part of what we call the world, and that what they tended to forget was that this was inhabited by beings possessing a certain quality called life. Indeed, there were those