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what he is—a mess.” I turned to her. “Tell me, had he really never seen a mop for washing up? Or an electric water-heater?”
    She laughed. “Honestly, I don’t think he had. I don’t know what his own kitchen can be like!”
    I lit a cigarette and flopped down in a chair. “Tired?” she asked.
    “A bit.” He said the Reindeer tail would come to bits in1,440 hours, but he didn’t know what an electric water-heater looked like. Could that possibly make sense? Did he know enough about real life to speak with confidence on anything? Was his opinion of any value whatsoever? Could one trust his judgment? I did not know, and I sat there turning it over and over in my mind.
    Shirley said, “Here you are.” I roused myself to what was going on, and the wonderful girl had been out to the kitchen and got a tumbler of whisky and soda, and she was offering it to me. I kissed the hand she gave it to me with, and said, “Like to go to the pictures tonight?”
    “I’ll look and see what’s on.” She picked up the paper, turned the pages, and said, “I heard your Mr. Honey holding forth very earnestly about something or other while we were washing up. What was it all about?”
    I blew a long cloud of smoke. “It was about the lost ten tribes of Israel, and the Druids, and about Jesus Christ coming to Glastonbury, and all sorts of stuff like that.” I looked up at her. “I wish to God I could make up my mind if he’s plain crackers or something different.”
    “Is it important?” she asked.
    “It is rather,” I told her. “You see, he says the Reindeer tail will come to bits in 1,440 hours. And I’m supposed to be able to check up on his work. And I can’t do it. I’m not good enough.…”
    The next week was a torment of anxiety and uncertainty. I had to keep the matter to myself; I did not want to keep on badgering Mr. Honey or to go wailing to the Director. Every day, I knew, the Reindeers were flying over the Atlantic piling up the hours faster than Mr. Honey’s test, each machine probably doing the best part of a hundred hours a week towards the point when Mr. Honey said their tails would break. On the sixth day I couldn’t stand it any longer, and suggested to the Director that perhaps he might give Sir Phillip a jerk up on the telephone.
    On the ninth day the report came in. The Director rang through to tell me he had got it, and I went down to him. He handed it to me, and I sat down in his office to read it through.
    Sir Phillip said that he had examined the work submitted to him in detail and had received certain explanations verbally from Mr. Honey. He accepted, with considerable reserve, the work of Koestlinger indicating that an energy loss occurred when a material was subjected to repeated reversals of stressand that this lost energy could not be accounted for by any balance of the normal forms. It was a wild assumption on the part of Mr. Honey, said Sir Phillip, that this lost energy became absorbed into the structure of the atom in the form of nuclear strain. He could only regard that as an interesting hypothesis which might perhaps be a fit subject for research at some date in the future. If ever it should be confirmed that something of the sort did happen, then he was very doubtful if the stress induced would, in fact, produce a separation of the neutron that Mr. Honey postulated. He said, a little caustically, that in his experience it was not so easy to split the atom as amateurs were apt to think. If such a separation should take place, he saw no present indication that the resulting new material would be the crystallamerous isotrope that Mr. Honey had observed in substances broken under a fatigue test. That, he seemed to think, was little more than wishful thinking on Mr. Honey’s part.
    In spite of all this, he recommended that the trials of the Reindeer tail should be continued, as the subject was obviously important. If it was desired that research upon the problems of fatigue should