few years ago."

"Her claims were, well, interesting, if that's the sort of thing you're interested in. The music was certainly more consistent with what might be produced by each of those gentlemen quickly and before breakfast, than it was with what you would expect from a musically unskilled middle-aged housewife."

Kate could not let this pomposity pass.

"That's a rather sexist viewpoint," she said, "George Eliot was a middle-aged housewife."

"Yes, yes," said Standish testily, "but she wasn't taking musical dictation from the deceased Wolfgang Amadeus. That's the point I'm making. Please try and follow the logic of this argument and do not introduce irrelevancies. If I felt for a moment that the example of George Eliot could shed any light on our present problem, you could rely on me to introduce it myself.

"Where was I?"

"I don't know."

"Mabel. Doris? Was that her name? Let us call her Mabel. The point is that the easiest way of dealing with the Doris problem was simply to ignore it. Nothing very important hinged on it at alI. A few concerts. Second rate material. But here, here we have something of an altogether diffenent nature."

He said this last in hushed tones and turned to study a TV monitor which stood among the bank of computer screens. It showed a close-up of Mrs May's hand scuttling across her pad of paper. Her hand largely obscured what she had written, but it appeared to be mathematics of some kind.

"Mrs May is, or so she claims, taking dictation from some of the greatest physicists. From Einstein and from Heisenberg and Planck. And it is very hard to dispute her claims, because the information being produced here, by automatic writing, by this...untutored lady, is in fact physics of a very profound order.

"From the late Einstein we are getting more and more refinements to our picture of how time and space work at a macroscopic level, and from the late Heisenberg and Planck we are increasing our understanding of the fundamental structures of matter at a quantum level. And there is absolutely no doubt that this information is edging us closer and closer towards the elusive goal of a Grand Unified Field Theory of Everything.

"Now this produces a very interesting, not to say somewhat embarrassing situation for scientists because the means by which the information is reaching us seems to be completely contrary to the meaning of the information."

"It's like Uncle Henry," said Kate, suddenly.

Standish looked at her blankly.

"Uncle Henry thinks he's a chicken," Kate explained.

Standish looked at her blankly again.

"You must have heard it," said Kate. "`We're terribly worried about Uncle Henry. He thinks he's a chicken.' `Well, why don't you send him to the doctor?' `Well, we would only we need the eggs.'".

Standish stared at her as if a small but perfectly formed elderberry tree had suddenly sprung unbidden from the bridge of her nose.

"Say that again," he said in a small, shocked voice.

"What, all of it?"

"All of it."

Kate stuck her fist on her hip and said it again, doing the voices with a bit more dash and Southern accents this time.

"'That's brilliant," Standish breathed when she had done.

"You must have heard it before," she said, a little surprised by this response. "It's an old joke."

"No," he said, "I have not. We need the eggs. We need the

eggs. We need the eggs. `We can't send him to the doctor because we need the eggs.' An astounding insight into the central paradoxes of the human condition and of our indefatigable facility for constructing adaptive rationales to account for it. Good God."

Kate shrugged.

"And you say this is a joke?" demanded Standish incredulously.

"Yes. It's very old, really."

"And are they all like that? I never realised."

"Well - "

"I'm astounded," said Standish, "utte rly astounded. I thought that jokes were things that fat people said on television and I never listened to