'The active mind never needs to rest? That's hard to accept.'

'It needn't be. Creative work is its own recreation. If you're drafting the patent on a new gene or designing a cathedral in Sao Paulo, why waste time hitting a rubber ball over a net?'

'Your children can do that for you…?'

'Assuming you have any children. Alas, today's corporate city is superbly talented, adult and virtually childless. Look around you at Eden-Olympia. No leisure activities, no community life or social gatherings. How many parties have you been invited to in the last four months?'

'Hard to remember. Very few.'

'Practically none, if you think back. People at Eden-Olympia have no time for getting drunk together, for infidelities or rows with the girlfriend, no time for adulterous affairs or coveting their neighbours' wives, no time even for friends. There are no energies to spare for anger, jealousy, racial prejudice and the more mature reflections that follow. There are none of the social tensions that force us to recognize other people's strengths and weaknesses, our obligations to them or feelings of dependence. At Eden-Olympia there's no interplay of any kind, none of the emotional trade-offs that give us our sense of who we are.'

'But you like it here.' I tried to speak jokingly. 'After all, it is the new paradise. Does it matter?'

'I hope it does.' Accepting my raillery, Penrose bared his teeth. 'The social order must hold, especially where elites are involved. Eden-Olympia's great defect is that there's no need for personal morality. Thousands of people live and work here without making a single decision about right and wrong. The moral order is engineered into their lives along with the speed limits and the security systems.'

'You sound like Pascal Zander. That's a police chief 's lament.'

'Paul…' Penrose raised his hands towards the ceiling, trying to defuse his impatience with me. 'I take the point – a sense of morality can be a convenient escape route. If the worst comes to the worst, we tell ourselves how guilty we feel and that excuses everything. The more civilized we are, the fewer moral choices we have to make.'

'Exactly. The airline pilot doesn't wrestle with his conscience over the right landing speed. He follows the manufacturer's instructions.'

'But part of the mind atrophies. A moral calculus that took thousands of years to develop starts to wither from neglect. Once you dispense with morality the important decisions become a matter of aesthetics. You've entered an adolescent world where you define yourself by the kind of trainers you wear. Societies that dispense with the challenged conscience are more vulnerable than they realize. They have no defences against the psychotic who gets into the system and starts working away like a virus, using the sluggish moral machinery against itself.'

'You're thinking of David Greenwood?'

'He's a good example.' Penrose sat up and rubbed at a coffee stain on his white shirt, irritated by the dark smudge. 'The security people here won't admit it, but on May 28 they took at least an hour to react coherently, even when they actually heard gunshots. They couldn't believe that a madman with a rifle was walking into offices and shooting people dead. Their moral perception of evil was so eroded that it failed to warn them of danger. Places like Eden-Olympia are fertile ground for any messiah with a grudge. The Adolf Hitlers and Pol Pots of the future won't walk out of the desert. They'll emerge from shopping malls and corporate business parks.'

'Aren't they the same thing? Eden-Olympia as an air-conditioned Sinai…?'

'Absolutely.' Penrose pointed approvingly at me, the alert student in the front row of the lecture hall. 'We're on the same side, Paul. I want people to come together, not divide themselves into separate enclaves. The ultimate gated community is a human being with a closed mind. We're breeding a new race of deracinated people, internal exiles without human ties but with enormous power. It's this new class that runs our planet. To be successful enough to work at Eden-Olympia calls for rare qualities of self-restraint and intelligence. These are people who won't admit to any weakness and won't allow themselves to fail. When they arrive their health is at a peak, they rarely touch drugs and the glass of wine they have with dinner is a social fossil, like the christening mug and the family silver.'

'But things go wrong?'

'Nothing too obvious at first. But by the end of the first year their energy levels begin to fall. Even a twelve-hour day, six days a week, isn't long enough to get everything done. At the clinic we've watched it happen dozens of times. People complain about the recirculated air and pathogens breeding in the filter fans. Of course, none of the air at Eden-Olympia is recirculated.'

'And the filters? They screen something out.'

'Bird droppings and toilet wastes from aircraft using Nice Airport. Then people worry about security inside their office buildings. That's always a key indicator of internal stress, the obsession with the invisible intruder in the fortress – the other self, the silent brother who clones himself off from the unconscious. The neural networks are starting to uncouple themselves. Committee meetings are rescheduled for Sundays, holidays abandoned after twenty-four hours. Finally they make their way to the clinic. Insomnia, fungal infections, respiratory complaints, inexplicable migraines and attacks of hives…'

'Old-fashioned burnout?'

'That's what we thought with the first cases. Presidents of multinational companies and their CEOs. These people weren't anywhere near burnout.' Penrose sounded almost disappointed as his eyes strayed across the white walls, searching for a blemish. 'But the creative edge was blunted, and they knew it. We urged them to take up skiing or yachting, book a suite at the Martinez and spend the weekend with a crate of champagne and a pretty woman.'

'The perfect prescription,' I commented. 'Did it work?'

'No. There was no response at all. But the health checks threw up a curious fact. There was a very low level of venereal complaints, surprising when you think of these attractive men and women at the height of their powers, and all the business trips around the world.'

'They weren't having much sex?'

'Worse. They weren't having sex at all. We set up a bogus lonely-hearts club, hinting that there were any number of bored secretaries eager for a fling. No takers. The adult film channel, hours of explicit hardcore, did no better. People watched, but in a nostalgic way, as if they were seeing a documentary about morris dancing or roof-thatching, an old craft skill popular with a previous generation. We were desperate. We held corporate parties with a chorus line of kiss-me-quick beauties, but all they did was look at their watches and keep an eye on their briefcases in reception.'

'They'd forgotten they were living in paradise?'

'This was an Eden without a snake. Short of making sexual intercourse a corporate requirement, there was nothing we could do. Meanwhile, immune levels across a hundred boardrooms continued to fall. Faced with all this insomnia and depression, I went back to old-fashioned depth psychology.'

'The leather couch and the lowered blinds?'

'More the armchair and the sun-filled room – psychiatry has moved on.' Penrose stared at me, aware that I was waiting for him to trip himself. For all his jovial asides, his manner was relentlessly aggressive. As he flexed his legs and openly displayed his heavy thigh muscles it occurred to me that psychiatry might be the last refuge of the bully.

'Of course, Wilder,' I apologized. 'I'm behind the times. Jane showed me round Freud's house in Hampstead… dark and very strange. All those figurines and ancient idols.'

'The antechamber to a pharaoh's tomb. The great man was preparing for death, and surrounded himself with a retinue of lesser gods paying tribute to him.' Forgiving me with a raised hand, Penrose went on: 'Classical psychoanalysis starts with the dream, and that was my first breakthrough. I realized that these highly disciplined professionals had very strange dreams. Fantasies filled with suppressed yearnings for violence, and ugly narratives of anger and revenge, like the starvation dreams of death-camp prisoners. Despair was screaming through the bars of the corporate cage, the hunger of men and women exiled from their deeper selves.'