'He can regard it how he damned well likes,' said the Dean. 'For my part I want him out of Porterhouse and into the hands of this filthy gangster Hartang and his shredder as soon as possible. I sincerely hope he dies a slow and painful death.'

But again the Praelector asserted his new-found authority. 'I think we should think this matter out and not take any precipitate action we might later come to regret.'

The Dean was baffled, and so was the Senior Tutor. 'What on earth are you talking about? Regret? Precipitate action? These filth come in here and wreck the Chapel and think they can buy the College so that this monster, this drug dealer Hartang, can use us-how did that swine put it?-as another turtle shell. And cover his arse, will he? I'll cover the bastard's arse if he so much as sets foot anywhere near the College. And what did he say about our eating habits?'

'I think he said we devoured…like Japanese vultures after Lent or something,' said the Senior Tutor.

'Actually he said Sumo-wrestling vultures been on hunger strike,' said the Praelector. 'I must say I found it a very striking simile at the time. Most extraordinary way Americans have of using words. I shall never be able to look at black pudding in quite the same light again. Though why he should suppose you can catch AIDS from a sausage I cannot for the life of me imagine.'

'What I don't understand is why he keeps on about rubber douches and forced feeding,' said the Senior Tutor.

'I can't understand a single damned thing. Not one. Not a single damned thing,' the Dean shouted. And what's with-bugger the swine, I'm beginning to talk like him. What in God's name has happened to the Bursar? He sounded quite terrifying. Not that I blame him, of course, but he seemed to have gone out of his mind.'

'I think you'll have to ask Dr MacKendly about that,' said the Praelector. 'He gave him some sort of upper, I believe the name is. Unfortunately the after-effects are rather the opposite, an extreme form of lower.'

'Serve the idiot right for getting us into this mess,' snarled the Dean. 'I want a word with Master Bloody Bursar.'

The Praelector looked doubtful. 'I should go easy on him,' he said. 'He's not at all well and his mental state leaves a great deal to be desired.'

'We'll see about that,' said the Dean.

The saw precisely what the Praelector meant during lunch. The Bursar suddenly refused a very choice pair of chops on the grounds that he was damned if he was going to eat the Lamb of God. The Dean eyed him warily. The Bursar was clearly a very disturbed person and not the mealy-mouthed creature he had been.

The Chaplain, however, took up the issue. "That is a very interesting doctrinal point,' he said. 'Now in the Communion Service we are asked to eat the body of Christ and to drink his blood. That is what our Lord prescribed at the Last Supper.'

'Lunch,' said the Bursar, toying curiously with a knife.

'Lunch?'

'The Last Lunch,' the Bursar snarled. 'If you can have a Last Supper, why the hell can't you have a Last Lunch?' There was an uneasy silence for a moment but the Bursar hadn't finished.

'And anyway there's a world of difference between having a sort of biscuit put on ones tongue and munching one's way through a plateful of mutton. And what's the mint sauce for?'

'The mint sauce? My dear chap-'

'I'll tell you what it's for,' said the Bursar lividly. 'It's for covering up the taste of the Lamb.'

The Chaplain nodded. 'Something of the sort, yes,' he said, 'though frankly I think it's going too far to smother a chop with mint sauce. A chop always tastes better on its own or with fresh peas…'

'Not that lamb. The Lamb of God, for Chrissake,' the Bursar shouted. 'The mint sauce takes away the taste of…'

'An interesting point that,' the Chaplain mused, when the Bursar himself had been taken away.

'Which one? They none of them held any interest for me,' said the Dean. And I didn't much like the way he kept emphasizing his points with that knife.'

'The one about the Last Lunch,' said the Chaplain, 'or even a Last Dinner. Supper has always struck me as a rather insubstantial meal, more of a snack really. Still, if you're going to be crucified, I don't suppose you want anything too heavy.'

'Christ,' said Dr Buscott in disgust.

'Precisely,' the Chaplain went on. 'We've just been talking about Him. A most peculiar chap, I've always thought. I've often wondered what he'd have done in life if he had come up to Porterhouse as an undergraduate.'

'He might have come in handy to do something for the Bursar. It's going to take a miracle to get him back to sanity,' said the Senior Tutor, and helped himself to one of the chops the Bursar had refused.

At the other end of High Table Purefoy Osbert and the Librarian sat eating quietly.

'Do they always behave like that?' Purefoy asked.

'They're always very odd but I've never seen anything like that before,' said the Librarian. 'But then the whole place seems to have gone mad lately. Funnily enough the Bursar has always seemed the mildest of them all.'

'And who is the small round man with the red face?'

'That is the Dean,' the Librarian said. 'The small angry-looking man. Not someone you want to cross, especially when he's in a nasty mood, and by the look of him he's not in a very nice one now.'

'And who is the tall thin old fellow?' Purefoy asked.

'That's the Praelector. He's not a bad old chap. Very old but relatively scholarly for Porterhouse,' the Librarian said. "The dimmest of the three is supposed to be the Senior Tutor, but I'm not sure he's half as ignorant as he pretends. It's always difficult to know with the Senior Fellows. They are perpetually playing games and pretending to be complete fools and never to do any work and then you find they regard you as an idiot because they've taken you in. But all Cambridge is a bit like that. I call it a "Put-You-Down Town". Everyone is so bloody competitive. Not that I'm bothered, because the Librarian is only a sort of honorary Fellow in Porterhouse and I very seldom dine in. But as the Sir Godber Evans Memorial Fellow I'm afraid they'll expect you to and they'll put you through it. It is what they call your Induction Dinner.'

However, for the moment the Dean was far too preoccupied to notice Dr Osbert. It wasn't only the Bursar's state of mind that bothered him. In fact that was the least of his worries. Something about the Praelector's manner, and the fact that he was obviously more in command of the situation than the Senior Tutor whose emotions were leading the way, led him to suspect that the Praelector saw more profit for the College in what had happened than was immediately obvious. He would have to have a quiet talk with the Praelector on his own.