"Attaboy," Miss Elderley said. "Wow."

"Be fair, I guess," Summers said. "Those boys with guitars."

"He feels his manhood threatened," Professor Elderglass went on. "Note how his dress proclaims an er long-dead national virility. He thinks man is being abolished. His kind of man."

"Bankside," Summers said. Everybody roared.

"Yes, the character or homunculus in your play. Man qua man. Man in his humanity. Man as Thou not It. Man as a person not a thing. These are not very helpful expressions, but they supply a clue. What is being abolished is autonomous man-the inner man, the homunculus, the possessing demon, the man defended by the literatures of freedom and dignity."

"That's it, you bastard," Enderby said, "you've summed it all up."

"His abolition has been long overdue. He has been constructed from our ignorance, and as our understanding increases, the very stuff of which he is composed vanishes. Science does not dehumanise man, it de-homunculises him, and it must do so if it is to prevent the abolition of the human species. Hamlet, in the play I have already mentioned, by your fellow-playwright, Mr. Summers, said of man, 'How like a god.' Pavlov said, 'How like a dog.' But that was a step forward. Man is much more than a dog, but like a dog he is within range of a scientific analysis."

"Look," shouted Enderby over the applause, "I won't have it, see. We're free and we're free to take our punishment. Like Hopkins. I suppose you'd watch him doing it with your bloody neat little bow tie on and say how like a dog. Well, he's been punished enough with this bloody film or movie as you'd call it, bloody childish. That's his hell. He was gall, he was heartburn."

"He should have taken Windkill," Jake Summers said and got roars. Enderby was very nearly sidetracked.

"Leave the commercials to me, Jake," Lansing said, delighted. "And talking about commercials it's time we took another-"

"Oh no it bloody well isn't," Enderby shouted. "You can keep your bloody homunculus, for that's all he is-"

"Pardon me, it's you who believe in the homunculus-"

"Man was always violent and always sinful and always will be."

"And now he's got to change."

"He won't change, not unless he becomes something else. Can't you see that that's where the drama of life is, the high purple, the tragic-"

"Oh my," Jake Summers sighed histrionically and was at once loudly rewarded. "No time for comedy," he added and then was not clearly understood.

"The evolution of a culture," Professor Lookingglass said, "is a gigantic exercise in self-control. It is often said that a scientific view of man leads to wounded vanity, a sense of hopelessness, and nostalgia-"

"Nostalgia means homesickness," Enderby cried. "And we're all homesick. Homesick for sin and colour and drunkenness-"

"Ah, so that's what it is," Miss Elderley said. "You're stoned."

"Homesick for the past." Enderby could feel himself ready to weep. But then fire possessed him just as Sperr Lansing said, "And now we let our sponsor get a word in-" Enderby stood and declaimed:

"For how to the heart's cheering

The down-dugged ground-hugged grey

Hovers off, the jay-blue heavens appearing

Of pied and peeled May!"

"Fellers," Sperr Lansing said, "do you ever feel, you know, not up to it?" He held in his hands a product called, apparently, Mansex. "Well, just watch this." Then he turned on Enderby, as did everybody, including the sweating studio major-domos. The band, which appeared to have a whole Wagnerian brass section as well as innumerable saxophones and a drummer in charge sitting high on a throne, gave out very piercingly and thuddingly.

Blue-beating and hoary-glow height; or night, still higher,

With belled fire and the moth-soft Milky Way,

What by your measure is the heaven of desire,

The treasure never eyesight got, nor was ever guessed what for the hearing?

SPERR: Well I don't think it can. You'd better get on to Harry right away.

ENDERBY: Fucking home uncle us (????) indeed. Ill give you fucking home uncle as (?????). Degradation of humanity. No, but it was not these the jading and jar of the cart (?) times tasking it is fathers (?) that asking for ease of the sodden with its sorrowing hart (art?) not danger electrical horror then further it finds the appealing of the passion is tenderer (?) in prayer apart other I gather in measure her minds burden in winds (????????)

EIGHT

"And I'll tell you another thing," said the man in the bar. "Your queen of England. She owns half of Manhattan."

"That's a lie," Enderby said. "Not that I give a bugger either way."

It was a small dark and dirty bar not far from the television theatre whence Enderby had been not exactly ejected but as it were ushered with some measure of acrimony. The programme that had been recorded could not, it was felt, go out. The audience had been told too and had been angry until told that they were going to do it all over again but this time without Enderby.

"What's the matter with you then?" this man asked. "You not patriotic?" He had a face round and shiny as an apple but somehow unwholesome, as though a worm was burrowing within. "Your Winston Churchill was a great man, wasn't he? He wanted to fight the commies."

"He was half American," Enderby said, then sipped at his sweetish whisky sour.

"Ain't nothing wrong with that. You trying to say there's something wrong with that?"

"After six years of fighting the bloody Germans," Enderby said, "we were supposed to spend another six or sixty years fighting the bloody Russians. And he always had these big cigars when the rest of us couldn't get a single solitary fag."

"What's that about fags?"

"Cigarettes," Enderby explained. "While you've a lucifer to light your fag, smile, boys, that's the style."

"My mother was German. That makes me half German. You trying to say there's something wrong with that?" And then: "You one of these religious guys? What's that you was saying about Lucifer?"

"The light-bringer. Hence a match. For lighting a fag."

"I'd set a light to them. I'd burn the bastards. It's fags that pretends the downfall. The Sin of Sodom. You ever read that book?"

"I don't think so."

"Jack," this man called to the bartender, "do you have that book?"

"Gave it back to Shorty."

"There," the man said. "But there's plenty around. Where you going now?"

"No more money," Enderby said. "Just one subway token."

"Right. And your queen of England owns half the real estate in Queens. That's why they call it Queens, I guess."

Enderby walked slowly, not too displeased, towards the Times Square subway hellmouth. He had told the bastards anyway. Not apparently as many as he had expected to tell, but these matters could not always be approached quantitatively. He passed a great lighted pancake house and hungered as he did. No, watch diet, live. A whining vast black came out at him and whined for a coin. Enderby was able sincerely to say that he had no money, only a subway token. Well gimme that mane. I kin sell that for thirty cents. But how do I get home? That ain't ma problem mane. Enderby shook his head compassionately. Two other blacks and a white man, dispossessed or alienated, had made a little street band for their own apparent pleasure-guitar, flageolet, tambourine. Music of the people-was that a possible approach?

An ole Sain Gus he said yo born in sin