Professor Tomlinson was a disappointed man. He had recently achieved his life’s ambition, and already he could see it beginning to crumble.
He turned in his seat, and shouted across the laboratory to his assistant. “Hargreaves! Give me those figures again.”
Hargreaves was sitting in front of a luminous screen, looking at a series of diagrams that were filled with information. He was checking through each one in turn, collecting and collating the data. He pushed his spectacles back into place on the bridge of his nose, and repeated exactly the same numbers that he had read out a few minutes earlier.

