The consoles, which had once been so large they filled the rooms, had shrunk and become fearfully silent, though the lights that blinked and glowed and the screens that displayed everchanging patterns, numbers and words seemed to indicate that everything was turned on and running. J understood. Bit by bit diodes and transistors had replaced big bulky tubes, and had been in turn replaced by tiny integrated circuit chips that contained whole libraries of preprogramming in an area the size of a thumbnail. Everything had become smaller, cooler, quieter, yet at the same time more powerful. Now the last step had been taken. Automation had replaced human control, and the last human operator had been banished.

«Lord Leighton?» J called out. The bare rock walls threw back a disquieting echo.

«There he is.» Richard pointed.

Lord Leighton, in a rumpled green smock, had blended in so well with his beloved computers he had been almost invisible. The machines were not, as they had been, dull gray with crackled finishes, but, except where a spot of gleaming chrome or spotless red plastic showed its contrast, all were in the same muted matt green as Leighton's smock.

«Ah, welcome, welcome!» Lord Leighton came scuttling forward. «How do you like my new toys?»

Leighton was a monster, a troll, a grotesque Quasimodo lurching along with a halting, crablike gait on legs that had never quite recovered from a near-fatal childhood attack of polio. Yet under his high balding forehead with its sparse strands of white silky hair pulsed a brain of terrifying power. In the field of computer technology Leighton might well be the greatest genius England-indeed the world-had ever seen. Every device in this project had begun as a gleam in these dark-pupilled yellow-rimmed bloodshot eyes that now stared up at J through the thick distorting lenses of a pair of steel-framed glasses.

J replied uncertainly, «Very pretty toys. Very pretty.»