Kearney picked the female up. She struggled for a second, then purred and allowed herself to settle on his shoulder. The male, eyeing Kearney as if it had never seen him before, flattened its ears and retreated under a bench.

'They're nervous today,' he said.

'Gordon Meadows was here. They know he doesn't like them.'

'Gordon? What did he want?'

'He wondered if we felt up to a presentation.'

'Is that how he put it?' Kearney asked, and when Tate laughed, went on: 'Who for?'

'Some people from Sony, I think.'

It was Kearney's turn to laugh.

'Gordon is a prat,' he said.

'Gordon,' said Tate, 'is the funding. Shall I spell that for you? It starts F-U.'

'Fuck you too,' Kearney told him. 'Sony could swallow Gordon with a glass of water.' He looked round at the equipment. 'They must be desperate. Have we achieved anything this week?'

Tate shrugged.

'It's always the same problem,' he said.

He was a tallish man with mild eyes who spent his free time, to the extent he had any, devising a complexity-based architectural system, full of shapes and curves he described as 'natural'. He lived in Croydon, and his wife, who was older than him by a decade, had two children from her previous marriage. Perhaps as a reminder of his Los Alamos past, Tate favoured bowling shirts, horn-rimmed glasses and a careful haircut which made him look like Buddy Holly.

'We can slow down the rate at which the q-bits pick up phase. We're actually doing better than Kielpinski there-I've had factors of four and up this week.'

He shrugged.

'After that, noise wins. No q-bit. No quantum computer.'

'And that's it?