Only its price had been ample. Kingsley stamped through the train looking for a compartment where he could bite the carpet in solitary splendour. Moving quickly through a first-class carriage he caught a glimpse of the back of a head that he thought he recognized. Slipping into the compartment, he dropped down by the Astronomer Royal.

“First-class, nice and comfortable. Nothing like working for the government, eh?”

“Quite wrong, Kingsley. I’m going up to Cambridge for a Trinity Feast.”

Kingsley, still acutely conscious of the execrable dinner he had just consumed, pulled a wry face.

“Always amazes me the way those Trinity beggars feed themselves,” he said. “Feasts on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and four square meals on each of the other days of the week.”

“Surely it’s not quite as bad as that. You seem quite put out today, Kingsley. In trouble of any sort?”

Metaphorically the Astronomer Royal was hugging himself with delight.

“Put out! Who wouldn’t be put out, I’d like to know. Come on, A.R.! What was the idea of that vaudeville stunt this afternoon?”

“Everything that was said this afternoon was plain sober fact.”

“Sober fact, my eye! It would have been much more sober if you’d got up on the table and done a clog dance. Planets a degree and a half out of position! Rubbish!”

The Astronomer Royal lifted down his brief case from the rack and took out a large file of papers on which a veritable multitude of observations was entered.

“Those are the facts,” he said. “In the first fifty or so pages you’ll find the raw observations of all the planets, day-by-day figures over the last few months. In the second table you’ll find the observations reduced to heliocentric co-ordinates.”

Kingsley studied the papers silently for the best part of an hour, until the train reached Bishop’s Stortford. Then he said: