The girl with the Slav eyes was concentrating on her flasks. She seemed of slight importance. I judged her a technician, not a chemist. 'Some people in Germany said that Hopkins was forestalled in his discovery by the Dutchman Christian Eijkman. You know, when he observed that natives eating polished rice went down with beri-beri. I wanted to tell Hopkins how I disagreed with that view. Anyway, he was always generous in his praise for Eijkman's work. _Fair play,'_ he added in English.

The Hindenburg-like man grunted. 'Didn't the gateman send a porter up with you?' he enquired of me. When I shook my head he remarked resignedly, 'Oh, they're too comfortable drinking coffee in their lodge this weather. Visitors aren't supposed to come unescorted,' he added as an apology. 'We are a commercial undertaking, not a university, and a company must guard its secrets like its marks in the bank. Where did you learn your German?'

'There were lectures at Cambridge for scientists. A knowledge of German is of course essential to keep up with modern chemistry.'

'I am a chemist, so I savour your compliment.'

I became aware while we talked of the unmistakable smell emitted by laboratory mice. Somewhere beyond the door which they had left ajar would be an animal house, its shoebox-sized cages stacked the height of a man, each floored with straw and sawdust on which scurried, in various states of ill health, lapping their cunningly doctored bowls, the invaluable and involuntary martyrs to man's easeful supremacy on earth. Through the opening I glimpsed something like an oversized biscuit tin on legs, which from my earlier days working in the Inoculation Department of St Mary's Hospital in London I recognized as an incubator for growing bacteria. For all their secrecy, I gathered from the combination that something was going on involving the experimental infection of living beings with germs.