II
The Reunion, as Miss Jennson had called it, took place after dinner. Allmembers of the Unit assembled in the large Lecture Room.
The audience did not include what might be called the technical staff:
the laboratory assistants, the Corps² de Ballet, the various service person-nel, and the small assembly of handsome prostitutes who also served theUnit as purveyors of sex to those men who had no wives with them andhad formed no particular attachments³ with the female workers.
Sitting next to Betterton, Hilary awaited with keen curiosity the arrivalon the platform of that almost mythical⁴ figure, the Director. Questioned byher, Tom Betterton had given unsatisfactory, almost vague answers aboutthe personality of the man who controlled the Unit.
“He’s nothing much to look at,” he said. “But he has tremendous impact.
Actually I’ve only seen him twice. He doesn’t show up often. He’s remark-able, of course, one feels that but honestly I don’t know why.”
From the reverent⁵ way Miss Jennson and some of the other womenspoke about him, Hilary had formed a vague mental figure of a tall manwith a golden beard wearing a white robe—a kind of godlike abstraction.
She was almost startled when, as the audience rose to their feet, a dark,rather heavily built man of middle age came quietly on to the platform. Inappearance he was quite undistinguished, he might have been a businessman from the Midlands. His nationality was not apparent. He spoke⁶ tothem in three languages, alternating one with the other, and never exactlyrepeating himself. He used French, German and English, and each wasspoken with equal fluency⁷.
“Let me first,” he began, “welcome our new colleagues who have cometo join us here.”
He then paid a few words of tribute to each of the new arrivals.
After that he went on to speak of the aims and beliefs of the Unit.
Trying to remember his words later, Hilary found herself unable to doso with any accuracy. Or perhaps it was that the words, as remembered,seemed

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