Dropping her book on the chair, she swung away and went back into her cage, moving inside her simple dress as flexibly as a reed.
‘Hey, Jeanette – I didn’t mean -just a -‘
Her voice came back: ‘They close the doors again after an hour.’ Then, as if in mockery, her own door closed behind her, independently.
For want of anything else to do, he stepped into the patio and picked up the book. It was called Experimental Design, by one Sir Ronald Fisher, and the first sentence that he hit read: ‘In fact, the statement can be made that the probability that the unknown mean of the population is less than a particular limit, is exactly P, namely Pr (u<x+ts)=P for all values of P, where t is known (and has been tabulated as a function of P and N).’ He dropped the thin volume hastily. He had been wondering vaguely whether Jeanette had brought the book with her or the ship had supplied it, but suddenly he couldn’t care less. It began to look as though all the chicks he encountered on this ship had been born to put him down.
Disappointed at his own indifference, he remembered her warning, and looked quickly back at the top of the gangway down which he had come. It was already closed. Suppose he was cut off? There were people down there in the park that he still wanted to talk to – but obviously not now. He raced along the esplanade.
He identified his own cage almost entirely by intuition, and it seemed that he was scarcely in it five minutes before the door to the patio slid shut. Now he had something else to think about, and he was afraid to try it, not only because it was painful, but because despite Jeanette’s theories about time and memory, he still thought it very likely that Lavelle and her consort could read his mind. Experience, after all, supported all three theories indifferently, thus far.