A novella (also available in Night Ferry and Other Stories). 'It had often seemed to Theo (Theocritus Urquhart Rufus) Dorrington that every one of the decisions that had shaped his life, from the imposition of his absurd Christian names and thus the acronym that had made a daily misery of his schooldays . . . through to his choice of career and spouse, had been made by someone else. In retrospect, his life seemed to possess a seamless, inexorable logic. But it was a specious logic . . . and in the week of Theo's forty-second birthday, just four days before the event, everything changed.'