During the short drive in from the FBO at Cranfield, Richard had ordered the driver of his black taxi to swerve to a halt in front of the first computer store. The sales clerk, eager to be of service and to make sure that Richard ended up with a machine he’d be happy with, had been solicitous to a fault until Richard had finally got it through the man’s head that he had way more money than time and could they please get on with it. Five minutes later, Richard had strode out the door of the place and climbed back into the taxi carrying the new laptop (he had left its empty box sitting on the store’s counter and a trail of plastic packaging material all the way to the exit) and a boxed set of DVD-ROMs containing the Legendary Deluxe Platinum Collector’s Edition T’Rain software with Bonus Materials. The computer had finished crawling through its interminable boot-up as they were skirting Bedford, and he had jammed in the installation disc somewhere around St. Neots. The bemused cabbie had dropped him off at the Porter’s Lodge of Trinity when the installation progress bar was creeping along around the 21 percent mark and so Richard had just carried the machine in on his hip and kept it perched there, whirring and clicking and trying to force thunderous T’Rain sound track music through its tinny little speakers, as the bowler-hatted staff had dryly greeted him and escorted him to his cavernous lodgings. It was ten in the morning or something. Richard had found his way to the suite’s toilet, which was located somewhere in Oxfordshire, and showered and shaved, then fed another disc into the computer, napped for a couple of hours, enjoyed a liquid lunch with D-squared, and then brought him back here to teach him the rudiments of T’Rain.