significantly. Wilt had clung to the lectern in the hope that he'd manage to get through the hour without ejaculating into his trousers. He was so worried about this that he hardly noticed that Mrs Ofrey had finished her question. 'Would you say that view was correct?' she said by way of a prompt.
'Well...er...yes,' said Wilt, who couldn't recall what the question was anyway. Something to do with the Monarchy being a matriarchy. 'Yes, I suppose in a general way I'd go along with you,' he said, wedging himself more firmly against the lectern. 'On the other hand, just because a country has a female ruler, I don't think we can assume it's not male-dominated. After all, we had Queen Boadicea in Pre-Roman Britain and I wouldn't have thought there was an awful lot of Women's Lib about then, would you?'
'I wasn't asking about the feminist movement,' said Mrs Ofrey, with a nasty inflection that suggested she was a pre-Eisenhower American, 'my question was directed to the matriarchal nature of the Monarchy.'
'Quite,' said Wilt, fighting for time. Something desperate seemed to have happened to the cricket box. He'd lost touch with the thing. 'Though just because we've had a number of queens...well, I suppose we've had almost as many as we've had kings...must have had more, come to think of it? Is that right? I mean, each king had to have a queen...'
'Henry VIII had a whole heap of them,' said an astro-navigational expert, whose reading tastes seemed to suggest she would have preferred life in some sort of airconditioned and deodorized Middle Ages. 'He must have been some man.'
'Definitely,' said Wilt, grateful for her intervention. At this rate, the discussion might spread and leave him free to find that damned box again. 'In fact he had five. There was Katherine of...'
'Excuse me asking, Mr Wilt,' interrupted an engineer, 'but do old queens count as queens? Like they're widows. Is a king's widow still a queen?'
'She's a queen mother,' said Wilt, who by this time had his hand in his pocket and was searching for the box. 'It's purely titular of course. She'
'Did you say 'titular'?' asked Captain Clodiak, endowing the word with qualities Wilt had never intended and certainly didn't need now. And her voice suited her face. Captain Clodiak came from the South. 'Would you care to amplify what titular means?'
'Amplify?' said Wilt weakly. But before he could answer, the engineer had interrupted again.
'Pardon me breaking in, Mr Wilt,' he said, 'but you've got kind of something hanging out of your leg.'
'I have?' said Wilt, clutching the lectern even more closely. The attention of the entire class was now focused on his right leg. Wilt tried to hide it behind his left.
'And by the look of it I'd say it was something important to you.'
Wilt knew damned well what it was. With a lurch, he let go of the lectern and grabbed his trouser leg in a vain attempt to stop the box but the beastly thing had already evaded him. It hung for a moment almost coyly half out of the trouser cuff and then slid onto his shoe. Wilt's hand shot out and smothered the brute and the next moment he was trying to get it into his pocket. The box didn't budge. Still attached to the bandage by the plaster he had used, it refused to come without the bandage. As Wilt tried to drag it away it became obvious he was in danger of splitting the seam of his trousers. It was also fairly obvious that the other end of the bandage was still round his waist and had no intention of coming off. At this rate, he'd end up half-naked in front of the class and suffering from a strangulated hernia into the bargain. On the other hand, he could hardly stay half-crouching there and any attempt to drag the bloody thing up the inside of his trousers from the top was bound to be misinterpreted. In fact, by the sound of things, his predicament already had been. Even from his peculiar position, Wilt was aware that Captain Clodiak had got to her feet, a bleeper was sounding and the astro-navigator
