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on the 27th floor Laing and Charlotte were jostled when their elevator was carried down to the 3rd floor by a trio of drunken pilots. Bottles in hand, they had been trying for half an hour to reach the 10th floor. Seizing Charlotte good-humouredly around the waist, one of the pilots almost dragged her off to the small projection theatre beside the school which had previously been used for showing children's films. The theatre was now screening a private programme of blue movies, including one apparently made on the premises with locally recruited performers.
    At the party on the 27th floor, given by Adrian Talbot, an effeminate but likeable psychiatrist at the medical school, Laing began to relax for the first time that day. He noticed immediately that all the guests were drawn from the apartments nearby. Their faces and voices were reassuringly familiar. In a sense, as he remarked to Talbot, they constituted the members of a village.
    "Perhaps a clan would be more exact," Talbot commented. "The population of this apartment block is nowhere near so homogeneous as it looks at first sight. We'll soon be refusing to speak to anyone outside our own enclave." He added, "My car had its windscreen smashed this afternoon by a falling bottle. Could I move it back to where you people are?" As a qualified physician, Talbot was entitled to park in the ranks closest to the building. Laing, perhaps anticipating the dangers of proximity, had never made use of this concession. The psychiatrist's request was instantly granted by his fellow residents, an appeal to solidarity that no member of his clan could deny.
    The party was one of the most successful Laing had attended. Unlike the majority of parties in the high-rise, at which well-bred guests stood about exchanging professional small-talk before excusing themselves, this one had real buoyancy, an atmosphere of true excitement. Within half an hour almost all the women were drunk, a yardstick Laing had long used to measure the success of a party.
    When he complimented Talbot the psychiatrist was non-committal. "There's a quickening pulse in the air, all right, but has it anything to do with good humour or fellow-feeling? Rather the opposite, I'd guess."
    "You're not concerned?"
    "For some reason, less than I should be-but that's true of us all."
    These agreeably expressed remarks cautioned Laing. Listening to the animated conversations around him, he was struck by the full extent of the antagonisms being expressed, the hostility directed at people who lived in other sections of the high-rise. The malicious humour, the eagerness to believe any piece of gossip and any tall story about the shiftlessness of the lower-floor tenants, or the arrogance of the upper-floor, had all the intensity of racial prejudice.
    But as Talbot had pointed out, Laing found himself unworried by all this. He even took a certain crude pleasure in joining in the gossip, and in watching the usually circumspect Charlotte Melville put down several more than two drinks too many. At least it was a means by which they could reach each other.
    However, as the party broke up a small but unpleasant episode took place outside the elevator doors in the 27th-floor lobby. Although it was after ten o'clock, the entire building was alive with noise. Residents were barging in and out of each other's apartments, shouting down the staircases like children refusing to go to bed. Confused by the endless button-punching, the elevators had come to a halt, and gangs of impatient passengers packed the lobbies. Although their next destination, a party given by a lexicographer on the 26th floor, was only one storey below them, everyone leaving Talbot's party was determined not to use the stairs. Even Charlotte, face flushed and tottering happily on Laing's arm, joined in the wild surge across the elevator lobby and drummed on the doors with her strong fists.
    When at last an elevator arrived, the doors opened to reveal a solitary passenger, a