"At that point, the hunter has at least four options. He can stand there and be torn apart. He can shoot the tiger. He can fire wild to scare the tiger away – making it back down from a confrontation. Or he can back down himself, metaphorically, by climbing the nearest tree in somewhat of a hurry."
A ripple of laughter went through most of his audience, but not all. There was a pale, unamused group sitting slightly apart from the rest, with a few girls among it, which was odd for a military studies lecture.
"Only two of these four options owe anything to the gunsmith's art, and I think we might agree that it is not his job to decide whether the world would be a better place with or without the tiger concerned. He simply provides his customer with options. The customer decides which one to opt for. In terms of war, which has not yet been downgraded to the status of a sport, where the only objective is to win-"
"Fascist bastard," said one of the girls, but rather quickly and tentatively.
Tyler ignored her. "War remains what it has always been: a continuation of politics by other means. So every option has to be seen as a political one, no matter whether it is offered up by the military, the commercial world, or even the academics – taken together, the gunsmiths."
"Fascist bastard," the girl said again, with more conviction.
"Nazi," one of boys added.
"Could you make up your minds?" Tyler asked in a polite deep voice. "Either I was in an Italian nationalist movement started in the 1920's or in the National Socialist party in Germany led by Adolf Hitler. I don't think they allowed you to belong to both."
That got a sympathetic laugh from his usual audience. The girl muttered: "Sod you."
At the top of the central aisle, there were double swing doors with big glass port-holes in them – scuttles, as the Navy would call them, smugly confusing the landsman – and he had seen faces peeping quickly in. Usually that only happened at the end of the hour, when a new class was gathering for a different lecture.
"But the decision itself remains in the hands of the political leaders, and once a country has a nuclear arsenal, any decision that touches on the possibility of war becomes a nuclear decision. The decision not to use nuclear weapons is a nuclear decision-"
"Why don't you take a nuclear decision then?" somebody called.
"I'd like to very much, but you're rather too close to me." As he said it, Tyler knew it was a mistake. It got a laugh from his usual audience, but it gave the others just the provocation they had been waiting for.
"Tyler out!" one of them shouted. "Tyler out, out, out!" They got to their feet, moving into the aisle and taking up the chant: "Tyler out, Tyler out…"
One of the other undergraduates stood up from across the aisle and was pushed down again. The little crowd moved down on Tyler, and he was suddenly and surprisingly afraid. He wasn't a young soldier any more.
The doors at the top slammed open and a slim figure in a short raincoat danced down the steps and crashed into the crowd. One of the girls flopped aside, sprawled over the top of one of the stalls, one of the men turned to meet the newcomer and then folded suddenly out of sight. The man in the raincoat reached the front and Tyler recognised him.
The spearhead of the crowd was a pale boy with very black curly hair and a black leather jacket. He marched towards Tyler with his right forefinger stabbing at eye-level in time with his chant. "Tyler out, Tyler out…"
As Maxim came past he slashed sideways with the edge of his left hand, a blow that moved no more than nine inches. But the pecking arm flopped, and the boy gasped. So did Tyler: he could imagine what such a whack on the biceps felt like. Then Maxim was hustling him off the platform and through the side door.
They waited in the corridor that was supposed to be for faculty only, until George burst through the door behind them, looking rather blown and dishevelled.
"I had to thump somebody," he said, examining his hand. "Haven't hit anybody in years. I'm getting soft. There should be a car…"
Inside the lecture room, a full-scale brawl was brewing up as the two groups of undergraduates tangled.
"I should have poked him with my umbrella," George puffed as they scuttled down the corridor. "No, that would have been a gesture of class warfare. Where is the bloody woman?"
Dead on cue, Agnes rolled the big anonymous blue Vauxhall up to the outside door. George grunted; they all climbed in.
She drove fast for a quarter of a mile, then relaxed as they blurred into the complication of Cambridge's one-way and no-go systems.
"George," Tyler said, "can you tell me what this is all about?"
"Where have you been all the night? No, you needn't answer that. But we've been ringing you since six this morning, and I'm sure Fleet Street began soon after midnight. Haven't you read any papers today?"
"I haven't had the time, yet."
"Well, Luxembourg's leaked. Leaked? – the dam's broken. Moscow must have put out its own release. It came out in the first edition of the Morning Star: Britain's leading advocate of nuclear warfare going to a secret meeting in Luxembourg with equivalents from France and Western Germany, are they planning a secret nuclear strike force? Provocative behaviour by the old imperialist powers just at a time when America seems to be seeing the light, de-da-de-da-de-da. The real papers had to pick it up, just to cover themselves. Communist sources claim that a secret meeting in Luxembourg… and so on. So the cat's in the fire, the bat's in the belfry and the Headmaster would like you to go incommunicado until Luxembourg itself. Can you get a bag packed? We can collect more of your stuff later."
"Where are we going?"
"The FO's lending us one of their hospitality places near Maidenhead. Can we turn right here?"
"No. Take the second left…" Tyler leaned forward and gave crisp directions to Agnes. Maxim had never been driven by her before; she was very good, handling what was probably a strange car – it certainly wasn't hers – with a flowing, farsighted confidence.
"There isn't any question of cancelling Luxembourg?" Tyler asked.
George sighed. "No-o. In fact, it rather means it has to go ahead, unless one of the others drops out, but that's their affair. Moscow's deliberately challenged us to back down. If we do that, our little Froggie friends aren't going to listen to anything we say for a long time."
"It might even have a unifying effect," Tyler said, mostly to himself.
What nobody said was what they had been discussing on the way down: that this proved Moscow hadn't got the letter and now didn't expect to. "If they're going public in this way," Agnes had pointed out, "it shows they haven't anything more subtle up their balalaikas."
Maxim checked out Tyler's rooms for him, then the three of them paced the court while he packed a bag and ignored the telephone. The snow had melted, but the invading east wind still sprang out of every archway.
"Of course," George said, suddenly moved to look on the gloomy side, "if they're challenging us not to go to Luxembourg, they probably know they're making sure we do go. Perhaps that's what they want."
"We were going anyway," Agnes said.
"That wasn't by any means certain, not after we knew what was in the letter…"
"But Moscow didn't know we were having doubts," Agnes said, rather exasperated.
"True, true," George said reluctantly. "At least, I suppose it is."
"You need a drink."
"It is not yet eleven in the morning," George said with dignity.
At that time, in that weather, the big court was almost empty. A porter walked briskly along the far side, a stray out-of-season tourist was peering into the dead fountain, and the lodge cat was showing off its privilege by squatting on the forbidden, and very damp, grass by the gateway. It was the first time Maxim had been inside a Cambridge college. It lacked grandeur, but the uncaring mixture of styles, from the Tudor gateway to the Victorian library, had a comfortable homely look of a dotty professor in odd socks who has never thought about anything as small as grandeur in his life.