...the director watched Travers with his unpleasant eyes. His aggressive stare had surprised Travers - seeing himself confused with the psychotic patients was too sharp a commentary on his own role at the Institute, a reminder of his long and wearisome dispute...
To both Ballard and Revell, our salvation lies in science and technology. "I think machines are going to save us," says Revell at one point. "The Age of Reason is probably petering out slowly," replies Ballard. "Only our machines will be reasonable, because they make sense. We can rely on our computers to be moral beings. A machine, in a sense, is a moral structure—like a thermostat. If the room is too hot it will bring the temperature down. . . . I think we are subcontracting our moral universe to that of the machines." Such comments reveal the contradictory, unstable fissures in Ballard's Enlightenment morality, where, for example, machines are simultaneously invested with animal desires that will destroy us, and the scientific techniques that could save us. The machine is, in other words, an arena into which we throw our ethical conflicts