Enclosed on three sides by the congested streets of a great city, the Organization was nevertheless well laid out in the ample grounds of its foundation-granted land, and stood along the banks of the river with something of the authority that characterizes Wren’s buildings on the Thames at Greenwich. Here as at Greenwich the river’s edge was faced with a high embankment and bordered, where the lawn ended, by a narrow walk. From this walk one looked across the river to the low-lying labyrinth of docks and factories, surmounted by an immense Frosti-Cola sign. Behind the Organization’s back, the skyscrapers of the city rose as abruptly as the Alps, an ascending graph of successful commerce. The setting impressed all newcomers, and still had an effect on even those members of the staff who had been with the Organization since the signing of its Founding Constitution. Flinders, who had spent the past two years in the North African countryside, was all but overwhelmed by it.

A forester and agricultural conservationist, Flinders had been recruited by the Organization two years before to serve as an expert in its Project for the Reforestation of the Temperate Zone. With a single stop here at Headquarters for briefing, he had flown from his home town in Oregon to a still smaller town some hundred miles to the south of the Mediterranean. Now, on his way home with his mission at an end, he was at Headquarters once more in order to report on his work and to be—although the word was yet unknown to him—debriefed.

He had no idea of what he should say at the meeting. He had never attended meetings at all until he got involved with the Organization. His profession had kept him out of offices. His two years in North Africa could not be contained within reportable dimensions in his mind. Throughout his assignment he had, as instructed, sent in quarterly technical reports to his opposite number at Headquarters, a certain Mr. Addison. These Reports on Performance in the Field (an expression which allowed Flinders to fancy himself capering in a meadow) had given a faithful account of his initial surveys, the extent and causes of erosion in the area, the sampling of soils, availability of water, and ultimately the selection and procurement of young trees and the process of their planting.