Rodriguez-O’Hearn drank his coffee, and made a space for the container among the papers on his blotter. He tipped back his chair. “To think,” he said, “Miss Shamsee, that when I was a young man I wanted to be the conductor of an orchestra.”

She took the empty container off the desk and dropped it in the waste-basket. “That’s what you are,” she said, “in a manner of speaking.”

“No, no,” he said, but tipped his chair down again. “Such mistakes we make,” he said.

When the girl went out he looked through his In-tray. He then wrote a note asking Addison to bring Flinders to see him the following day, signed several recommendations for new experts, and began to read a report, making notes in the margin. When his secretary next came in, however, with an armful of files, she found him looking out of the window.

“Miss Shamsee,” he said gravely, “I’m afraid we have suffered much erosion since classical times.”

She was used to him, and merely put the files in his In-tray. She saw, as she did so, that on the edge of his blotter he had drawn a small tree.

SWOBODA’S TRAGEDY

It was the documents that finally got Swoboda down. His colleagues supposed that the further postponement of his promotion had been the last straw, but in fact it was the documents that did it. In the past he had been ready to carry out the often tedious duties imposed on him by the Organization—he was by nature almost too ready in this respect—but the documents finally did it. It was too much.

Like most great turning-points in life, the matter presented itself gradually. Mr. Bekkus had stopped one day at Swoboda’s desk and casually asked, “Oh Swoboda, would you,” and Swoboda had said, as he had always said, “Certainly Mr. Bekkus,” and that was how it began. The arrangement was that he would send out these documents each morning, just for a few days until someone else was found to do it. The documents, which came in various related series all beginning with the symbol “SAGG” (Services of Administration and General Guidance), then started to arrive daily, in stacks of one hundred apiece, on Swoboda’s desk. He had been instructed to send them out in separate large brown envelopes to their eighty-five designated recipients throughout the Organization, in his spare time. But several factors operated against this plan. In the first place, Swoboda had no spare time. In the second place, it was impossible for him to attend to any of his normal clerical work until he had cleared the stacks of documents off his desk each morning; by then much of the day was gone and he was faced with the necessity of staying after hours. And thirdly, no attempt was ever made to find another person to cope with the documents and they were thus laid, almost literally, at Swoboda’s door forever.