“Quite, quite.” Ashmole-Brown was radiant. He tilted back his chair. He took off his glasses and, holding them by the stems, twirled them round and round, allowing his eyes to sparkle unconfined.

“And how would you estimate the—ah—usefulness of your work?” Pylos inquired. “At this stage.”

Ashmole-Brown pursed his lips reflectively. His glasses rotated more slowly between his fingers. “It is sound,” he said judicially. “Yes, I would say—it is sound.”

“Sound?” Pylos frowned. “Not more than sound?”

“No more—yet no less. Sound, sir. Sound is the word I should choose.” There was silence while Ashmole-Brown politely declined to add another adjective. He broke into smiles again. “The completed work, however, has become—if not a reality—no longer a myth. In another three years, I should say—yes, another three—”

“Three years more?”

“Give or take a few months, naturally. My path lies plain before me. There is, as I say, light: light at the—”

Here Ashmole-Brown gave an exultant twirl to his glasses and they spun out of his hands, hit the desk, and fell to the floor. After a moment’s surprise he dropped forward in his chair and fumbled shortsightedly on the floor around him. His speckled back heaved above the desk like the dorsal mound of some half-submerged sea monster. Pylos could hear him breathing in short grunts. “Now, where the devil … Ah, yes, yes, here we are.” Ashmole-Brown hove into sight once more, pinker in the face, holding the glasses in his hand. Pylos saw that one of the lenses was completely shattered.

Ashmole-Brown stared at the glasses for some moments. He then laid them on the desk before him. He seemed to have forgotten that Pylos was there. He shook his head heavily. “This,” he said, apparently to himself, “will slow me down considerably.”

Pylos stirred in his chair, and Ashmole-Brown gave him a nod of recognition. He took up his glasses again and prodded the shattered side despondently with his forefinger. “O piteous spectacle,” he declaimed. He then held the unbroken side vertically to his eye like a lorgnette and, after squinting through it at Pylos, lifted a half-completed page from the desk and attempted to read. His lips slowly formed the words as he identified them. He put the glasses down, seeming relieved. “Daresay I can go on like that for a while,” he said.

“But surely,” Pylos exclaimed, aghast, “they can be repaired in a matter of a day or two.”

Ashmole-Brown stared. “My dear chap, no sense in that. No sense at all. I’m going on home leave in a few weeks. In England I can get a brand-new pair for nothing.”

After the dismissal of Ashmole-Brown, Pylos felt himself to be full-fledged. It was as if he had passed through some ceremony of Organizational initiation, forged some invisible bond with his fellow administrators. He now settled in to his coordinational duties in earnest. With Miss Graine’s assistance, a pattern was formed—one he was to follow for years, a routine of discussions, decisions, and correspondence which his position invested with parochial grandeur.