Chai hurriedly explained about the door. “That’s your conference room, sir. There are three doors, as you see—the one to your outer office, this to the conference room, and the other leads to—er—Miss Graine.”

But not for long, Pylos added reassuringly to himself. “Well, gentlemen,” he said, going behind his desk and standing there with his fingertips resting on the blotter, “this all seems very satisfactory. It will take me a while, naturally, to…”

“Naturally,” and “Of course” came readily from the lips of his two subordinates. “If in any way,” they said, and “Anything at all.” Miss Graine all the while stood by, and Pylos had the impression that she was waiting for the others to leave. He therefore said, “And now, since I understand I have a busy afternoon of meetings, I’d like to get on with these”—he laid his hand on a pile of documents with which he had been provided (the Founding Constitution of the Organization, the Basic Legislation Governing Extension of Aid, the Standard Conditions of Application)—“interesting papers.” He smiled as if his thoughts were already elsewhere, and kept smiling like that until he had the room to himself.

Pylos sat down at his desk and really looked at everything for the first time. There were more gadgets than in his previous office, in a ministry in Athens—two telephones, each with a battery of numbered buttons, a small transmitter for the relaying of debates from Organization auditoriums (an arrow on the dial of this device could be turned to any of the several languages into which discussions were interpreted), and an intercom freshly marked “Miss Graine.” Otherwise, the room did bear a certain bureaucratic resemblance to his former premises, and he really had to remind himself that beyond these walls lay no prospect of the Acropolis or Mount Lycabettus but a dizzy panorama of the peaks and ledges of immense office buildings.