As he sat with his hands folded on the immaculate blue blotter, he could not help wondering again how he came to be there. The new department that Pylos had been asked to head—a body to aid impoverished areas of the world—had been formed as a result of recent Organizational deliberations. Barely two months had passed since Pylos had received in Athens the cable offering him the post of Chief Coordinator in this new department. The conditions seemed not unfavorable, the salary—when translated into drachmae and calculated together with allowances—not ungenerous. His Athenian post in foreign affairs was soon relinquished (with satisfactory arrangements made to perpetuate his pension rights); his furniture was soon crated, his bags soon packed, his colleagues envious, his wife overjoyed. On the ship he carefully studied the Organization papers that had been sent to him, and he and his wife read aloud to one another from the Reader’s Digest in order to improve their English. To no one, however, did Pylos express the surprise he felt: he was too much a Greek for that. He assumed it would eventually become clear to him how he, Achilles Pylos, a civil servant with no Organizational connections, with the merest smattering of knowledge in economics, should have been chosen for this post. He did not worry unduly about his suitability: he had been a bureaucrat too long for that. But he determined to go quietly until he got the lay of the Organizational terrain.

The matter was in fact a simple one. When the Organization’s Governing Body created a department to aid retarded nations, the question of a chief for that department instantly arose. He must be a national of a certain kind of country—a country not too contrastingly prosperous, yet not conspicuously delinquent; a country with an acceptable past, a decently uncomfortable present, and a reasonably predictable future. The man, likewise, must walk the middle path—a man of middle years and middle brow was wanted, a man not burdened with significant characteristics. Certain governments were asked to suggest candidates. Some sent the names of those they wished to be rid of, some proposed the ancient or the controversial. There were candidates who spoke no English, candidates who were chronically ill. One or two were overqualified and would have made trouble by taking up positions. A committee deliberated. The field was narrowed. At last the word went round. “They’re trying to dig up a Greek.”