In creating the staff of this new department, heads of existing departments had been asked to nominate those staff members in their ranks most fitted to initiate a program of aid to the world’s less-privileged. Many departments having naturally recommended those they could no longer tolerate themselves, a strangely assorted (and not wholly unsympathetic) crew was gradually assembled on a hitherto-unused floor of the building, and as DALTO reached its full complement of personnel, the remainder of the Organization’s staff were able to close their expurgated ranks with a sigh of relief.

It was from this background that there advanced upon Achilles Pylos, a few weeks after his arrival at the Organization, the case of Ashmole-Brown.

Until he was assigned to the new department, Ashmole-Brown had been working away at his cluttered desk in the Department of Social and Anthropological Questions. Within a matter not of weeks but of days after the formation of DALTO, the contents of that small office, including Ashmole-Brown, had been completely transferred to the freshly partitioned premises three floors below. His papers were rushed through by hand, an unusual circumstance which in itself would have denoted emergency. To Ashmole-Brown it made not the slightest difference whether he was on the thirty-first or the twenty-eighth floor: his work was everything to him, and he pushed on with it, oblivious of change, his head bent to his swelling manuscript, his hand moving evenly from line to line. He was to be seen on his way to the Organization library, a closely written list in his hand; or returning, his head already lowered as if in anticipation of the next page, each arm bowed with a load of the heavy books so soon to be exchanged for others. His desk, his window-ledge, his bookshelves, even his gray-tiled floor, were piled with flagged volumes and curling documents. Whatever else Ashmole-Brown might be, he was no slacker: there could be no doubt that he was hard at it.

Hard at what? This was the question that had so perplexed the Social and Anthropological officials and, the answer eluding them, had finally resulted in the frenzied transfer of Ashmole-Brown to DALTO. Ashmole-Brown had been hired, long ago, to undertake a study—that much was certain. But why? And by whom? He had a contract in which the nature of the study was defined at length, and its terms of reference by no means precluded the incorporation of Ashmole-Brown in DALTO: they would scarcely have prevented his inclusion in any public institution, so liberally studded were they with the many-faceted gems of the sociological lexicon. Even to the most experienced decodifiers, the central message of this contract seemed indecipherable. Ashmole-Brown alone was certain of his task.