The Organization had forgotten Ashmole-Brown. Five years earlier, Ashmole-Brown had been handed his final paycheck, an envelope containing his travel authorization and steamer-tickets, and a receipt for his relinquished laissez-passer. He had got into the Down elevator and gone out through the Organization’s revolving doors, and there had been no reason to think of Ashmole-Brown ever again. Ashmole-Brown had been terminated. What, then, was Ashmole-Brown doing on the inside page of the morning newspaper, grinning broadly as he stepped ashore on the very pier from which he had been summarily dispatched? According to the legend beneath the photograph, he was arriving for the publication of his book Candle of Understanding, which had recently created a sensation in England.

The photograph was indistinct, the legend brief. But it was Ashmole-Brown all right. The same eyes beamed through (intact) spectacles, the same shaggy tweeds were furled around ungainly limbs. Those at the Organization who saw the photograph were subtly troubled by this breakdown in the natural order of things. It was as if an old film had been run through the projector in reverse, and Ashmole-Brown were seen descending instead of mounting the gangway of his outbound vessel. It gave them a sense of witnessing some act of prodigious insubordination.

A few days later, glancing through a picture-magazine at the Organization barber-shop, Pylos came upon the same photograph of Ashmole-Brown—this time, large, sharp, and glossy and followed by several others. “Great to be back,” Ashmole-Brown was quoted—somewhat improbably—as having said. The caption proceeded to explain that he had been to these shores before and that he had at one time worked for the Organization. In a brief interview on the facing page, Ashmole-Brown was reported as having, among other things, modestly brushed aside the assumption that he had resigned from the Organization in order to devote himself exclusively to the completion of his great work. “Resigned? Not a bit of it,” he exclaimed (with, so it was recounted, a genial guffaw). “Dismissed, more like it. Turfed out. Jolly well turfed out.” No particular importance was attached to this revelation, and the sequence of photographs went on to depict a series of genial guffaws.

During the weeks that followed, Pylos saw much of Ashmole-Brown. His guffaw, along with innumerable copies of his immense and expensive book, was to be seen in bookshop windows, in railway carriages, and on coffee tables. Candle of Understanding was advertised, lyrically and at length, in newspapers which also reviewed it with no less lyricism and no greater brevity. It was praised by specialists and laymen alike. One learned that Ashmole-Brown was lecturing to various august assemblies, and that he would discuss his book late at night on a television program called “Last Gasp.” Finally Pylos came home one evening to find the book in his own living room. The next day he took it with him to the office.