A shadow on the frosted-glass partition alongside his open door informed him that Leslie, his secretary, had arrived. Not wishing to advertise her lateness, she alone of all the section did not use his chair to take off her boots.

“Leslie,” he called.

There was a scuffle and a suppressed metallic scraping as she hung up her coat, then Leslie appeared. Leslie had long brown hair and darkly outlined eyes. Her stockings, yesterday of black wool, were of white lattice today. She said truculently, “I’m sorry.” She was new to the section and had not quite established her right to address Ismet by his first name, although she invariably used it behind his back. Since he was only Step Two in the Specialized Category, she disdained to address him formally. “This rain,” she said. “Pee-ew!”

Ismet could not get up the nerve to admonish her after all. He said, “I’m preparing a paper. I don’t want to be disturbed unless it’s urgent. Do you have something to go on with?”

“I’m collating.”

“How long will that take you?”

Leslie made an estimate, doubled it. “Half an hour.”

Ismet added to his many defeats by letting her go. At her desk outside he heard her take up the phone and dial her friend in the typing pool. Her husky voice was at its most pervasive when lowered. “I went to this dance,” she said, “the one on the bulletin board. Pee-ew!”

Ismet drew a typed sheet toward him. A memorandum—to, through, and from higher authorities, with copies to those higher still—had been sent to him for a draft reply. “Pending accrual,” it began. Ismet bowed his head over his work.

Nagashima was standing by his window, watching the rain. These winter downpours were, to be sure, no worse than the spring rains of his own country, yet how he disliked them, what nostalgia he felt, leaning from this window of another world, looking on a scene that contained scarcely one familiar item. An immense building was being demolished nearby, the walls smashed by repeated blows of a swinging metal ball. An almost identical building would certainly rise from these smashes. In Japan, too, temples had been erected and re-erected on the same sites over centuries. Obviously a similar sense of continuity was involved, but he had not been able to link the two traditions.