Nevertheless, on this morning when the Question of Unification was coming up for debate, Jaspersen was in a melancholy mood. Although this was unusual for him, it had happened before, and he understood that the mood would pass away. Jaspersen had been heard to say that the Organization was his religion, and it is well known that moments of unaccountable doubt are the earmarks of the devout. Jaspersen had even gone so far as to make this analogy to himself. At such times he had learned to immerse himself more deeply than ever in his work, and with this in mind he now lifted two documents—the Provisional Report of the Working Group on Unforeseeable Contingencies, and a Study on the Harnessing of Cartographic Skills—from his window sill and set them aside for reading at home that evening.

This mood of Jaspersen’s would not even have been discernible beyond the Organization’s walls. Had it been suggested, for instance, by some uninformed outsider, that the Organization had ever seriously erred in some particular, that it had ever acted with less than its potential effectuality, Jaspersen would have been as ready as always to correct this misconception with precise legal and statistical information; to cite chapter and verse—or, rather, resolution and amendment (while acknowledging, with wry witticisms, the larger but more bearable truth of universal human fallibility).

Jaspersen looked at his watch. It was now long past the hour set for the opening of the Committee meeting, and even a little past the time at which it might actually have begun. Jaspersen left his office, inquired for Luba of one of the secretaries, and, not finding her in, put his head around the door of his deputy, an Italian named Pastore.

Girolamo Pastore had been standing by the window. In fact, his window was directly below Nagashima’s and, had the human eye been capable of distinguishing forms thirty stories up, the two would have been on view in identical attitudes, one a few inches above the other and quite unaware of the proximity. Pastore’s gaze traveled over buildings of glass, buildings of aluminum, a building with a sharp pinnacle that looked like a hypodermic needle stood on end. Why was it, Pastore was wondering, that at the very moment when architecture began to use the limitless upward resource of the sky the ceilings had become so very low? More than commercialism: something to do with man’s ceasing to demand noble rooms for himself, taking less pride in being a man. A man by himself—what was that these days? One counted merely as—a member of the staff.