Someone sitting beside the Chairman looked round repressively. One or two acolytes—the man in gray, a woman in black—silently carried papers back and forth across the room. The man had the stubby, earnest walk of a schoolboy; the woman appeared to glide over the blue carpet. In a man, Jaspersen thought, one could always see the child; whereas in a little girl one could always foresee the woman. The child Jaspersen who long ago had laughed in church, laughed in the schoolroom, had no place here, not even in memory. The idea that these guarded Committee faces had ever been childlike, or that they were sometimes even now transfigured by secular passions, was totally irrelevant.

“—to the preservation of freedom. For if freedom is to be effectively preserved, a solution must be found—”

One would have thought freedom was a museum piece—some extinct creature being pickled in a jar of spirits. The voice went on, on. Jaspersen’s father, a gaunt old man who loved Schiller and had no knowledge of world affairs, would have quoted “No incantation can compel the gods” (might even, for he was getting quite eccentric, have quoted it out loud), but Jaspersen knew better; had more than once thrown in his lot with incantations in this very room and seen the gods compelled. Was it not worthwhile, this compelling of the gods in a good cause? And if so, why could Jaspersen not rejoice as he sat there this morning? The trouble was, official life had grown so remote from life itself.

“—together with adequate safeguards…”

Jaspersen was not a man to succumb to despair: in fact, with his quick walk, he had quite outdistanced it. He would never ask himself “What will become of me?”—much less the more terrible question “What has become of me?” Here, however, twenty feet underground, in filtered air and fluorescent light, amid the aspirations ratified by one hundred member nations, a certain depression had managed—God knew how—to penetrate. There is no armor, there are no adequate safeguards. Deeply rooted conflicts are within us and obstruct the evaluation process.

Leslie sauntered down the corridor, her head uncharacteristically lowered as she studied the effect of her new shoes, which buttoned across the instep. When the elevator came, she got in jauntily. She liked to have errands away from the section, and often combined them with a leisurely coffee in the cafeteria or a visit to her friends in the filing room. Her sense of responsibility took her first to the main floor, where she got out. Descending to the basement, she stood on her toes to avoid wedging her vinyl heels in the grooves of the escalator. At the end of a corridor, a guard admitted her to the Committee Room, and she discovered Jaspersen sitting in a row of seats near the door.