cises, Hindu breathing exercises and Tibetan spiritual
calisthenics to dispel their incipient shakes. When the great moment
came, a solemn little group of executives entered the drafting room
and stood about in attitudes of grave ceremonial courtesy.

The draftsmen then drew their lines.

When it was over, the judges examined and graded the lines and the
scores were announced by Mr. Shrank, the foreman. The better scores
prompted little flutters of restrained applause from the executives.
This moist and muted sound had reminded Dewforth of a hippopotamus
venting its wind under water, and in a moment of thoughtless
exhilaration he had even thought of sharing this bizarre notion with
his wife. He never did so, as it happened.

* * * * *

Why had he ever told his wife about that wretched Leadership Star? Her
laughter persisted through his dreams, or through his dream. He only
had one. In this dream she was always a massive machine which ingested
songbirds between steel rollers and stamped them into pipe-flange
gaskets at a rate of one hundred and twenty per minute.

And the prize-winning line he had drawn--it revealed its true nature
in the perspective of days. There was no mistaking what it was. It was
The Abyss. It could widen and it could engulf. How much light would a
Leadership Star cast in that bottomless inkiness?

Acute restless had the effect of sending Dewforth frequently to the
lavatory, not so much for physiological reasons as because there was
no other place to go and he had to go somewhere when the white walls
of the drafting room threatened to crush him. He went as often as he
thought he could without attracting the attention of Mr. Shrank or
eliciting ponderous jocosities from the other workers. After several
visits, however, he did begin to question himself. What drew him to
that bleak refuge again and again? He was not aware of bladder
irritation. He had no infantile obsession about such facilities. Was
he driven by an aggregation of petty forces, each too small to make
sense by itself? Or was there one reason hiding behind a cloud of
small rationalizations? There was a difference in the air in the
lavatory, and in the sound--the undifferentiated background sound
which came from nowhere. Nowhere?

It came through a window.

He had been staring at a window--probably the only one in the
building--and it had failed to register on his mind at the time
because he had no