"It's big," Mrs. Frost agreed, striding along the hall and holding her manila folder against her chest with both hands. "But I don't know."

"You don't know what?"

Cryptically, she said: "Maybe it should be smaller. Remember what became of the giant reptiles."

"You mean curtail its activities?" He tried to picture the vacuum that would be created. "And what instead?"

"Sometimes I toy with the idea of slicing T-M into a number of units, interacting, but separately run. I'm not sure one person can or should take responsibility for the whole."

"Well," Allen said, thinking of Mavis, "I suppose it cuts into his life-expectancy."

"Myron has been Director of T-M for eight years. He's forty-two and he looks eighty. He's got only half a stomach. Someday I expect to phone and discover he's holed up at the Health Resort, doing business from there. Or from Other World, as they call that sanitarium of theirs."

"That's a long way off," Allen said. "Either place."

They had come to the door leading out, and Mrs. Frost halted. "You've been in a position to watch T-M. What do you think of it? Be honest with me. Would you call it efficient?"

"The part I see is efficient."

"What about the output? It buys your packets and it frames them for a medium. What's your reaction to the end result? Is the Morec garbled along the line? Do you feel your ideas survive projection?"

Allen tried to recall when he had last sat through a T-M concoction. His Agency monitored as a matter of routine, collecting its own duplicates of the items based on its packets. "Last week," he said, "I watched a television show." The woman's gray eyebrows lifted mockingly. "Half hour? Or entire hour?"

"The program was an hour but we saw only a portion of it. At a friend's apartment. Janet and I were over playing Juggle, and we were taking a break."