I went around to Weede's office. He was sitting in his restyled barber chair. For a desk he used a low round coffee table made of teak. Across the room was his three-screen color TV console. The barber chair, being an eccentricity permitted someone in Weede's position, hadn't bothered me much, but the coffee table was a bit frightening, seeming to imply that my titanic desk was all but superfluous. Weede was a master of the office arts, specializing in the tactic of reaction. Some time after I had joined the network, a subordinate of Weede's named Rob Claven decided to decorate his office with exactly fourteen of his wife's paintings. It was a fairly horrifying sight. Weede didn't say a word. But a week later a few of us, including Rob Claven, went to a meeting in Weede's office. What we saw startled us. All the paintings and old schooner prints had vanished and in their place was hung a single eight-by-twelve-inch reproduction of a detail from the Sistine Chapel. The almost bare walls were Rob Claven's death sentence. The Michelangelo was the dropping of the blade.

Finally Weede nodded me out of the doorway and directed me to the blue chair. He did this with a movement of hand or eye so close to imperceptibility that even as I sat down I could not determine how I knew that I was supposed to sit in the blue chair. Reeves Chubb was already there, smoking one of his mentholated cigars. Weede told us an anecdote that concerned golf and adultery. Within a few minutes five more people entered, one a woman, Isabel Mayer, and the meeting began.

I looked out the window. Men in yellow helmets were working on a building that was going up across the street. They weaved in and out of its hollow bones, shooting acetylene, and catwalked over shaky planks. Strangely they did not seem to move with any special caution. Perhaps they had come to terms with the fear of falling. They had probably seen others fall and despised those deaths for the relief that followed the shock, a relief that must have risen with the wind, floor to floor, up the raw spindling shanks of the building.