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old grey sweater, had turned his back on the others. Only Ed Warner looked up to greet Henry.
    ‘About time,’ he said. ‘We thought you’d died down there.’
    Henry was reminded of the possibly violent death of Karl, which he had forgotten, though it had happened only a few minutes before. Should he report it? he wondered, and if so, to whom? Mr. Masterson was inaccessible in his office. The placard on the door, hand-lettered by the last draughtsman, read ‘No Personal Conversations. This Means You.’
    Karl himself had been against making unnecessary trouble by reporting Ed’s death. If Karl was dead, then, the sensible thing to do would be to say nothing. Henry had a great respect for the wishes of the dead.
    He began to convince himself that the ‘shot’ was a truck backfiring in the street, and the ‘gun’ nothing but an electric shaver or electric toothbrush. Karl had always, when alive, enjoyed electrical cleanliness.
And to what end?
thought Henry C. Henry.
    He had begun to rejoice in his own teeth, covered as they were with a thick, resinous deposit like the gum on old furniture. As he remarked to Willard, who was interested in anything like old furniture, ‘What if I went around brushing my teeth twice a day all my life, then got them knocked out of my head by some punk in some alley?’
    ‘Hot damn!’ said Willard. ‘I know just what you mean. Very same thing happened to me once, in ‘Frisco. I sure was peeved, I’ll tell the world. Makes a fella want to go back home and open an antique store. Fill it with good old solid traditional things. Whew! Fella’d give his left nut for a chance like that.’
    Willard wanted to get into a discussion of the draughting tables and the draughtsmen, some of whom were, or seemed to be, Negroes.
    Ed Warner kept asking everyone if they knew why he was declared officially dead. No one knew or wanted to know, least of all Karl, when he showed up freshly shaved some days later. Though for some reason he and Ed were not speaking, Karl said loudly for Ed’s benefit: ‘If he was declared officially dead, he wouldn’t be here, and that’s that. They don’t make mistakes like that, right, Clark?’
    ‘That’s right.’ The little non-lawyer had grown a foot taller and vaguely hairy. ‘They have no right to hire a dead man all over again, when there are so many living unemployed.’
    Masterson was not being a pine cone about it. He hired men of all races and nationalities as draughtsmen, because they could be virtually enslaved, and he especially liked to hire Negroes and South American immigrants.
    ‘They all carry big, mean-lookin’ knives,’ Willard insisted.
    ‘I can’t believe that,’ said Clark. ‘They wouldn’t be allowed to carry knives longer than three inches. It’s illegal. Besides, I’ve never seen one of them with such a knife.’
    ‘You better pray you never do see one,’ Willard said. ‘They only get them out to use them. I know what I’m talkin’ about, now. I could tell you about one street fight I had in Leningrad. Whewee! Them big bucks come at me with knives like …’
    To defend himself, Willard began to carry a switchblade.
    Section IV: Disappearances
     
    ‘No one is so busy as he who has nothing to do,’ read the sign Bob (or Rod) was tacking to the wall. Rod (or Bob) looked on in smiling anguish, the better to see him with; later he took up a hammer and amended the sign to read ‘he who has
something
to do’. Easter was approaching, and the two pals were selling Valentines – to everyone but Art, the old clerk with his aureole of dust-coloured hair. No one ever tried to sell anything to Art.
    The chthonic draughtsmen kept to their stalls and did not mingle with the clerks. It was as if they feared infection, or that fraternizing with their superiors would cost them their jobs. For some reason the draughtsmen did not last long anyhow. They were fired, one at a time, and their tables broken up and burnt, until the day would