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grabbed up a memo pad. He shoved it toward me.
    "Here,” he said. “Don't trust your memory. You'll have too many things on your mind to remember such a detail. Jot the name down on a pad. Just for your own use if the need ever arises. Press hard, so my lab boys won't have too much trouble in bringing up the impressions from the pages below the one you tear off."
    He beamed at me, as if to approve that I was already learning, fast, how to be a government man.
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CHAPTER FOUR
    Naturally I had no choice in selecting my staff personnel. It was well I hadn't, for I was to learn that knowing the ropes of red tape and protocol was far more important than any possible skill or efficiency learned on the Outside.
    When I arrived the following morning at the departmental suite which had been set aside for me, temporary quarters until we outgrew the space, I found the door had already been lettered:
    BUREAU OF EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE RESEARCH
    DIVISION OF EXTRATERRESTRIAL PSYCHOLOGY
    DEPARTMENT OF EXTRATERRESTRIAL VOCATIONAL RESEARCH
    DIRECTOR
    Dr. Ralph Kennedy
    Apparently my real mission was to be concealed. Ostensibly my job was to train extraterrestrials vocationally and put them to work in self-respecting employment—if we ever did discover any.
    My real mission, of course, was to drive them away before anybody found out they'd been here; but I correctly suspected my staff would not know why they were really hired and what they were really supposed to help me do.
    When I opened the door, I found that staff already busy at work. It consisted of a middle-aged woman and two reasonably young men.
    Their desks were already piled high with file folders, yard-long printed forms with such ample blank spaces that it would take many hours to fill them out, and thick sheaves of bound reports. Some extra desks in the big, barn-like workroom had imposing charts, graphs, and star maps in varicolored inks spread over them. It was a beehive of activity and gave the quick illusion of many, many more staff members who just happened to be away from their desks on important missions or in vital conferences at the time.
    I suddenly realized that not only was the status of an official determined by how many people he commanded, but this, in turn, reflected upon the status of those working for him, as well. My staff of only three must have been feeling their unimportance keenly.
    No one looked up when I entered the door. They were much too busy. Since I hadn't yet begun to plan the kind of work to keep them busy, even with the excellent examples I'd seen the day before, I marveled at their skill in looking so frantically overworked so soon. But then, I was still thinking as an Industry man, and, instead, I must immediately requisition some more help to lift the burden from their overworked backs.
    There was a long, high counter between me and the area where they sat. Standard equipment where common citizens could stand and wait to be noticed. At one end was a gate for entrance into the sanctuary—with an angry notice on it telling me what federal law I would break and how many years penal servitude I'd risk if I entered without permission. Come to think of it, I'd never seen a communication from government to citizen, on any matter, that didn't contain a threat.
    I tried the gate and found it locked. I rattled it against its lock mechanism, but still nobody lifted a head.
    I went and stood patiently at the counter.
    When I didn't go away, the women finally lifted her head and looked at me with exasperation; then pointedly returned her eyes to her work. I cleared my throat softly, apologetically.
    One of the young men, the dark one with heavy, horn-rimmed glasses, heaved an impatient sigh at the disturbance, clucked his tongue in annoyed reproof, but didn't look up. The blond young man never stirred from his intense concentration of writing in longhand, apparently forming one letter at a time, in the blank spaces on one of the