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By Root 630 0

of the razor-blade company had possessed a miraculous razor blade which had been in his family for generations and which not only renewed its sharpness every time it was used but also granted the shaver anything he wished for after every thirteenth shave … the president, however, had not guarded his treasure carefully enough. One day he had forgotten to replace it in its velvet-lined case and had left it lying around in the bathroom, and one of the maids, trying to be useful, had … (the story was unclear at this point, but it was very complicated. The razor blade had somehow managed to make its way into a store, a second-hand store where it had been bought by an unsuspecting customer and …). The president had that very day needed some money in a hurry. He had shaved frantically every three hours to make up the number 13, scraping his face raw; what was his surprise and dismay when.… So he had found out what had happened, commanded the offending maid to be tossed into a pit full of used razor blades, and had covered the city with a dragnet of middle-aged female private detectives posing as Seymour Surveys interviewers, their eagle-eyes trained to ferret out everyone, male or female, with the least trace of a beard, crying “New Razor Blades For Old,” in a desperate attempt to recover the priceless lost …

Marian sighed, drew a small spider in one corner of the maze of lines, and turned to her typewriter. She typed the section intact from the rough questionnaire – “We would like to examine the condition of your razor blade. Would you give me the razor blade that is now in your razor? Here is a new one in return for it,” – adding a “please” before the “give.” There was no way of rewording the question that would make it sound less eccentric, but at least it could be made more polite.

Around her the office was in a turmoil. It was always either in a turmoil or in a dead flat calm, and on the whole she preferred the turmoils. She could get away with doing less, everyone else was in such a state, skittering about and screeching, that they didn’t have time to lounge around and peer over her shoulder and wonder what was taking her so long or what exactly she was doing anyway. She used to feel a sense of participation in the turmoils themselves; once or twice she had even allowed herself to become frenzied in sympathy, and had been surprised at how much fun it was; but ever since she had become engaged and had known she wasn’t going to be there forever (they’d talked about it, Peter said of course she could keep working after the wedding if she wanted to, for a while at least, though she didn’t need to financially – he considered it unfair to marry, he said, if you couldn’t afford to support your wife, but she had decided against it), she had been able to lean back and view them all with detachment. In fact, she found that she couldn’t become involved even when she wanted to. They had taken lately to complimenting her on her calmness in emergencies. “Well, thank goodness for Marian,” they’d say, as they soothed themselves with cups of tea and patted their overwrought foreheads with pieces of kleenex, breathing hard. “She never lets herself get out of control. Do you, dear?”

At the moment they were running around, she thought, like a herd of armadillos at the zoo. Armadillos recalled briefly to her mind the man in the laundromat, who had never reappeared, though she had been to the laundromat several times since and had always half-expected to see him there. But that wasn’t surprising, he was obviously unstable; he had probably vanished down some drain or other a long time ago.…

She watched Emmy as she darted to the filing cabinet and rummaged feverishly among the files. This time it was the coast-to-coast sanitary-napkin survey: something had gone embarrassingly wrong in the West. It was supposed to have been what they called a “three-wave” survey: the first wave surging out through the mails, locating and bringing back on its returning crest a shoal of eligible and willing answerers, and the second and third waves following up