HAIL AND FAREWELL

A Story by Jan Addison

When she had hung her ulster in the staff-room locker she took the stairs slowly, for the first time since the doctor said she must. ('Not for the first half-century I won't,' she'd said. And Dr. Eleanor, not joking: Want to finish that half-century?' And she: 'Not much, if it means having to die by inches.') Well, yesterday she'd finished it, fifty years at her own pace. Today she was ready to lean back, begin letting her juniors do the running.

She walked into the half-glass office with Agnes Dawes, Associate Director in new gold-edged black low on the panel, and sat down. Technically it was her office three days ago, first of the month, but what with clearing a decade's accumulation out of her old desk, rehearsing her successor, and being coached herself by old Emmy-(As if five years of Acting Associate Director through vacations and sick leaves weren't enough coaching.

She looked out the window and was as dashed by the serene reach of lawn as though it wore the ocean. But through plate glass on the other side was still the old morning turmoil around hor desk out there no, not her desk any more, Lou Brandt's. Agnes Dawes need never again keep afloat in that surf of urgent demands for instant and variegated information. Never again sit exposed eight hours a day at a mill-race public service point.

Never again... A wave of nostalgia A wave of nostalgia sharp as panic invaded her. She hustled a folder out of the deep filing drawer at her right and dived into the Associate Director's annual report. But what use? She'd got all that in hand last month during Emmy's vacation, and couldn't finish it till fiscal statistics were complete.

At this instant nothing.

What was there that had to be done?

Now it was real panic. What had she let herself in for? Where was she headed now?

This office had been the goal for