“Now spring was no more than a memory. In the conference room there was neither time nor place nor season of the year. Poised, windowless, two hundred feet above street level, it might well have been some cavern quarried deep within the bowels of the earth. Here, night and day were one. A sickly, shadowless light was diffused through the room from a series of opaque panels on the wall. The atmosphere, ingeniously held uniform in temperature and humidity by the air conditioning system, was curiously tasteless and soporific, a constant invitation to sleep.”