On Tuesday morning Nancy left her apartment on Chicago's north side and drove to work as usual, maneuvering her Volkswagen on eastbound streets between Old Town and New Town until she reached the Outer Drive.  Then she merged south into the eight-laned chariot race of rush hour on the Drive, whose swooping curves tore through parkland, keeping the quiescent lake in sight.  Past beaches and small-craft harbors, through parks that had been defoliated of low shrubbery but not freed of the lurking violent; past statues of forgotten Germans, past deserted bridle paths, past the Skeet Club, where in an hour the shotguns would begin to pop, and fragmented clay pigeons settle in another layer upon the bottom of the lake.

She swung the small car handily through the painful S-turn where the roadway bridged the river, then worked her way over into the left-hand lane as the Drive topped a rise.  The skyline of central Chicago loomed within toppling distance on her right, and the gray, classically-proportioned bulk of the Museum came into view, low and sprawling, a mile ahead.

Imperturbably sitting just where it wished to sit, taking up exactly as much room as it liked, the Museum split the superhighway into northbound and southbound vessels that went around it on opposite sides, vein and artery from the city's heart.  As if it had been sitting here from ancient days, as if it waited for this culture too to ripen for the harvest, to be ingested and digested and built into the cells of specimen cases in its vast marble guts.

Nancy left the Volks in the small employees' lot and walked up the long solemn slope of steps and in, exchanging good mornings with the familiar guard at the north entrance.  Inside, she walked briskly across a corner of the great skylighted central hall, whose white marble immensity dwarfed preserved elephants and even a skeletal Tyrannosaurus as well as three-story totem poles, case after case of smaller exhibits, and a scattering of early people.  Then Nancy ascended by elevator to the third-floor offices.

From the large window beside her desk she had a view of the second-floor graveled roof, and across it a long row of windows on her own level.  Endless cased slices of hardwood trees were visible through the nearer of those windows and gray-brown blobs that she knew were meteorites behind the farther.  On Nancy's desk, besides the phone and typewriter, there waited yesterday's unfinished work.  First, a small litter of letters from the public, queries from the curious on everything from fireflies to ancient Incas.  There was an unknown bug in a small box sent by an Iowa farmer, and a crackpot theory, with detailed diagrams, from Minneapolis.  Nancy had to see that all were answered, by the proper experts.  She might reply to the Minneapolis letter herself, having acquired some competence in the field of psychoceramics.  Then there was a stack of building contractors' specifications, supposed to somehow help Public Relations explain to the public the inconveniences inevitable in the next stages of the Museum's decades-long remodeling process.  There were also proofs of the introductory pages of a new guidebook.