WESTERN Union had changed a lot. By the middle of the seventies they had closed down most of their offices, those dingy yellow and green places that looked like the city room of some inferior afternoon newspaper. Like the railroads, they hated passenger traffic. In order to hold onto their franchise they had built a few new places, like this one in deepest Brooklyn, that attempted to look modern but that failed to cover the essential cheapness of the place. There was a new plastic "WU" logotype over the door, a promise of exotic electronic wizardry, but it was the same old Western Union.

It was like some kind of a maximum security prison. The people who had designed it had had security high in their minds. Everything was screwed down except the telegraph forms and the stub of pencil that was on the writing table, and that was attached to the table by a short string. The clerks' windows were buried in the wall like gun emplacements. You spoke to the clerk through a pane of glass with a small opening at the bottom that also was used for your paper transactions.

You went to the table on the other side of the grey room and wrote out your message, using the pencil stub, and then you came and stood in line in front of one of the gun emplacements (there were four of them, and three were closed) to wait your turn to slide the message and your money under the glass and to deal with the humorless harridan on the other side.