G. G. Ashwood finds the firm’s inertials. He has done so since 1998, and 141 of the 212 people on the roster today were first noticed by him.

He came to the firm from baseball, where he spent eleven years scouting for a minor-league club in the Carolinas, and before that from a casting agency, where he says he learned that the person nobody looks at twice is usually the one worth a second look. Inertials are seldom aware of what they are. They tend to be people whose colleagues’ hunches fail when they are in the room, whom fortune tellers decline to read, and who have been told all their lives that they are hard to get to know. They work night shifts, staff toll plazas and hospital records departments, and sit at the back.

Mr. Ashwood travels about two hundred days a year with a pocket field meter, a list of addresses and a great deal of patience. He has been the firm’s named contact for its PSI-FIELD MONITOR licence with the Turing Registry since the licence was granted in 2004.