The Green Millennium by Fritz Leiber

Inside, the Humberford Foundation was a gloomy Edwardian mansion to which had been sketchily grafted a pleasantly disorganized scientific enterprise. Glassed shelves of leatherbound books that hadn't been opened for decades were elbowed by trim microfilm files. Blackened portraits of John Junius Humberford and his ancestors looked down on machines for shuffling the eternal Rhine cards and on fluorescent screens-in-depth that blended a dozen recordings of a brain wave made from different angles into the shadowy semblance of a human thought. Stately drawing rooms that set one thinking of bustles and teacups instead held solemn faced, scantily clad girls with electrodes attached to twenty parts of their bodies. Laboratory technicians in loose smocks caught their heels in stair carpets a hundred years old.

But today there was an excitement that pushed the Edwardian half of the place far into the background and brightened the very grime on the walls. Chancellor Frobisher and his little train of visitors were not even noticed. Girls triumphantly calling Rhine cards stared past them unseeingly. Clairvoyants sketching objects being imagined by someone else three floors away didn't look up from their blackboards. A technician darted out with a large syringe and took air samples under their very noses without seeming to be aware of their presence. Correlating engines hummed and spat cards.