What Thin Partitions (12 page)

But I was intrigued beyond this point with these kids.

What if there really were a George? Of course there wasn't, but what if there were? They'd made a powerful case for his, existence, and the idea of a superentity would explain much in mass psychology heretofore unexplainable. The more we learned of electronics the more we were realizing that through interplay and feedback, impalpable force fields were brought into being which had measurable effects-effects impossible to any one of the machines contributing to the whole. The echo effect in a broadcasting studio was a rudimentary example.

Yes, what if there were a George? Why didn't I feel him, if there were? Because I was not one of the parts? Because, like a spectator standing off from a mob scene who looked with incredulous wonder upon their behavior, I could only see the effects from the outside? I felt a twinge of envy, for like everyone else, I, also, in fleeting instances, had known a sense of “belonging together.” The thing the Gestalt school was trying to develop.

"What a basketball or hockey team you guys would make,” I said. “Imagine a team where every member was completely in tune with every other member, the whole acting as one coordinated entity."

"That's the idea, sir,” one of them said. But their faces told me of their disappointment in me. Their idea of something for George to do went far deeper than winning some sports events. George was real, George was earnest, and the gym was not his goal.

"Or a music jam session,” I said. “Wow!"

They sat politely and waited.

"Mind you,” I said, “I'm not convinced of George, but on the hypothesis that he could exist, there must be dozens, hundreds of things, things we've never been able to do in industry or science because of imperfect communication and coordination."

Their faces brightened. At last the old guy was getting down to something solid.

But I was stopped right there. There must be dozens, hundreds. But at the moment I couldn't think of any. Very well, Kennedy, do what you always do with an applicant. Find out what he is trained for, what he can do, then it is simple to fit him in to what you need done-if he qualifies.

These boys qualified, there was no doubt of it. In spite of their closeness, they hadn't taken the same courses in school. One was a mechanical engineer, one an electronics engineer. Another had specialized in cybernetics, and that fitted neatly because our major line was making computers and mechanical brains for hush-hush missiles and so forth. A fourth one had specialized in production control, and the fifth one in industry procedures, such as accounting, purchasing, supervision, organization, things like that.

They were qualified. Every one of them was an ideal trainee.

But it still gave me nothing for George to do! There were a lot of unformed ideas teasing me just back of mental consciousness, and a considerable self-disgust that I couldn't put my finger on anything specific. But, there it was. Given time, I'd no doubt think of something. I didn't want to lose these lads while I thought it over. I'd have hired them like a shot if they'd come in separately, so why let them go on to some competitor while I mulled around trying to dream up something for George-who didn't exist anyway?

I launched into my young-grad-industrial-trainee speech, all about the need for converting knowing about things to doing them, the necessity for taking a beginning place while they learned the ropes. While they were learning, we would be observing them, finding out where they would best fit in our total organization, et cetera, et cetera. The same old line each young grad accepts cynically because there is nothing else he can do.

A little to my astonishment, they accepted enthusiastically. That was the idea. They realized that it was too much to expect something unusual for George right away, that like any other new employee, George would have to prove himself before he could expect anything of importance.

I was further astonished that the menial jobs I described for them didn't insult them. Usually a young grad's idea of starting at the bottom means Assistant to the President.

I called in the interviewer who had shunted the boys on to me, and told him to process the lads for the trainee jobs, the three engineers as draftsmen in their respective fields, a production control man as a stock chaser and expediter, and the business administration lad as a clerk in the purchasing department.

These were the open jobs, and it should be obvious to any interviewer that these were the lads to fill them. The interviewer looked at me with mingled emotions. Part of him was asking, “How do you do it?” with admiration, and the other part was sore at me because I had been able to do it, when all he'd got was irrational confusion.

I failed to reveal that I was also somewhat irrationally confused.

I had never run a personnel department on the usual policy of forgetting your promises as soon as you saw the back of the employee. One of the reasons we had so little organization trouble was because they knew that if I failed to keep my promise it wasn't because I hadn't tried.

In the days that followed, I tried to find something for George. I talked to various supervisors whose intelligence I respected. I went to administrative engineers. I threw the problem into the theoretical research lab. Everyone had the same reaction.

"Why sure, there must be dozens, hundreds-"

"Name me one, just one,” I'd say. “Name me something that theoretically we know how to do, but can't do, because we can't ever get the perfect coordination and communication to meet unforeseen developments."

Of course they accepted my statement that this was just a hypothetical situation. I wasn't sticking out my neck any farther than that. But it was an intriguing thought, and the more imaginative engineers pounced upon it with delight. Why there must be dozens. Name one, just one.

And they did name problems by the score. But these always fitted into one of two categories-either science didn't yet know how to solve the problem even with perfect communication and coordination, or it was only a little better performance than five separate guys could do without complete empathy. Never anything that only a George could do, a thing that couldn't be done without a George.

Some of them tried a different approach.

"Tell me what qualities George has, and then it should be easy to think of something that only he could do."

I learned to counter that one, because it led into endless discussions about qualities of mind, and never produced anything specific for George to do anyway.

"Give him any rational qualities you want,” I'd say. “Anything that fits into our present framework of science and industry. Let's don't deal in magic, or this time in the usual concepts of psi. Here we've got five guys, who are just ordinary guys without any wild talents. But they've worked out Gestalt empathy to the point where they think and act as a unit, as one organism. Now, granted this organism as a whole may equal more than the sum of its parts, still it doesn't have any wild talents. It can't turn the Auerbach cylinder into an antigravity unit, for example. But it is greater than the sum of its parts, it is more than just five well-trained guys who would bog down in confusion as soon as an unforeseen circumstance arose, who would have to stop whatever they were doing to compare notes and agree on where to go from there. This ... this George, would react instantly, drawing his decision from the combined minds and talents of the whole group, and all parts of the group would carry out the decision just as if they were parts of one body directed by one brain. Give him any background, any training, any knowledge, any rational qualities you like. What good is he? What could he do that we can't already do?"

They'd grin and mumble something about if I didn't have anything more important than that to occupy my time they certainly did. They'd agree to think about it, because, like myself, just behind the frame of consciousness there was the teasing certainty that there must be dozens, hundreds-

That, in itself, intrigued me. Was man evolving into a kind of group entity, instead of separate individuals? Some philosophers had said so. The whole social structure was trending in that direction. Were we on the verge of a whole new concept of mind and existence? Something we could intuitively feel but not put into words?

It became important to me, far beyond the importance of merely keeping my promise to think of something for George to do, my promise to the five lads. The five boys had settled into their new jobs without a disturbing ripple on the surface of the organization, and a couple of supervisors had gone out of their way to tell me that if there were any more of the same floating around to grab them.

One supervisor said it was astonishing the way his man seemed to grasp total orientation in his job, seemed to know without being told how the work he did fitted into the total structure. He thought this very unusual, because it usually took months or years for the concept to dawn that each job fitted into the pattern of all other jobs, like a big jigsaw puzzle.

I agreed that it was unusual. And felt a chill run down my spine. It wouldn't be unexpected if what was being taught the other four trainees was instantly available to him! Where did empathy leave off and telepathy begin?

I went beyond my usual conversations with the engineers and theoretical scientists. I even thought of taking the problem to Old Stone Face, and then got the practical thought that the general manager would flay me alive for wasting time on a hypothetical problem when there were so many real ones to solve-such as how to make people behave like machines.

I did take up the problem, tentatively, with Colonel Backhead. Along with other private industries working on hush-hush government contracts, we had our contingent of Army-Air Force-Navy personnel, who acted to interpret contracts, pass on plans and specifications, inspect output, needle the security police into ever increasing suspicions of everybody, stamp Top Secret on every piece of paper they saw. An organization within an organization. “A cancerous growth in the body of free enterprise,” Old Stone Face would mutter when he was particularly perturbed by some foolish regulation.

Still, I'd got to the point of desperation. I'd even accept an idea from Colonel Backhead, if he had one. He did, and it astonished me.

"Good thing such a thing doesn't exist,” he said in his clipped, raspy tones. “Rob a bank too easy."

Now what kind of a subconscious mind did he have?

Repeated failure and time dulled my enthusiasm for the quest. Other wheels were squeaking louder than my five lads; Company wheels, and Military wheels.

A certain realization also dulled my search, and faced me with defeat. Both industry and science are founded upon the basic premise that there cannot be perfect communication and coordination between individuals. The procedures are all set up to compensate for that lack. Deeper still, like any hypothesis founded upon a basic premise that is unquestioned, all theories and questions are shaped by that premise, and all evidence is rationalized to fit it-like the wondrous structure of astronomy built around Ptolemy's basic premise that the Earth was the center of the universe. It takes a complete breakthrough, a destruction of the basic premise, before we can think of the questions, much less arrive at answers.

I would have to be a Copernicus to think of something for George to do-and I wasn't.

I salved my conscience over the broken promise to the five lads by rationalizing that this betrayal was no more than any other young grad could expect. Most of them came in with bright hopes, eager ambitions, wondrous talents, and one by one we ground them down to fit into the total organization machine. They were malleable material. That was evidenced by the fact that their college had been able to pound and pummel them all into the same mental and attitude shape, so that they all could come out of the same production machine. Industry would follow the same process, and in five, ten, twenty years they would be unmistakably business executives. Was that bad?

What a terrible waste of unusual talents! Still, what could I do? If George was so unusual, let him find his own niche! Every other employee had to!

Accepting the rationalization was gall, but what else? And in the meantime, I did have other problems, problems I could solve.

Six months went by. A short time in the span of a lifetime job, a long time to a bright young trainee who took a temporary job only until something better, to make use of his unusual abilities, could be worked out. I forgot about the five guys. No special trouble over them came to my attention, and they became just five out of five thousand employees.

I had never accepted George as more than a hypothetical idea, and my wisdom in this course was apparent. If George did exist, he wasn't making his presence known to anybody. I even rationalized George away. Kids often dream up imaginary companions, talk to them, insist that mother set a place at the table for them, make a place for them in their beds. Such a thing had occurred to these five lads when they were kids-and because of their constant association they'd simply kept the idea alive. But now that they had jobs in separate departments, and were growing up, taking on more adult responsibilities in their jobs, the whole childish idea would soon appear silly to them.

I was glad I'd always kept it purely hypothetical when talking with the engineers and scientists.

With that final rationalization, I dismissed them from my mind completely. In the usual sink-or-swim fashion, they would either climb on up in their jobs through the usual channels, or they wouldn't. Until they became troublesome, they were none of my affair-now.

My little psi machines had likewise been discarded. Association and consequent guilt feelings? Something as childish as the idea of George?

The months slipped away, and almost a year passed. I had forgot the boys.

My phone rang with that long, persistent shrill the switchboard operator uses to tell me that Old Stone Face is on the other end of the wire and chomping impatiently.