What Thin Partitions (16 page)

"Do you think you'd have time to run over to the UCLA library this morning,” I asked, “to see if you can pick up anything on the relationship of hypnosis to psi-if any?"

She looked at her own IN box pointedly. It was stacked up a foot thick, a mute reminder that she tried to take over all the detail work and leave me with only the creative.

Creative! As, for example, I should go over to Design Engineering and say, “Please, fellows, would you mind trying to cooperate a little with Industrial Engineering's ideas and save up your pencil stubs?” I already knew what Industrial Engineering could do with pencil stubs. I didn't need Design Engineering to tell me.

Or maybe go over to Industrial Engineering and say, “Look, fellows, did it ever occur to you that it might not be maximum efficiency to bring Design Engineering minds down to the level of saving up pencil stubs?” I already knew their answer, too, about what the creative geniuses really designed and passed around when they thought nobody was looking, and how it would be raising, not lowering, their mind level to get them considering costs. This was creative personnel.

"Never mind,” I said. “I'll find time during the morning to go over to the library. Maybe that would be better, because I know what I want.” I stood there for a moment. “I think I know what I want,” I amended.

I closed the door and went back to my desk. I picked up the stack of interoffice memos. The top one was from Old Stone Face, Mr. Henry Grenoble, the General Manager. He mentioned, rather gently I thought, that I hadn't been caught trying to wreck the company for quite a while now, and what was I doing? Just sitting around drawing my paycheck.

I felt better. I had seen the evidence of George taking over more and more of the production functions of Computer Research, and the workers getting more and more like ants who knew exactly what they were supposed to do from some central source that had no corporeal identity. Marvelously efficient, and I was afraid Old Stone Face had let it soothe him into tranquility. Apparently he hadn't. I didn't feel so alone now.

My drive to the UCLA library turned out to be a waste of time. Oh, there had been a few half-hearted attempts to rouse psi through hypnotism, with results about as indecisive as other experiments. It looked as if I'd have to do my own experiments. As I leafed through the few references, I wondered how I'd be as a hypnotist.

Of course I might get the Swami to help me, but the habit of faking was so deeply ingrained in his character one couldn't tell when he was being honest because he didn't know, himself.

I managed to snag a couple of profs in the psych department, but my questions on the subject were met with much the same disdain as if I'd asked for the real truth about Unidentified Flying Objects. I should have known. There is a breed who calls himself a scientist but is really concerned only with maintaining a reputation for esoteric knowledge. As soon as the layman picks up the idea, he drops it like a hot coal, for to be identified with it now would associate him with the untouchables. Bridey Murphy and various television programs had vulgarized hypnotism until these men, whose only real concern was their own prestige, wouldn't touch it. They had the same attitude toward psi-and for the same reason.

As I climbed back into my car, I reflected that fortunately there were a few, not many but some, who were more concerned with knowledge than with REPUTATION. Lucky mankind! Otherwise...

When I got back to the plant, Sara had a surprise waiting for me in my office. Another colonel from the Pentagon.

"Logart,” he identified himself. To his credit he did not add and emphasize, “Colonel Logart.” He let the eagles on his collar speak for themselves. He did add, “Poltergeist Division, Pentagon,” but his face broke into a broad grin when he said it.

Out of his uniform he would have been more or less nondescript, displaying none of that rugged, masculine handsomeness of the fair-haired career men in the services and denoting a possible latent something-or-other in high places. I nodded, shook hands perfunctorily, and waved him to the crying chair in front of my desk.

"Know anything about mass hypnotism?” I asked as an opener.

"After fifteen years in the service?” he countered. “What do you think basic training and all that comes after it might be?"

I'd been looking at him, but now I did a sort of double take and really saw him for the first time.

"Well now,” I grinned as broadly as he. “How have you managed to survive?"

He took my question at face value.

"One of the more or less valid facts about hypnotism is that you can't be hypnotized if you don't want to be. Of course that presupposes you know what is happening-as most don't. But I knew. And I also knew that the only way to survive that, or any other mass hypnotism framework, was to become so completely imitative that no one would realize I knew I was imitating."

"Well now,” I said again. “You and I might be able to work together. We've had a series of stuffed pouter pigeons, and-"

"I know,” he interrupted. “You've got yourself quite a reputation back at the Pentagon, Kennedy. For bringing an end to fine, promising careers, that is. We've got plenty of brave men who can stand up under bullets, or bombs, or even ridicule when it comes in from the outside. But when a man becomes ridiculous in his own eyes ... You've got quite a nasty faculty for that, Kennedy.” He'd stopped grinning, but his eyes were still twinkling with real mirth. Yet a man who could consciously learn to be so imitative as to give the illusion he thought he was being creative could succeed in simulating almost anything. So I could only hope the mirth was real.

"That's why it was relatively easy for me to get assigned to this Company. General Sanfordwaithe was in a hole. He could order men to their death under fire without a twinge, because that's part of the hypnosis. But to order career suicide is something else. So I expect he was pretty relieved when I volunteered, or rather when I begged for the assignment."

He stopped and looked at me.

"Of course there's more,” I said, and pushed a box of cigarettes across the desk to him. He took one, lit it, and so did I.

"Yes,” he said. “There's more. Considerably more."

"Naturally."

"I'm interested in George,” he said. “I've always known that sooner or later a George would come on the scene. That is, if I got the story straight. Would you mind..."

I repeated the story of George for him. How these five young college grads came to me with the yarn that through mental identification, interplay and feedback, they had succeeded in creating a superentity, an incorporeal being for which they were merely body, hands and feet. Unlike the fleeting entity that comes into being in a mob, or other gathering of people with mental feedback and interplay, George was a permanent, an enduring-ah-personality? quality? being?-anyhow, whatever.

I told him how I had tried for months to find something that only a George could do, something that five unconnected guys couldn't do, something that required instant communication and coordination. I told him how I'd failed to think of anything because science and industry are both constructed to compensate for the lack o instant communication and coordination. I told him how George had gradually reached out and begun to take over the operation of the production planning functions of the plant; the furor caused by getting contracts out on time, for a change-I the investigation and demonstration to the Pentagon officers of his reality as an entity. And the demonstration of his power.

"Demonstration of one of his powers,” I amended. “What other powers he might have, or develop, I've ... I've been a little too nervous to find out."

He nodded as if he understood and crushed out the butt of his cigarette in my ashtray.

"Pretty much as stated in the report,” he conceded. “I was afraid it might have been-ah-interpreted. Strike you as peculiar that you couldn't think of anything for George to do?"

"Yes,” I said emphatically. “There was a teasing, tantalizing feeling that there must be dozens, hundreds of things. Only I could never bring one right out into the foreground. Like a word or a name on the tip of our tongue that annoys because it will neither come clear nor go away."

"One of the interesting aspects of hypnotism,” he said as if he were veering away from the subject, or maybe coming back to it. “The subject is partially conscious and knows things exist beyond his will's reach. But he can only think and act according to the compulsions given him, the things consistent with the framework of his commands. Ever occur to you that what you call ‘frameworks’ might be a kind of compulsion boundary you can't cross? You say industry and science is organized to compensate for the lack of instant communication and coordination because such things can't exist among people. Something for George to do would be outside your frame of compulsions."

"Look,” I said. “Aren't you extending the definition of hypnotism a little far? After all, a word, too, has certain semantic boundaries."

"Who can draw the line,” he asked, “between hypnotism and suggestion? Where does suggestion leave off and teaching begin? Where does propaganda leave off and belief begin? Where is the line between belief and compulsion? Where is the boundary between compulsion and hypnotism?"

"The music goes round and round,” I said flippantly. But flippancy was a cover-up for some powerful mixed emotions I hadn't yet sorted out. More than the words, it was the semantic overtones back of them, such as the implications in substituting the word teaching and propaganda. By that, did he mean all teaching?

Personnel people, accustomed to twenty different versions a day of the only possible right way to think, become detached and are able to see these versions in perspective. But I felt something different from that-a glimpse of such far vision that I could look down on human beings, like two-dimensional creatures, forever imprisoned within the narrow walls of their compulsions, unable to break through the hypnotic suggestions of their frameworks. But only a glimpse.

For that comprehension was replaced by a reaction far less exalted. A deep disappointment. I'd run into his pattern before, on quite a few occasions. I had him pegged, classified. The mental exhibitionist. A fellow who dreams up startling things to say to gain attention and impress people. They don't need to mean anything, just sound as if they do. No doubt around the Pentagon, where the philosophical concepts must be at best on the primitive level-or the military framework couldn't exist at all-he'd made quite a splash with his semantic gymnastics. And, no doubt, he thought a display of his well-worn patter would push Kennedy over as easily.

After fifty thousand people or so, we never seem to get an original. Even in the first few dozens we start getting carbon copies, people who occupy a duplicate framework, and therefore duplicate all the same problems inherent in the framework. The hope that we may-perhaps even today!-encounter an original keeps us able to endure the deadly monotony of repetition where each person thinks himself to be ... different. My hope that today I had discovered one died.

Oddly, his interest in me seemed to die simultaneously. Perhaps it was my flippant remark, yet if he had been truly perceptive he would have known ... Therefore his assumption that he hadn't impressed me, after all, was proof of the shallow level at which he operated. His eyes seemed to film over, grow remote. Outwardly he was still cordial, as was I. But rapport, for a few moments tantalizingly near, was gone. I understood him, and he was at least perceptive enough to realize it.

"Well,” he said, after an appreciable pause, “I just dropped in to get acquainted. You understand, of course, that before discussing with you my real mission I must present it to your general manager, Mr. Grenoble."

"Of course,” I agreed. “Never let it be forgotten that I'm just the Personnel Director here. I can't speak for the company except at that level."

We stood up simultaneously. He reached across the desk and we shook hands. His eyes looked at me as if he was perhaps a little sad at what they saw. And perhaps my eyes showed him the same. He was disappointed that he hadn't made an impression. I was disappointed that he had tried it on such an obvious level. He left.

The office seemed singularly empty and barren after he had gone. And that was odd, because if he hadn't made a deep impression, why should it? Had I been right in my first reaction, and not my second? Of course not. The man was an obvious poseur, transparently so. The pity of it was, he didn't need to be. Because there was something about him...

Something, like a word or a name on the tip of the tongue, wouldn't go away. Some hypnotic compulsion shut me off from ... Nonsense!

The next day Old Stone Face and Colonel Logart left for Washington. The deal proposed by the Pentagon must have been a good one, interesting enough to cause the general manager to make the trip. Henry gave me no hint before he left of what it might involve. Usually I can surmise what's in the wind, even when he thinks he's playing it close to his chest, because he wants this or that kind of expert. This time there was no such clue.

There was a clue as to the magnitude of the deal, for Old Stone Face stayed in Washington more than a week. This meant he had to hang around while a little time could be found here and there in the calendars of the big boys. From the time involved, some of these boys were right up there on the first team.

Still there were a couple of straws in the wind. When Henry called me into his office for his going-away pep talk, which usually amounted to instructions to kind of keep an eye on the store while he was out to lunch, he betrayed at least one source of interest.

"How's George doing these days, Ralph?” he asked with what he considered to be a disinterested, friendly smile. On him it always looked like an earthquake splitting open the side of a granite mountain.

"Your production reports will tell you better than I can,” I said. “He's practically taken over the running of production. I don't know about you, but it's cut my work in half. Grievances have dropped off to practically nothing."