What Thin Partitions (19 page)

"You think Jennie lived in a different—” She hesitated over the new word, tasting it for meaning, “-framework?"

"I'm pretty sure of it,” I said.

"And she could travel back and forth without hurting herself?"

"Possibly. We don't know for sure."

"My,” she said. “Think of that. That's some daughter I've got, eh, Mr. Kennedy?"

"You can say that again,” I agreed.

"That Logart fellow,” she said. “He seems like a nice enough man. Awful young to be a full colonel. I guess it wouldn't do any harm for him to talk to Jennie-if you was there. You think it would do her any harm?"

"She wouldn't have to agree unless she wanted to,” I said. “I'm not going to put any pressure on her. I made up my mind to that two, three years ago when I first got to know her."

"Then I'll tell her to come see you tomorrow when she gets out of school in the afternoon."

I started to leave, then turned back.

"How's Swami?” I asked.

Her face began to glow.

"He's the most wonderf—” She paused and then smiled teasingly. “But you wouldn't know anything about him in that framework."

I tried to picture Swami in the role of ardent lover. It wasn't too difficult. He probably would have made an art of it, a supplement to his art of fakery in reading palms, telling fortunes, gazing into the crystal ball. Perhaps it would be better if I didn't acknowledge that to Annie.

"No,” I laughed. “I guess you're right. I wouldn't know anything about his abilities in that framework."

"Jennie's crazy about him,” she said. “Sometimes I think those two understand each other better than I understand either one of them."

"Oh?” I said.

"They're two of a kind,” she said. “They play games together.” Then cryptically, she added, “But it's all right, because he's there to see that she don't come to no harm."

I felt my eyes widen a little. Perhaps we wouldn't have too much trouble in getting Jennie back into the old framework after all.

"They claim that together they can do things that neither one of them can do by themselves,” she added.

"If they're that close,” I said, “maybe Swami had better come with Jennie tomorrow afternoon."

Her face lit up and the last vestige of doubt left it.

"Then I know it will be all right,” she said confidently.

I hoped so.

Sara kept Jennie and the Swami in the outer waiting room until Logart could be located. It wasn't difficult to find him. He'd left word with the switchboard that he'd be in conference with Old Stone Face and was to be notified immediately when I was ready. He left the conference at once, and I hoped Old Stone Face would realize that there really were times when a little girl and a fake swami might be more important than the general manager.

The three of them came in together and I introduced them as I gave them chairs.

"You're a bigger girl than I thought you'd be,” Logart said to Jennie. “Prettier, too."

I caught a flash of dark jealousy in Swami's eyes-Jennie, still in the preteen age of a child at one moment and a young lady the next, suddenly became a very demure and shy young lady. Apparently Logart caught the look in Swami's face, too, for he addressed most of his remarks to the man, and gradually I could see him winning over the highly temperamental, unstable personality.

I had visualized myself as carrying the conversational ball, drawing them out, bringing them closer together, and finally with great subtlety introducing the psi subject. Logart picked up the ball immediately and I became no more than a nonparticipating spectator. In fact, I wasn't quite sure that I caught all the plays, or understood fully those I did see.

Whatever it was that happened, Jennie was completely captivated. Yet it was to the Swami that she turned and drew closer. Suddenly I realized that it was no longer to Jennie as separate from the Swami, but both of them as a team that Logart was appealing. Logart had somehow caught the implications of the games that Swami and Jennie played together where as a team they could do things that neither could do separately.

Had Logart still been in uniform I might have credited the way they turned to him, accepted his leadership, yes, domination over them as subservience to military command. But he had shed his uniform and badges, and had become an uncolorful, nondescript civilian. But not to them! They recognized something in him I could not see. They gave acquiescence long before it was asked. In fact, he never asked their agreement, he took it for granted. And they gave it in the same spirit.

I had to stop them at one point, they were going too fast toward their destination, whatever it might be.

"Whoa!” I exclaimed. “Wait a minute. You can't pull Jennie out of school and ensconce her over there in the laboratory building just because you want her. There are such things as school laws and child labor laws here in California."

"Isn't that your problem, Mr. Kennedy?” Logart asked, with an undercurrent of impatience in his voice.

"Yes,” I said reasonably. “And it's quite a problem. It's true that we have special provision for, say, child actors. The State gives special permission when adequate and compensating educational facilities are provided. I can set up the educational facilities without any trouble. The problem is this. The State Board understands about child actors. But what am I going to give the State as an excuse for taking Jennie out of regular school and putting her to work in our factory?"

"It seems to me that the success or failure of Earth's first space ship is more important than some stupid motion picture,” Logart said, with his impatience increasing.

"Ah,” I said. “But now we're dealing with a framework of bureaucracy. Remember your military framework, Mister Logart. They're going to ask what has this little girl got so necessary to our success that the graduates of our finest technical universities don't have?"

"What is the procedure to deal with other unusual children?” he asked.

"There aren't supposed to be any unusual children,” I said. “That's the whole point. There aren't supposed to be any unusual people of any kind, or any unusual circumstances. What did you do with those unusual young fellows you pulled into the services, Colonel Logart? You ground them down to complete conformity and mediocrity, or you destroyed them in trying. Now the disease is no longer confined to the military. Because nothing is done to reverse this process when the man has finished his term of service, it has saturated the whole culture."

All three of them were looking at me with different expressions. Jennie was politely waiting while an adult finished saying something she didn't understand. Swami was looking at me with eyebrows cocked in puzzled surprise. Logart was patient, with a little smile that seemed comprised of both amusement and pity playing around his lips. I couldn't interpret it then, I didn't understand it until months later, when the pattern he was now developing finished in its inevitable result.

I was puzzled, too. At myself. I had never been particularly concerned for the ultimate fate of our culture, of mankind. I conceded that I didn't have many illusions left, but mine had always been an attitude of “If you can't lick ’em, join ’em.” Yet every time I came in contact with Logart, or even thought about him, I started getting up on a soapbox and philosophizing off into the blue yonder. And I was supposed to be the one who was skilled in keeping people on the subject until the matter in hand had been covered!

"What I'm saying,” I supplemented a little lamely, because it wasn't what I'd been saying at all, “is that in dealing with a specific framework, you've got to make certain concessions to it, even though they prove a nuisance. Now I can see only one way to justify bringing Jennie here into the plant laboratory on a full-time basis, and that is in the role of a child actor. The State could understand that, because there's precedence. So we'll have to go through the process of making a motion picture record of the building of this spaceship. The State will understand if we interpret that record through a child's eyes, because the State is convinced that the people have the minds of small children."

I started to swing into another diatribe about administrative attitudes of telling people only what the government thought the people ought to know, and keeping from them what they thought the people were too innocent to suspect-and resolutely closed my lips. Now that I had realized Logart's effect on me, I could at least be on guard. What effect did he have on others? Was he also arousing in them deep, latent concepts-abilities?

"As you say,” he was conceding, “a motion picture record will be an added nuisance. But if it takes that to get up off the surface of the Earth, we'll do it.” There was a vibrant chord of deep yearning, longing, in his voice.

"There will be quite a few such nuisances,” I said drily.

There were quite a few nuisances.

Not the least of them was the sudden withdrawal of George from the production departments of the factory. George had largely dispensed with red tape in favor of his more immediate form of communication. When George withdrew to concentrate on spaceship plans, like a little boy who drops his tricycle and never gives it a backward glance when he sees daddy untying a real bike from the rear bumper of the car, this form of communication was suddenly cut off. Nobody knew what to do.

Red tape is not only communication, it is history. No one knew what to do, and from the few sparse records no one could tell what had been done.

The workers turned to their supervisors. Here were the machines, here was the blank stock. But what were they supposed to do with it? The supervisors turned to the production planning departments. Where are the work orders, the job tickets? Production Planning turned to Engineering. Where are the blueprints? Engineering turned to Plant Management. What are we supposed to be doing? Plant Management turned to General Management. Old Stone Face had nowhere to turn. It is one thing to build a huge organization one step at a time. It is something else to have five thousand idle employees turn at once and say, “What am I supposed to do?"

In this hectic period of readjustment which loaded me down with quarrels, complaints, grievances, I noticed a peculiar state of mind creeping over me. Ordinarily there is a joy in the skill of being able to juggle dozens of problems without dropping any of them to smash, but there was no joy in this. I simply slugged through the days somehow. I put it down to overwork, overpressure, and the fact that I really wanted to be active in the preliminary stages of planning the spaceship. Compared with that, the job of getting the plant running smoothly again was sheer tedious drudgery.

All through the months I never really had any hand at all in the building of the spaceship. Peripheral nuisances kept me busy, a sort of picking up the pieces that Logart dropped as he pushed the project along. He never shoved me out of things. He just didn't need me at the central core, and there always seemed to be some emergency that prevented my real participation.

Such as the nuisance of getting a motion picture record started, the subterfuge that would give us Jennie without too many questions. This meant dealing with thirty-two more unions necessary to film a professional picture, to say nothing of State Boards, Local Boards, and Bureaucrats at every level. Anybody who still thinks we have free enterprise is living in a previous century. Simply making it possible for Jennie to get additional training from Logart kept me from sitting in on those sessions to see what was going on.

The nuisances piled up and as customary around Computer Research the buck passes from hand to hand until, somehow, it finally winds up on my desk. For instance there wasn't any reason why I should have got involved in the court actions that would condemn the adjoining property and give us more space. But I did.

One little old lady chose this particular time to decide that science had gone far enough. She picked up Asimov's famous sardonic jest made when the American satellite was first being publicly described: “If God had wanted basketballs to fly he'd have given them wings.” She clung to it with literal sincerity, and talked about the Tower of Babel. Somehow the notion got fixed that if man left Earth, where he had been put to work out expiations for his sins, the whole plan of the universe would be destroyed. She had a lot of followers. The Press, treating it first as a joke, gradually began to concede she might have a point. And, although the court decreed against her, when she sat down in her little parlor with a shotgun across her lap and defied anybody to remove her bodily from her property-still hers no matter what a federal court judge said -our Public Relations Department somehow passed the buck to me. Rationalizing her into believing man was following out the predestined plan of the universe and science was proof that man was making progress in the expiation of his original sin took time. By the time I finished, her house was a little island in a sea of bulldozers.

Old Stone Face didn't help any.

"I thought I was pretty well adapted,” he said to me one day, “to the government attitude that a fellow isn't any kind of business manager at all if he can't make a ten-thousand-dollar item cost the tax payers a half million, but Ralph, the costs of this project are ridiculous.

Arguments that the more money we wasted the more profit we made, as is accepted custom, didn't sway his attempts to cut costs. The amazing Logart had somehow managed to pry open the Federal till so that we could just reach in and help ourselves. Old Stone Face insisted it wasn't the money, it was the principle of the thing. The more he tried to cut costs the greater the clamor and the more problems that somehow got piled on top of me.

I saw the land cleared, the spaceship hangar and side buildings arise without any help from me. By now, I seemed to be past caring.

When Logart insisted he had to have a laboratory separate from everything else, where only he, Jennie, Swami, and George could enter, and pointed out a private residence on the north side of our property he thought would do, somehow I took it for granted it was my problem to get it for him. Somehow, working through our legal department, of course, I did. Somehow, I didn't ever get around to pointing out that the Personnel Director cannot be excluded from any company property; that the Personnel Director has the right to participate in any employee training program. After they moved into their new “laboratory” I never even got a peek inside it. The astonishing bit about that was that I couldn't seem to care.