What Thin Partitions (2 page)

"I'll sign a slip to your foreman,” I agreed, and pulled a pad toward me. Of course I knew the foremen saved these excuse slips to flourish as an alibi when their production stumped; but I'd fight that battle out, as usual, at the next management conference.

Annie walked out the door, holding the white slip aloft as if it were a prize of some sort. Sara stood silently in the doorway until the outer door had closed.

"You took nine minutes on that beef,” she said. “You're slipping."

"The union prefers we call them grievances,” I said loftily.

"Well, there's another beef waiting,” she said pointedly. “And this time it's a beef, because it's one of the scientists, Dr. Auerbach, not a union member."

"No, Sara,” I said with exaggerated patience, just as if she weren't the best secretary I'd ever had. “That isn't a beef either. With scientists it's nothing less than a conflict problem. We don't have beefs here at Computer Research."

"Some day I'm going to have just a good old-fashioned beef,” Sara said dreamily, “just for the novelty of seeing what's it like to be a human being instead of a personnel secretary."

"Well, while you're trying to work yourself into it, get me little Jennie Malasek out of the nursery,” I said dryly.

"It's not enough,” she answered tartly, “that you should twist us intelligent, mature adults around your little finger. Now you got to start picking on the little kids."

"Or vice versa,” I answered with a sigh. “I don't know which, yet. Send in Dr. Auerbach, and have Jennie waiting. I want to go home sometime tonight. I, too, am human."

"I doubt it,” she said, and without closing the door, signaled the receptionist to let in Dr. Auerbach.

Dr. Karl Auerbach walked in with the usual attitude of the technical man-a sort of zoo keeper walking into a den of snakes attitude, determined but cautious. I waved him to the crying chair and refrained from reassuring him that it would not clamp down upon him and start measuring his reflexes.

He was tall, thin, probably not past forty, a little gray at the temples, professionally handsome enough to mislead a television audience into thinking he was a medical doctor on a patent nostrum commercial. In his chemically stained fingers he held a plastic cylinder, oh maybe four inches long by two in diameter. He carried it with both care and nonchalance, as if it were nitroglycerine he just happened to have with him.

"I understand a personnel director handles employee problems of vocational adjustment,” he stated carefully after he had seated himself.

I gave him a grave nod to indicate the correctness of his assumption.

"I assume it is handled on an ethically confidential basis,” he pursued his pattern faithfully.

Again I nodded, and this time slowly closed my eyes to indicate assent.

"I am unacquainted with how much an employee tells you may remain off the record, and how much your position as company representative requires you place on the record.” He was scouting the essential area to determine precisely where he stood.

"The company is liberal,” I stated in the hesitant, pedantic tones so approved by technical men. “Everything is off the record until we have the problem with its ramifications. Then ... ah ... by mutual agreement, we determine what must be placed on the record."

Apparently it won his confidence. Well, there was no difference between the learned and the unlearned. Each approaches an unknown with extreme caution. Each takes about the same length of time under skilled handling to get to the point. Each throws up a lot of false dummies and loses confidence if you concern yourself with them. Learned or illiterate, anger is anger, frustration is frustration. A problem is a problem, with the complexity of it purely a relative thing. To each is given problems slightly beyond his capacity to handle them adequately.

"I find myself frustrated,” he stated flatly.

I still had a long way to go, for that's nothing new. Who isn't?

Slowly and carefully, disposing of each point as it arose, we threaded our way into the snakepit. The essential facts were that he had been employed as a research chemist, placed under Dr. Boulton, head of the experimental department. This, I knew. Instead of being permitted to do the research chemistry for which he had been employed, he had been kept on routine problems which any high school boy could do.

This I doubted, but recognized it as the stock complaint of every experimental research man in industry.

Dr. Boulton was approaching the cybernetics problem on a purely mechanical basis which was all wrong. I began to get interested. Dr. Auerbach had discussed with Dr. Boulton the advisability of a chemical approach to cybernetics. I began to get excited. Dr. Boulton had refused to consider it. Apparently he had not been excited.

I knew Dr. Boulton pretty well. As heads of our respective departments we sat in on the same management conferences. We were not particularly friendly. He regarded psychology and all applications of it with more than a little distrust. But more important, I had for a long time sensed a peculiar tension in him-that he was determined to keep human thought processes mysterious, determined not to see more than a narrow band of correlation between the human mind and a cybernetic machine.

I had already determined that Dr. Boulton would outlive his usefulness to us.

"And how would you approach the problem chemically?” I asked Dr. Auerbach.

We had more discussion in which I proved to him that I was top security cleared, that my chemistry was sadly lacking and he would have to speak as though to a layman, that indeed he was not going over his superior's head in discussing it with me, that there was a possibility I might assist if I became convinced enough to convince general management a separate department should be set up. And finally he began to answer my question.

"Let us take linseed oil as a crude example,” he said, and waved my offer of a cigarette aside. “Linseed oil, crudely, displays much of the same phenomena as the human mind. It learns, it remembers, it forgets, it relearns, it becomes inhibited, it becomes stimulated."

I don't usually sit with my mouth hanging open, and became conscious of it when I tried to draw on my cigarette without closing my lips.

"Place an open vessel of linseed oil in the light,” he instructed, and touched the tips of his two index fingers together, “and in about twenty-four hours it will begin to oxidize. It continues oxidization to a given point at an accelerated rate thereafter, as though finally having learned how, it can carry on the process more easily."

I nodded, with reservations on how much of this could fairly be termed “mental,” and how much was a purely chemical process. Then, in fairness, I reversed the coin and made the same reservations as to how much of brain activity could be called a chemical response to stimuli, and how much must be classed as pure thought over and beyond a specialized chemistry. I gave up.

"Put it in the dark,” he continued, “and it slows and ceases to oxidize. Bring it back into the light, within a short time, and it immediately begins to oxidize again, as if it had remembered how to do it.” He moved to his middle finger. “We have there, then, quite faithful replicas of learning and remembering."

I nodded again to show my willingness to speculate, at least, even if I didn't agree.

"But leave it in the dark for twenty-four hours,” he moved to his third finger, “then bring it back into the light and it takes it another twenty-four hours to begin oxidizing again. Now we have an equally faithful replica of forgetting and relearning.” He tapped each of his four fingers lightly for emphasis.

"The inhibitions and stimulations?” I prompted.

"Well, perhaps we go a little farther afield for that,” he said honestly, “in that we introduce foreign substances. We add other chemicals to it to slow down its oxidization rate-or stop it entirely-inhibitions. We add other substances to speed up the rate, as quick driers in paints. Perhaps it's a little far-fetched, but not essentially different from adrenalin being pumped into the bloodstream to make the brain act at a faster rate. The body has quite a few of these glandular secretions which it uses to change the so-called normal mental processes."

"Where do we go from there?” I asked, without committing myself. But he was not through with his instruction.

"I fail to see any essential difference,” he looked me squarely in the eyes, “between a stored impulse in a brain cell, a stored impulse in a mercury tube, a stored impulse in an electronic relay, or for that matter a hole punched in an old-fashioned tabulator card."

I pursed my lips and indicated I could go along with his analogy. He was beginning to talk my language now. Working with its results constantly, I, too, was not one to be impressed with how unusually marvelous was the brain. But I murmured something about relative complexity. It was not entirely simple either.

"Sure, complexity,” he agreed. He was becoming much more human now. “But we approach any complexity by breaking it down into its basic parts, and each part taken alone is not complex. Complexity is no more than arrangement, not the basic building blocks themselves."

That was how I approached human problems and told him so. We were getting to be two buddies now in a hot thinking session.

"Just so we don't grow too mechanistic about it,” I demurred.

"Let's don't get mystical about it, either,” he snapped back at me. “Let's get mechanistic about it. What's so wrong with that? Isn't adding two and two in a machine getting pretty mechanistic? Are we so frightened at that performance we will refuse to make one which will multiply three and three?"

"I guess I'm not that frightened,” I agreed with a smile. “We're in the computer business."

"We're supposed to be,” he amended.

"So you want time and money to work on a chemical which will store impulses,” I said with what I thought was my usual brilliant incisiveness. I began to remember that Sara probably had little Jennie Malasek outside by now, and that was an unfinished problem I had to handle tonight.

"No, no,” he said impatiently and rocked me back into my chair, “I've already got that. I wouldn't have come in here with nothing more than just an idea. I've been some years analyzing quantitatively and qualitatively the various chemicals of brain cells. I've made some crude syntheses."

He placed the cylinder on the desk. I looked at the long dark object; I looked particularly at the oily shimmering liquid inside the unbreakable plastic case. It caught the light from my window and seemed to look back at me.

"I want,” he continued, “to test this synthesis by hooking it up to a cybernetic machine, shooting controlled impulses through it, seeing what it will store on one impulse and give up on another. I simply want to test the results of my work."

"It will take a little doing,” I stuck my neck out and prepared to go to bat for him. “The human mind is not as logical or as accurate as a machine. There are certain previous arrangements of impulses stored in certain brains which will cause the mouth to say ‘No!’ I'll have to do some rearranging of such basic blocks first."

I was grinning broadly now, and he was grinning back at me.

He got up out of his chair and walked toward my door. “I'll leave the cylinder with you,” he said. “I read in a salesmanship course that a prospect will buy much easier if you place the article in his hands."

"What were you doing, studying salesmanship?” I asked, still grinning.

"Apparently it was justified,” he said cryptically, and walked out the door.

Sara came to the door and looked in. “You took long enough on that one,” she accused.

"It takes a little longer,” I said with pedantic gravity, “to lead a scientist to the essential point. He's a little more resourceful in figuring out hazards to keep himself from getting where he wants to go.

But I remembered Auerbach's remarks about salesmanship. “However, in this instance,” I mused honestly, “I'm not just sure as to who was leading whom."

"You wanted little Jennie Malasek,” Sara said. “You may have her."

I wasn't reassured by the phrasing, the emphasis, or the look on her face.

The time I had lost on the last two interviews, I made up on this one. Children are realists and only poorly skilled in hypocrisy. They will go along with the gag if an adult insists on being whimsical, conciliatory or fantastic, but only because adults are that way and there's nothing they can do about it.

Sara brought Jennie in, gave me a cryptic look, and closed the door behind her as she left.

Jennie stood at the door, a dark little thing, showing some evidence that the nursery teachers had made an attempt to clean her up before sending her over. They hadn't quite succeeded. There was no chocolate around her pinched little mouth, so Sara hadn't succeeded in capturing her either. I wondered why they hadn't combed her black hair, and then realized Jennie might have pulled it down in front of her face for something to hide behind. Her black eyes gleamed as she peered at me through the oily strands.

"Sit in this chair, Jennie,” I said casually, and went on being busy with things on the top of my desk. My request wasn't quite a command, but took obedience entirely for granted. It didn't work with Jennie.

She still stood at the door, the toe of one slippered foot on the arch of the other, her thin little legs twisted at an odd angle. Her look was neither defiant nor bashful. Nor was it courage covering fear. I was the nearest source of immediate danger. I should be watched. It was simply that, no more.

I felt I should pity her, that I should warm to her desperate isolation. I was willing to feel sympathy because she did not ask for it. Because ordinarily I admired and liked people who did not accentuate their pathos with calculated fraud.

I found, to my surprise, that I did not like her. Oddly, I felt she knew it. And even worse, I felt that, knowing it, she was not hurt. But at least she did call for respect. Whatever she was, she was sincerely-whatever she was. I would not be a fraud either. I went to the point.

"They tell me, Jennie,” I said as matter-of-factly as I could, and I'm experienced at it, “that you throw things and set things on fire."