What Thin Partitions (21 page)

Authors: Mark Clifton

At any rate the multiple wedding finally did come off. Somehow the responsibility for that, too, got around to my office. But as usual., Sara was more capable of handling it than I would have been. I had only to officiate at the reception afterwards. The boys’ parents were all there, the first time I'd met them; but somehow even they managed to pass the buck, and it was as if all these were my children.

After the reception, I had hardly enough energy left in me to stagger into my apartment. I was utterly exhausted and in a slight fever.

"Did anybody think to make arrangements for their honeymoons"” I heard myself mumbling as I lay down across the bed to gather enough energy to get up and undress.

I fell asleep patiently telling myself that Sara would take care of it.

I was awakened by the telephone on the stand beside my bed, and with that dim realization that it had been ringing for a long time. Through grainy eyelids I could see outside my window that it was a bleak gray dawn. I hadn't bothered to snap off my light, pull down my shade, and I was still dressed.

"Aw for ... Why don't you look up the right number?” I grumbled into the phone when I finally managed to reach out and claw it off its stand.

"Ralph! Ralph! Don't hang up. This is Henry!"

Old Stone Face's granite voice blasted me a little more awake.

"Yes, Henry,” I groaned without that brisk, glad alertness righthand men are expected to feel on any occasion.

"The ship's gone,” he said. “Just got a call from Plant Security. Meet you there."

There was a crash in my ear as he slammed down the phone. Well, at least I didn't have to dress. A slept-in tuxedo was just fine for going out to hunt a misplaced spaceship.

* * * *

Henry and I pulled into the executives’ parking section at the same time, and both of us spilled out of our cars and started running toward the spaceship hangar. A little knot of watchmen, security police, maintenance men had gathered at the doorway. They stepped back as we puffed our way up to the door and came to a halt. Yes, the spaceship was gone. The ceiling of the hangar was neatly folded back, as planned, to let the pink clouds and blue sky show through.

"Some honeymoon,” I said to Henry.

"You think they'd have taken their wives?” he asked me.

"You think they'd have chosen this particular morning for a routine test run?” I asked him.

"You think they'd have risked their wives before they tested it?” he asked.

"You think they weren't absolutely sure of what they were doing all along?” I asked.

We weren't bothering to answer each other.

"We'd better check the laboratory. Logart's been sleeping there lately,” Henry said. “Those kids could have taken it up as a lark, you know.” He shook his head angrily. “This younger generation!” he grumbled.

The little knot of employees, who had been crowding the doorway behind us, stepped back again and let us get out. They looked at us curiously, to see what we would do now. Executives were supposed to be able to handle anything, even spaceships that disappear.

We walked over toward the laboratory building that never had been straightened on its foundations. Neither of us seemed to be in a great hurry now. We went up on the porch and knocked politely at the door. We waited. No one answered our knock. There was no sound of movement inside. I tried the latch, and the door swung open without any trouble.

We peered into the hallway, and the house looked just as I remembered it when we bought it from its previous residents. As we stepped inside, I saw an envelope on the hall table. I looked at the front and saw it was addressed to me. I picked it up and carried it with me as we searched the house. There were no occupants, of course.

As we went from room to room a most peculiar realization came to me. In spite of my weariness, my lethargy was gone. I no longer felt numbly swept along in currents I could not understand or control. I was back to a state of mind I remembered, a state of being awake, and already the events of the last few months had the haze of a remembered dream.

"You feel unusually sharp this morning, Henry?” I asked as we left the service porch area. He looked at me quickly.

"First I thought I was losing my grip because I got so I didn't care what was happening in building the spaceship,” he said. “Then I got so I didn't care that I didn't care."

"Me too,” I said. “Now I feel awake again."

"Me too,” he said. Then added cryptically, “That Logart!"

We came into the living room. The chairs and divan were as neatly placed as in any home-Annie's work, no doubt. I hadn't been admitted to the house, but Annie had!

"This envelope is addressed to me,” I said.

"Well, open it,” Henry said.

We sat down in chairs, and I slipped a page out of the unsealed envelope. It was all neatly typed out. I had expected it to start with some such cliche as “When you read this, we will be gone,” but Logart, whose signature was at the bottom, hadn't wasted words on the trivially obvious. I started reading aloud for Henry's benefit.

* * * *

"A man can grow only so tall,” Logart began. “After that, he can merely grow fat. As with a man, so with a culture of man. When a culture has more to lose than to gain in trying to realize a dream, it is the dream that dies. When a culture starts walking backward into the future, with its eyes fixed on the past, the culture dies.

"A youth must leave his home and the parents who bore and cherished him or suffer the consequences of being never more than were his parents. History is full of the migrations of such youth groups. Youth groups with a dream that can only be realized where there is room for a dream to grow.

"Sorry you couldn't go with its, Kennedy. You tried. We tried. But what would life be like for you in a framework you could never share, where all your dependable patterns are no longer true, where till your wisdom of coping with people avails you nothing? For all your sympathy, you never quite believed that psi is an entirely different framework. You were always trying to make it conform to your already fixed notions of what truth must be.

"All of us will remember you with deep gratitude, for you brought together a critical psi mass. It needed only me to arrange the parts into its dynamic potential. Jennie, Swami and George were, in a sense, your psi children. Be glad you gave them a good start.

"Somewhere, out among the stars, where there is room to grow, we will form a colony, and then a culture based in psi. Give its your blessing, and wish its luck.

"Logart."

* * * *

I looked up at Old Stone Face. He looked back at me.

"Too bad, Ralph,” he said. He had helped, too. It was a disappointment that Logart had not given him credit. That Logart! “Well,” he said finally, as if squaring his shoulders. “First thing is to get some breakfast. Next thing is to get that sluggish Public Relations Department waked up and working on some handouts for the Press, who, I guess, will sort of wake up now, too. Next thing is to try to explain all this to the Pentagon, and how come we didn't stop them from taking the spaceship. Then there's Congress to explain to, why we used all that money they urged us to take. After all that's boiled down, and reflected itself in the voting machines, we still got computers to make."

"Why?” I asked.

"Now you took here, Ralphie, my boy,” he said and shook his finger at me. It shocked me into an upright position. He didn't seem to notice, because his eyes were veiled as if he were looking into a far distance. “That Logart didn't have a corner on new frameworks. Maybe he's right about the old folks having grown too set in their ways to change, but there'll be other wild and independent children who want something different. You'll see.

"But first things first. Let's go get some breakfast."

We walked over to the plant cafeteria which does a brisk breakfast business in men whose wives are too lazy to get up and see them off to work properly. There was a hush over the room, so still that the inadvertent clink of a spoon against a coffeecup sounded like a gong. The story had spread.

The sight of Henry and me, at one end of a long and otherwise empty table, calmly eating our stacks of hotcakes seemed to restore some confidence. If we could eat, then things might not be so bad. Henry had calculated the effect; and I should have, because that's my job. The cafeteria noise picked up until it reached normal, and provided a mask for the sound of our voices.

"Look here,” Henry pointed a spoon at me. “Don't you give up. You were on the right track. It still takes unusual people to do unusual things. Don't sit around and sulk just because your unusual people did something unusual. You better get used to that. Remember that."

I stared down into the remaining syrup in the bottom of my plate.

Yes, I would remember. There might be other unusual people sometime in the future, but I could never forget Jennie, Swami, George. Logart was right. Now in remembrance and reflection, they were like children of mine. Children who, in the perfectly normal course of growing up, had been attracted to a fascinating stranger for Logart would always remain a stranger in my inability to comprehend him-to go out into the world, the universe, to make their own way apart from my protection, to build a new kind of life which I could never share.

But they had not taken everything. They'd left me something precious-remembrance, and reflection.

THE END
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