What Thin Partitions (15 page)

We hadn't long to wait. A major, one of Colonel Backhead's men, and the lowest ranking man in the conference room opened the door and nodded in our general direction. He didn't give us the courtesy of meeting our eyes, but his face was a study in curiosity.

We stood up and filed into the conference room. I brought up the rear. The brass and braid were all grouped around the far end of the huge walnut table. The chairs at this end of it were evidently for us to use. When the maintenance department had set up the room for the meeting, I'd checked it and noted that the chairs were all evenly spaced around the table. But a shift had taken place. The Military had pulled their chairs closer together and left a wide gap between themselves and the chairs to be occupied by civilians. Old Stone Face was sitting at this end of the table, apparently to be associated with the culprits. We culprits sat down, three on one side, three on the other.

There were cool nods from the brass and braid, a frosty smile for me from General Sanfordwaithe on the grounds that we had once met before. He was accompanied by a gorgeous Pentagon colonel. To their right sat an admiral and his man, and an equally gorgeous Navy captain. To the left sat a pair of Air Force brass who had mastered that wonderful technique of appearing informally formal. Down toward the middle of the table, and dangerously close to the civilians sat Colonel Backhead and his major. There was no greeting for us from either of these two.

In fact, Backhead appeared to consider our entrance as a distasteful interruption to what he had been saying.

"The most that can be said of your explanation, Mr. Grenoble,” he continued, and the way he pronounced mister made it an insult, “disregarding its fantastic incredibility for the moment, is that it is naive.” Then in an excess of generosity he excused Old Stone Face. “Of course it wouldn't be expected that an industrialist would be trained in spotting the nefarious and subtle work of master saboteurs. But we are trained. I submit that you may have been taken in by this wildly preposterous explanation, and that from your point of view you have been honest in offering it to us.

"But let me show you how it looks from another point of view."

Beside me, I felt one of the boys stir a little in his chair. I glanced at them sidelong, and saw that flicker of secret delight behind their solemn faces.

"This is how it looks to me,” Colonel Backhead said again for emphasis.

Without a change of accusing expression, he stood up, climbed up on his chair, leaned forward in a crouch, crawled over into the middle of the conference table, put his head down on the table, and bracing himself with his hands, he slowly lifted his posterior and feet into the air, until he was standing on his head.

"It looks all upside down,” he said sternly.

Then he toppled and fell over sideways.

I glanced at Henry and saw that his mouth was hanging open. A glance down the table showed me that General Sanfordwaithe had clamped his grim jaws tightly while he stared with unbelieving eyes. The faces of the rest of the Military showed only pity and contempt. It was the Navy captain who bore out that expression.

"If that's the best headstand you can do,” he said icily, “you're no credit to the services."

He crawled up on the table, and with crisp, sure movements formed a triangle with his head and hands. Then, with fluid precision, he raised his feet, brought his legs together, straightened them out, and pointed his toes ceilingward.

"You have to do this regularly,” he said in a didactic voice. “I do it everytime I want to get a new perspective on things. That is why the Navy is pulling so far ahead of the Army, we practice getting a new point of view."

"The Navy is no better than the Air Force,” the pair of wings shouted in unison. “We're upside down most of the time!” The pair of them climbed up on the table and stood on their heads also.

They seemed to be enjoying themselves hugely. I felt a little sorry for the admiral. He was trying to crawl up on the table, but age was against him. He looked as if, for the first time, he might have to admit he had to face retirement. Couldn't even stand on his head any more!

Old Stone Face had pushed himself back from the table, and his hands were still upraised, as if it were a holdup. I looked down the table at Sanfordwaithe. His eyes met mine, and the horror in them dissolved into laughter. The explanation had occurred to both of us at the same time. He stood up, he roared with laughter, he gasped, he pounded futilely on his chest, trying to get air back into his lungs. Then a new horror spread over his face, a certainty that he would laugh himself to death. Abruptly, he stopped.

"No,” he gasped as soon as he could draw a breath. “Not me, too.” He gasped in another breath, and trusted himself to look at the squirming men in the center of the table. They were shoving, pushing one another like little boys in a rough and tumble game in a schoolyard.

"I can stand on my head longer than you can!"

"Can't either!"

"Can, too!"

"My ships can lick your ol’ airplanes any day!"

"Can't either!"

"Can, too!"

"Ol’ Army's no good for nothin'!” the admiral shouted.

"Yah, yah, yah,” agreed the Air Force.

"Is, too!” Backhead's major shouted. “Good for mopping up.” He crawled down off the table and started running around the conference room. “Where's the mop?” he whined plaintively.

I caught a glimpse of Backhead's face where he still huddled in the middle of the table, down toward our end. He was no longer caught up in the mob psychology. Like Henry, Sanfordwaithe, and myself, he was an observer. His face was sick with despair.

"Call off your dogs, Kennedy,” Sanfordwaithe shouted at me about the tumult. “I'm convinced."

I was, too. George was no longer confined to the five lads, not necessarily so. Now I knew why there had been no disruption of our organization when red tape had been bypassed. George had simply taken over.

And what George could take over, he could also let go.

The majestic military crumbled into a heap in the middle of the table, and began to slide off its edges onto the carpeted floor. Back in their own military mind framework again, they scrambled to their feet and stood at disheveled attention. Their faces were masks of horror, for like the participants in a mob, they remembered everything they had done, but with the guiding entity gone from their minds, they could find no excuse for it.

No one shouted “At Ease!” to them, and slowly they remembered that they were big boys now, far enough along in the Military hierarchy so that someone didn't have to tell them every little move to make. Sheepishly, they relaxed and slid back into their chairs. Furtively, they began to straighten their ties, button their tunics, rearrange their medals, preen themselves, recapture the impregnable Military attitude.

I recalled the caption to a cartoon. A dear little old lady was talking to a marine general. “I can understand why you must toughen them up for battle purposes,” she said. “But when you're through with them, how do you retenderize them so they'll be fit to mingle with human beings?"

Perhaps these men had now been tenderized to the point where they could think rationally. It would seem so.

"Perhaps, Mr. Kennedy,” General Sanfordwaithe said, with a twitch of his lips, “we should run over the explanation of George once more. I think we may have missed some of the fine points."

I turned to the five lads.

"You boys can go on back to your departments now. You won't be needed here any longer."

I looked at General Sanfordwaithe, and his nod of agreement seemed to contain a considerable measure of relief.

"Yes, sir,” one of the boys said. They stood up, not quite with the precision of a drill team, a move that I now knew was calculated disorder. They looked at me, as if wanting to be reassured that they had done well. I smiled, and so did they.

For one incredible instant George took control of me, and I shared the wondrous delight of being, belonging, the ecstasy of being something beyond human. Then he released me as the boys filed out the door, and was left grubby, incomplete, ineffectual, burribling-alone.

I turned around in my chair and faced the brass and braid again. All of them were looking at me, now without accusation, except Backhead and his major. Those two sat slumped in their chairs, with bent heads, staring fixedly at the center of the table.

"It's been coming for a long time,” I began. “The whole civilization has been trending in that direction. It had to come. With billions of human beings now inhabiting the world, there is simply no way that individualism can survive. This is just an advance flash of what may be commonplace before long. It is something new, gentlemen. We don't know how these boys are allied to produce a George. More important, perhaps, we don't know what to do with George.

"And we must think of something, for idle hands, gentlemen, you know-"

"You know anything about hypnotism, Sara?” I asked my secretary when she brought in my share of the morning's memos.

She dropped the papers into my IN box and backed away from the desk as if it were a hot fire.

"Now Mr. Kennedy,” she began warily. “You're not going to start stirring things up again are you?” She looked as if she wanted to run right back to her own office, and maybe right on out of the plant.

"Isn't it about time?” I wondered.

"Why don't you let sleeping dogs lie, Mr. Kennedy?"’ she asked plaintively. “It's been so nice these last few months."

"Can't think of anything more useless than a sleeping dog lying around,” I grumbled. “That's the trouble. Trouble with everybody. Everybody's massively fed, massively diverted, massively tranquilized-"

"Peace, it's wonderful,” she murmured.

"Most dangerous condition this country ever faced,” I said. “Want to know something, Sara? Even the usually discontented intellectuals have gone over to this happy-happy kick where anybody who views-with-alarm is a you-know-what. Scares me, Sara, when all the rest of the world-"

"Every time you get like this things happen around Computer Research,” Sara complained. “Why can't you be just an ordinary Personnel Director? Why can't you be contented just doing an ordinary job like everybody else?"

"What, for instance, am I neglecting in my ordinary job?"

"There's enough in those memos to keep you busy-"

"I'll tell you what's in those memos even before I look at them,” I interrupted. “There'll be one from Safety Engineering complaining that a certain supervisor fishes bits of metal out of the machinery with his hands without shutting down the whole production line first, and that's the way fingers get smashed. There'll be a companion piece from the supervisor asking me to tell Safety Engineering to keep its nose out of his department, and if he wants to smash his fingers they're his fingers. Big challenge to Personnel, Sara."

"You know what accidents do to our insurance rates,” she reminded.

"I know what overprotection does to production,” I reminded back. “Then there'll be a memo,” I went on, “from the Chief of Security Guards complaining that the Maintenance Supervisor refuses to stop for positive identification when he passes through security check points. The companion to that will be from the Maintenance Supervisor complaining that he passes every one of those unprintable security guards twenty times a day and if they don't know who his great grandmother kissed on her first date by now they never will and the whole thing is a bunch of nonsense anyhow-everybody playing Junior G-Man."

"That was yesterday's memos,” Sara said loftily.

"All right,” I answered. “Idea's the same. For instance I haven't had a complaint for quite a while from Office Supply that the design engineers refuse to turn in old pencil stubs when they want new ones-and you can't tell me they're really doing it."

"I'll keep an eye out for it, and rush it right in to you when it comes,” Sara promised, and tossed her long bob of red hair.

"You know what worries me the most of all, Sara?” I asked.

She looked wary again.

"The Pentagon,” I said. “More specifically the Poltergeist Division. I haven't heard from the Poltergeist Division of the Pentagon in over a year."

"Well, you know these government bureaus,” Sara tried to console me. “They start out going to do big things. Everybody in them rushes around designing forms and reports and statistics to impress people. First thing, they get so snowed under with filling out those forms, making those reports, and compiling those statistics there just isn't any time left to do anything. You should try it, Mr. Kennedy. Nothing like big charts and graphs and engineering curves done in colored inks to impress people with how important you are. Cover your desk and your walls with those, and you won't need to do anything at all. Except, maybe, keep them dusted."

I ignored her.

"Even General Sandfordwaithe has stopped hounding me,” I said. “Ever since the George incident, he's left me strictly alone."

"You should be glad."

"It worries me, Sara. It worries me a lot. When our own Pentagon gets so massively ... well massively something that it stops hounding us scientists-"

"You scientists!” she scoffed. Then, lest she had gone too far, “All his hounding didn't help you to produce more antigrav units."

"That's something else,” I said. “That fake Swami sits over there in his plush laboratory, holding hands with the female production line workers, and so far he hasn't learned a thing about how to activate antigrav cylinders on any kind of a dependable schedule."

"So what can you do about it?” she asked, not with curiosity but with a tone telling me I should accept the inevitable, like everybody else.

"Maybe hypnotism...” I began.

"This is where I came in,” she answered. And went out.

I got up and followed her to the connecting door between our offices. She had already sat down back of her own desk, and now couldn't very well escape without making a point of it. I leaned against the doorjamb.