PART ONE
WHAT THIN PARTITIONS
(with Alex Apostolides)
Even after four years, the changing of the shifts at Computer Research, Inc., fascinated me. Perhaps it was because the plant had grown so fast, fed by the steadily increasing government orders. Perhaps it was seeing the long line of windowless buildings across the grassy square suddenly boil at their base as two thousand employees surged in and out at the sound of the shift bell.
Could be, as personnel director, I liked to speculate on which of those intent or laughing faces would suddenly cease to be an abstract problem and become a real one. Or the other way around; could be I liked to get away from the pile of reports on my desk, and just remind myself by looking at all these people that there could be even more problems than there were.
There could be problems I had never faced before. Could be there were things behind those faces streaming past my window of which I'd never dreamed. I found myself staring even more intently at the faces, trying to catch a glimpse of such possibilities. But, then, how could we recognize something of which we've never even dreamed?
"Is your intercom signal out of order, Mr. Kennedy?" my secretary's voice broke in on my reflections. I turned from the window and looked at her with a start. She was standing in the doorway with that half accusing and half understanding look on her face, so characteristic of her.
"I suppose I just didn't hear it, Sara," I answered. "Or didn't want to hear it," I amended, being honest with her. "What is it this time?"
"A termination," she answered. "P-1, Assembler. Annie Malasek." I sighed and walked over to my desk. I wasn't in much of a mood to go into my act; it was late in the afternoon and I felt I'd done my day's work already. But it was my job to keep any employee who rated P-1, Production Very Top Class, from leaving us if it were possible. There weren't many who ever got that good, and the few who did were too valuable to entrust to the assistants, interviewers and counselors, in the outer Offices.
"O.K., Sara," I agreed. "Send her in."
Sara turned away from my door, and I picked up some papers from my desk and began looking at them. I was above making employees stand and wait while I pretended to be busy; that was a little man's trick. But I wasn't above pretending I was glad to interrupt important work just for them. It was a part of my act which worked-sometimes.
It didn't seem to have much effect on Annie, however. She just stood there in my doorway looking hostile.
"All I want is my check," she said with emphasis.
I smiled a little more and indicated the crying chair with my eyes. She didn't obey my unspoken request. So I spoke it. She still hesitated in the doorway, her training to obedience battling with her independence. Independence won, temporarily.
"All I want is my check," she repeated, and then made the expected mistake. "I ain't here to make trouble for nobody."
"Is that the reputation I've got over in the plant, Mrs. Malasek?" I asked softly, putting the right amount of ruefulness in my voice, shrugging my shoulders a little bitterly. "That nobody wants to talk to me because I'll make trouble?"
It caught her off base, of course, as I'd intended. "No sir," she said hastily, "I didn't mean that."
"Then suppose you sit down," I said firmly, "and tell me what the trouble is." This time obedience won, naturally. She sat down on the edge of the chair and leaned forward. She wasn't committing herself completely, not until she'd got her anger off her chest. They never do. They steam themselves up for days or weeks, and you've got to turn the right pet cocks and let the steam escape gradually, or else they'll blow their top.
She started in with a lot of trivialities and I let her run on for a while. They seldom tell you what's really bothering them?it's too close to them, they're afraid you'll think it is silly. That's where most counselors fall down. They take these surface complaints as being the real issues, and waste all their effort striking at shadows.
"What's really bothering you, Annie?" I asked after a time. I gave her that look which says, "These things you've been talking about are all right to tell other people, but you and I, we know?"
It caught her off base again. As usual, she hadn't intended to tell me the real trouble. And now she had to. She sat back a little into the crying chair, an unconscious admission that I'd won. Two large crystal tears began forming to her black eyes and began to run down her leathery cheeks.
Without making a production out of it, I opened my top drawer and took a clean handkerchief from the stack. I shoved it across the desk at her, without appearing to notice what I was doing. Without appearing to notice what she was doing, she picked it up and dabbed at her cheeks.
"It's about Jennie," she said after a moment's hesitation. She wasn't sobbing. It was just that the tears kept welling up and starting to run down her cheeks before she remembered to wipe them away.
"Jennie?" I prompted.
"My kid," she answered. "She don't get along with the other kids in your nursery."
I winced inwardly as she identified the plant nursey as my personal project. It was. And it was a sore spot, maybe a mistake. I hadn't thought it out very far. It seemed like such a good idea to make provision for care of the small children right there at the plant. But it's one thing to handle employees. It's something else entirely to start handling their children?and do it successfully.
"The teachers neither," she said, and this time her hostility flared up, hotter than ever. Unreason took over again. "I want my check, and then I'm going to march straight down to the Industrial Welfare Commission. They'd be very interested in certain things about cer?"
"What did the teachers do?" I interrupted in a casual tone, just as if her threat to call in the IWC weren't a real one. Once those lovely theorists who learned sociology from a book written by a sociologist who learned things from a book written by?"
"They lie about my little Jennie," Annie answered hotly. But her eyes showed she wasn't too sure they were lying. Too plainly they showed dread, uncertainty, guilt, fear.
I picked up my pencil and began twirling it in my fingers. I wasn't ready for her to realize I had looked into her eyes. She had to go through her defensive pattern first, get it out of her system. I kept my eyes on the pencil.
"What kind of lies?" I asked.
"They say I got to take Jennie outta the nursery," she said, her eyes glaring anger. "They say my Jennie ain't good enough to be with other kids."
I knew the teachers in the nursery well. I'd picked them. Considering the jobs they had, they were pretty nice gals. Reasonably practical, too, considering they had degrees in education that were exceptional.
"What do they really say, Annie?" I asked quietly.
"They say they can't manage Jennie," she answered truculently. "They say she throws things." We were getting down to bedrock now. A fond mother defending a spoiled brat, a little monster sweet only to mother's eyes.
"And does she?" I asked, and was so far off the beam I wasn't even braced for the answer.
"She can't help it if things just fly through the air when she gets mad," Annie said defensively. "They always gripe over there because fires start around her. I just get burned up, Mr. Kennedy, when I think about it. She can't help it if she starts fires. Anyway, they're only little ones that really don't hurt anyone."
I kept quiet.
"She don't start the fires because she don't have no matches," Annie said with determined logic. "How could she start fires without no matches?"
"Did it ever happen at home?" I asked.
Annie dropped her eyes and began to twist her fingers around one another in her lap.
"Lately," she said almost soundlessly. "That's why I brought her down to the nursery here. She was all alone in the room we rent. I got nobody but her, nobody to look out for her. I got to work hard all the time."
I had a sudden vision of the stark barrenness of this woman's life. Husband gone, or maybe never had one. Neighbors with their nasty little suspicions kept in a roiling turmoil these days by world conditions, delighting in relieving the monotony of their lives by dark looks, remarks they'd know she'd overhear. A small child, locked in a bare room all day, not playing with the other children, a mother coming home at night too tired to more than feed her.
The picture was all too clear, and nagging somewhere at the back of my mind was a series of case histories of children with similar environments.
"Annie," I said suddenly, "let me took into it. Let me talk to the teachers, get their side of the story. And I'd like to talk to Jennie too, if you don't mind."
The tears welled up faster now, flowed in a steady stream. She dabbed at her eyes and blew her nose with a loud honk. A part of my mind registered that Sara would hear the honk and interpret it as the signal to get the next interview ready. This one was over. The problem had been transferred from the employee to me, as usual. Only this time I wasn't sure yet what the problem was, or whether I could handle it.
"Now suppose you go on over to work, Annie," I said, "and forget about this quitting business. There'll be time to do that later, if I can't help you."
She stood up now and walked toward the door, "I'll get a demerit for being absent from my bench too long," she said, as she put her hand on the door. "I've got a P-1 rating. I don't want no demerits." There didn't seem to be much distinction in her mind between her big problems and her little ones.
"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."
If I expected either a burst of tears or defiance, I was mistaken. I didn't have time to observe reactions at all.
It was as if a sudden hurricane and earthquake had hit the room at the same time. A desk tray full of papers whizzed by my head?my pen stand crashed through the window back of me, I got a shower of paper clips in the chest, my intercom described an arc and crashed broken into a corner. By the time I had wiped the ashes and tobacco from my ashtray out of my eyes and got them to stay open again, Jennie was gone. Sara was standing in the doorway with a look of consternation on her face.
I was on my way home before I remembered that when Sara and I had cleaned up the mess, I had not remembered picking up Auerbach's little cylinder, his chemical impulse storer. I last saw it laying on the corner of my desk where Auerbach had left it.
Probably Sara had picked it up and put it away. Anyway, the office was within security boundaries. The cylinder would be safe there.
I put it out of my mind, and wondered if the library had a card index classification under the heading of "Poltergeist."
)
