What Thin Partitions (14 page)

"I mean is something really going on, Ralph?” he insisted.

"I don't know,” I said, and shrugged. Underneath my disgust I was just as worried as he. “I'll look up these guys he named. He was overconfident that he had barreled us over, that we couldn't refuse him, so he did us that much of a favor, anyway. I'll let you know if there is anything to it."

"I made a list of the names for you, Mr. Kennedy,” the secretary said, and tore a sheet out of her book. Her quizzical, but approving look made me wonder if she might be one of the secretaries I'd referred to. I wanted to tell her that it was none of my business, or anybody else's, so long as she did her work. I couldn't, of course. She might not be one of those secretaries, she might only wish she were.

I gave her a quick wink that would cover either situation. She gave me a blush that would also fit either case.

On the way back to my office I stopped off at the department of the complaining supervisor and told him never mind reporting to the works manager that stock got to his department ahead of work orders; that this was a part of a larger picture I was investigating, and just to sit tight. He grinned, and shrugged, and implied that he just worked there anyhow. If that's the way we wanted to run a company, he guessed he could put up with it. Only would I please keep that two-bit Napoleon, meaning Colonel Backhead, out of his hair. I suggested patience and fortitude.

In my own department I picked up the five dossiers from the files and started for my own office.

"Trouble again?” Sara asked, as I walked past her desk.

"Nothing unusual,” I said. “Just another investigation by the big brass from Pentagon."

"Oh that,” she shrugged. “You haven't been fooling around with more poltergeists, have you?"

"Why does everyone assume it is my fault when something goes haywire over in the factory?” I asked plaintively. I went on into my office and spread the dossiers out on my desk.

There was a connection between them. They all lived at the same address. They'd all been hired on the same day. They'd all graduated from Stanford the same year. Obviously, if they were speaking to each other, they could communicate about their work. And they wouldn't have to wait until they got home. We have telephones, and intercoms. So a mechanical engineer picks up a phone and says “Hey Bob, here's an advance flash on some stuff we're going to need that might be hard to get. Why not order it now instead of waiting for the specs?"

Would that be anything to excite the cloak-and-dagger boys"

Yes, each file had a form showing that the employee had been cleared for secret work. So they could talk to each other without overloading Russia's spy ring.

I pulled their progress records. Each of them had climbed remarkably fast. In one year, each of them had made lead man, or group leader, in his department. Not particularly remarkable in engineering, where there's always too few with know-how, and plenty of opportunity for kids with know-what. A little tougher in purchasing and production control, but not if you really grasped how everything tied together.

I flipped back to their original applications. Personnel uses various codes to grade applications and give the interviewer a memory clue so he can call up a mental picture of the individual. But each of these applications had a code word in the top left hand corner I didn't understand.

In quotes, “George!!"

So the interviewer had thought these lads were real George. He'd been right. Their progress records confirmed his opinion that they were good material. But I'd have to caution him against introducing slang codes of his own. A code is worthless unless it communicates the same thing to each of us.

And then it hit me.

I burst out laughing. So George hadn't waited for me to find something for him to do! But while I was still chuckling, I felt the hair on my nape begin to prickle. Maybe the mechanical engineer hadn't needed to use a telephone to tell purchasing about the hard-to-buy item! Maybe they hadn't needed to send a memo for the expediter to have his stock chasers start delivering materiel to the production machines.

No wonder we'd got contracts out on time. Paperwork is the biggest bottleneck in any large company. It passes from hand to hand, and lays on each desk for hours or days before it is processed and sent along. Weeks can pass between the sender and final receiver. Change orders-and when the military is mixed up in the deal there's a million-sluggishly flow along behind the original. The started work is scrapped and begun again, and again, and again. The orders saying “Do it” are cancelled out by other orders saying “Don't do it."

George had by-passed the red tape. Each of these guys, now in a minor key spot, had flashed all information on to the others, and the busy little pseudopods had just gone ahead and done things, or made the necessary changes days or weeks before the paperwork could catch up.

I knew how auditors worked, and that's what the Pentagon would send-procedure auditors looking for information leaks, finding them by comparing dates and times and work flow, things that showed prior knowledge to the arrival of the authority to know and do. I knew, right then, that the auditors would find dozens, hundreds of discrepancies.

I was tempted, I was sorely tempted, to sit back and do nothing. Let them spend days, weeks, months-or if they'd been civil service trained, years-to find out what I already knew.

And then come face to face with the inexplicable.

I think I would have kept my hands off except for those kids. They were just naive enough to think that getting the job done was more important than the paperwork, which showed their service hadn't taught them very much about the Military. I didn't want their F.B.I. files to carry the information that these were dangerous characters to be barred from any sensitive job for the rest of their lives just because they'd tried, in their fashion, to push the job along to get finished by contract deadline date.

Another thought nagged at me. How had they managed to by-pass red tape without fouling everything up for all those people who didn't have a share in George? With all its faults, red tape is a necessity; it is communication telling everybody what has happened or should happen. It can bottleneck, but without it the whole organization falls to pieces.

And ours hadn't!

I supposed they'd kept prior knowledge in their own hands until the rush paperwork had followed through. I dismissed it with that, I shouldn't have. If I'd pursued my thought a little farther, I'd have realized it couldn't have been done that way.

I picked up the phone and put a call through to Old Stone Face. “I know the answer to that little problem, Henry,” I said. There was a full fifteen seconds of silence.

"So it was something you'd been up to, after all,” he answered.

"In a way, I guess it was,” I admitted. “I hired the guys. In that sense it was my fault. In that sense, anything that anybody does is my fault."

He wasn't buying any sophistry today.

"So now I'll ask my first question all over again, Ralph! What have you been up to?"

"I'd better come up and talk to you,” I said. “But while I'm on my way you can be thinking of the little poltergeist girl, the Swami, and frameworks."

"Oh no!” he said, heavily. “Not another one of those."

"Yes, sir,” I affirmed.

Our first act was to send a telegram to General Sandfordwaithe at the Pentagon, the general in charge of Materiel and Supply, and our most frequent Pentagon contact. My first brush with him had been over little Jennie Malasek and the antigrav units. He was a stuffed shirt of the stiffest kind, and it had delighted me to trap him into a promise to furnish us with some poltergeists-male type. But when he found out what they were, instead of exploding, the guy had actually followed through and tried to produce. I suspected that back of the deep encrusted years of military formality there was a human being. The following series of telegrams bore me out.

Our first one said,

CALL OFF YOUR DOGS. WE KNOW WHY CONTRACTS FINISHED ON TIME. IT IS OKAY.

HENRY GRENOBLE,

GENERAL MANAGER

CORPORATION

In two hours we got his ubiquitous answer.

YOUR REASSURANCE INSUFFICIENT. COLONEL BACKHEAD REPORTS YOUR COMPANY RIDDLED WITH SECRET AGENTS LEAVING TRACKS OF NEFARIOUS WORK EVERYWHERE AND MANY EMPLOYEES MORALLY UNSUITABLE FOR WORK ON GOVERNMENT CONTRACTS. URGENT WE COME AT ONCE SINCE YOU WILL NOT COOPERATE IN UNMASKING SAME. SUSPECTS KENNEDY IS A LIBERAL.

SANDFORDWAITHE

With Henry's permission, I replied to that dastardly charge personally.

SUGGEST YOU GIVE BACKHEAD DOUBLE BILLED CAP AND MAGNIFYING GLASS AND SEND HIM TO ANTARCTICA. UNDERSTAND SECRET AGENTS DISGUISED AS PENGUINS TRYING TO SABOTAGE ANNEXATION ATTEMPT DISGUISED AS GEOPHYSICAL SURVEY. WE ARE TOO BUSY GETTING WORK DONE TO BOTHER WITH BACKHEAD'S FANCIES AND ALSO HAVEN'T TIME TO BE COURT-MARTIALED AGAIN.

RALPH KENNEDY,

DIRECTOR OF INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS, CRC.

His reply came within an hour.

IF YOU, KENNEDY, REPEAT YOU IN ITALICS, ARE DIRECTLY INVOLVED I HAD BETTER COME PERSONALLY. WHAT IS THIS NONSENSE ABOUT COURT-MARTIAL? BILL EMPOWERING PENTAGON TO COURT-MARTIAL PRIVATE COMPANIES DEFEATED IN CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE BY MISGUIDED LIBERALS AS YOU SHOULD KNOW. BUT STAFF AND I WOULD BE PLEASED TO HEAR EXPLANATION OF WHY CONTRACTS GET FINISHED ON TIME. HIGHLY DISTURBING ABNORMALCY.

SANFORDWAITHE

I called young Bellows in the mechanical engineering department on the interphone. I chose him solely because he was the first name on my list of five. I sketched in the story and the furor it was causing.

"Now,” I said, “here's the deal. When you boys told me about George I didn't believe you, and I'm a pushover for believing in oddballs. You lads are going to have to appear before some top brass from the Pentagon tomorrow, and if I didn't believe in George, what do you think their reaction will be?"

"We can convince them, sir,” Bellows said instantly, and confidently.

"Not by just saying so,” I cautioned.

"No, sir. George has learned a lot since he has been employed here, and we're very grateful to you for giving him the opportunity."

"I don't know,” I argued dubiously. “I tried for months to dig up something that would prove he existed, something that only he could do."

"Don't worry about it, sir,” Bellows said in a comforting voice.

"Anything you want to tell me in advance of the hearing?” I asked hopefully.

"We'd rather not, sir. You might not give permission, and then we wouldn't be able to prove."

"Now look,” I said warningly. “Oh, never mind. Just don't jeopardize the company if you can help it."

"Oh no, sir,” he said in a shocked voice. “Nothing like that."

"O.K.,” I replied in a tone that said I washed my hands of the whole thing. “It's your necks."

I failed to add it was also my neck if they let me down.

The company grapevine told me when the Pentagon Brass arrived and were ushered directly into the big conference room. Old Stone Face accompanied them. It was his idea that he would first explain George to them, then if they wanted to observe us pariahs from the lower strata, we should be assembled in the anteroom awaiting their summons.

I wasn't sure how adequately Henry could explain George, but I had to agree that since the idea of caste was so firmly imbued in the military mind that generals could speak only to generals, they would consider it lese majesty if anyone lower than a general manager attempted to brief them.

I gave them five minutes to get settled, and then called five supervisors to get the pseudopods of George sent down to the anteroom. That done, I cut through factory building Number Two to sit with the boys and be ready for the inquisition.

On the way I was stopped by the production supervisor who had complained about the foul-ups in scheduling.

"I don't know why I squawked about the raw stock getting here before the work orders, Mr. Kennedy,” he said. “It's all straightened out now."

"Then you got the work orders through?” I asked.

"Naw,” he answered disgustedly. “Didn't need ’em. If I'd just used my head, I'd have known what to do."

I looked over at the storage racks.

"Looks like ordinary bar stock to me,” I said dubiously. “I don't see how you could expect to know what should come out of your turret lathes, milling machines and screw machines. Not without work orders and blueprints."

He gave me that disgusted look a production man always keeps in reserve for a white collar.

"If I'd used my head, I'd have known,” he repeated. “It's working fine now."

I shrugged, grinned, and left him. I supposed the expediter, one of the five lads, had told him, and he was trying to redeem his position by showing off, by saying that a supervisor just knows these things. The alternative, that he might be speaking the literal truth, that nobody had had to tell him, didn't occur to me.

The short talk delayed me, and when I got to the conference anteroom the boys were all sitting in a cluster of chairs in a corner of the room. I hadn't seen them for a year, and I only vaguely remembered their faces. Yet as a composite group, I remembered them very well. Individually they hadn't changed much, yet, as a composite, I got the impression that this was a much more mature and assured group than it had been during my interview with them. For their sakes, and mine, I hoped so.

I greeted them, all of them returned my greeting in unison. I sat down, a little apart from them. I felt there were many things I should say. I didn't want it on their conscience, or mine, that I had briefed them in attitude or cooked up any phony story. Still, on the way up from my office, I'd felt I'd be remiss if I didn't sketch in for them what was likely to happen in the conference room.

But now that I was in the room with them, there seemed nothing to say, nothing at all. They weren't nervous, and, for a wonder, neither was I. At most it seemed like an unnecessary interruption in our day's work.