What Thin Partitions

by Mark Clifton

  He looked at me as if I'd insulted him, and I could anticipate some reply to the effect that he was not applying for domestic service. But the humble supplicant rather than the proud and fierce hill man won. He started to pick up the ash tray from Sara's desk.

  "No, no!” I exclaimed. “I didn't ask you to hand it to me. I want you to TK it over to me. What's the matter? Can't you even TK a simple ash tray?"

  The lieutenant's eyes were getting bigger and bigger.

  "Didn't your Poltergeist Section test this guy's aptitudes for telekinesis before you brought him from Washington all the way out here to Los Angeles?” I snapped at him.

  The lieutenant's lips thinned to a bloodless line.

  "I am certain he must have qualified adequately,” he said stiffly, and this time left off the “sir."

  "Well, I don't know,” I answered doubtfully. “If he hasn't even enough telekinetic ability to float me an ash tray across the room-"

  The Swami recovered himself first. He put the tips of his long fingers together in the shape of a swaybacked steeple, and rolled his eyes upward.

  "I am an instrument of infinite wisdom,” he intoned. “Not a parlor magician."

  "You mean that with all your infinite wisdom you can't do it,” I accused flatly.

  "The vibrations are not favorable—” he rolled the words sonorously.

  "All right,” I agreed. “We'll go somewhere else, where they're better!"

  "The vibrations throughout all this crass, materialistic Western world—” he intoned.

  "All right,” I interrupted, “we'll go to India, then. Sara, call up and book tickets to Calcutta on the first possible plane!” Sara's mouth had been gradually closing, but it unhinged again.

  "Perhaps not even India,” the Swami murmured, hastily. “Perhaps Tibet."

  "Now you know we can't get admission into Tibet while the Communists control it,” I argued seriously. “But how about Nepal? That's a fair compromise. The Maharajadhiraja's friendly now. I'll settle for Nepal."

  The Swami couldn't keep the triumphant glitter out of his eyes. He had me.

  "I'm afraid it would have to be Tibet,” he said positively. “Nowhere else in all this troubled world are the vibrations-"

  "Oh go on back to Flatbush!” I interrupted disgustedly. “You know as well as I that you've never been outside New York before in your life. Your accent's as phony as the pear-shaped tones of a Midwestern garden club president. Can't even TK a simple ash tray!"

  I turned to the amazed lieutenant.

  "Will you come into my office?” I asked him.

  He looked over at the Swami, in doubt.

  "He can wait out here,” I said. “He won't run away. There isn't any subway, and he wouldn't know what to do. Anyway, if he did get lost, your Army Intelligence could find him. Give G-2 something to work on. Right through this door, lieutenant."

  "Yes, sir,” he said meekly, and preceded me into my office.

  I closed the door behind us and waved him over to the crying chair. He folded at the knees and hips only, as if there were no hinges at all in the ramrod of his back. He sat up straight, on the edge of his chair, ready to spring into instant charge of battle. I went around back to my desk and sat down.

  "Now lieutenant,” I said soothingly, “tell me all about it."

  I could have sworn his square chin quivered at the note of sympathy in my voice. I wondered, irrelevantly, if the lads at West Point all slept with their faces confined in wooden frames to get that characteristically rectangular look.

  "You knew I was from West Point,” he said, and his voice held a note of awe. “And you knew, right away, that Swami was a phony from Flatbush."

  "Come now,” I said with a shrug. “Nothing to get mystical about. Patterns. Just patterns. Every environment leaves the stamp of its matrix on the individual shaped in it. It's a personnel man's trade to recognize the make of a person, just as you would recognize the make of a rifle."

  "Yes, sir. I see, sir,” he answered. But of course he didn't. And there wasn't much use to make him try. Most people cling too desperately to the ego-saving formula: Man cannot know man.

  "Look, lieutenant,” I said, getting down to business, “Have you been checked out on what this is all about?"

  "Well, sir,” he answered, as if he were answering a question in class, “I was cleared for top security, and told that a few months ago you and your Dr. Auerbach, here at Computer Research, discovered a way to create antigravity. I was told you claimed you had to have a poltergeist in the process. You told General Sanfordwaithe that you needed six of them, males. That's about all, sir. So the Poltergeist Division discovered the Swami, and I was assigned to bring him out here to you."

  "Well then, Lieutenant Murphy, you go back to the Pentagon and tell General Sanfordwaithe that—” I could see by the look on his face that my message would probably not get through verbatim. “Never mind, I'll write it,” I amended disgustedly. “And you can carry the message."

  I punched Sara's button on my intercom.

  "After all the exposure out there to the Swami,” I said, “if you're still with us on this brash, materialistic plane, will you bring your book?"

  "My astral self has been hovering over you, guarding you, every minute,” Sara answered dreamily.

  "Can it take shorthand?” I asked dryly.

  "Maybe I'd better come in,” she replied.

  When she came through the door the lieutenant gave her one appreciative glance, then returned to his aloof pedestal of indifference. Obviously his pattern was to stand in majestic splendor and allow the girls to fawn somewhere down near his shoes. These lads with a glamour-boy complex almost always gravitate toward some occupation which will require them to wear a uniform. Sara catalogued him as quickly as I did, and seemed unimpressed. But you never can tell about a woman; the smartest of them will fall for the most transparent poses.

  "General Sanfordwaithe, dear sir,” I began, as she sat down at one corner of my desk and flipped open her book. “It takes more than a towel wrapped around the head and some mutterings about infinity to get poltergeist effects. So I am returning your phony Swami to you with my compliments-"

  "Beg your pardon, sir,” the lieutenant interrupted, and there was a certain note of suppressed triumph in his voice. “In case you rejected our applicant for the poltergeist job you have in mind, I was to hand you this.” He undid a lovingly polished button of his tunic, slipped his hand beneath the cloth and pulled forth a long, sealed envelope.

  I took it from him and noted the three sealing-wax imprints on the flap. From being carried so close to his heart for so long, the envelope was slightly less crisp than when he had received it. I slipped my letter opener in under the side flap, and gently extracted the letter without, in any way, disturbing the wax seals which were to have guaranteed its privacy. There wasn't any point in my doing it, of course, except to demonstrate to the lieutenant that I considered the whole deal as a silly piece of cloak and dagger stuff.

  After the general formalities, the letter was brief: “Dear Mr. Kennedy: We already know the Swami is a phony, but our people have been convinced that in spite of this there are some unaccountable effects. We have advised your general manager, Mr. Henry Grenoble, that we are in the act of carrying out our part of the agreement, namely, to provide you with six male-type poltergeists, and to both you and him we are respectfully suggesting that you get on with the business of putting the antigravity units into immediate production."

  I folded the letter and tucked it into one side of my desk pad. I looked at Sara.

  "Never mind the letter to General Sanfordwaithe,” I said. “He has successfully cut off my retreat in that direction.” I looked over at the lieutenant. “All right,” I said resignedly, “I'll apologize to the Swami, and make a try at using him."

  I picked up the letter again and pretended to be reading it. But this was just a stall, because I had suddenly been struck by the thought that my extreme haste in scoring
off the Swami and trying to get rid of him was because I didn't want to get involved again with poltergeists. Not any, of any nature.

  * * * *

  Old Stone Face, our general manager, claimed to follow the philosophy of building men, not machines. To an extent he did. His favorite phrase was, “Don't ask me how. I hired you to tell me.” He hired a man to do a job, and I will say for him, he left that man alone as long as the job got done. But when a man flubbed a job, and kept on flubbing it, then Mr. Henry Grenoble stepped in and carried out his own job-general managing.

  He had given me the assignment of putting antigrav units into production. He had given me access to all the money I would need for the purpose. He had given me sufficient time, months of it. And, in spite of all this cooperation, he still saw no production lines which spewed out antigrav units at some such rate as seventeen and five twelfths per second.

  Apparently he got his communication from the Pentagon about the time I got mine. Apparently it contained some implication that Computer Research, under his management, was not pursuing the cause of manufacturing antigrav units with diligence and dispatch. Apparently he did not like this.

  I had no more than apologized to the Swami, and received his martyred forgiveness, and arranged for a hotel suite for him and the lieutenant, when Old Stone Face sent for me. He began to manage with diligence and dispatch.

  "Now you look here, Kennedy,” he said forcefully, and his use of my last name, rather than my first, was a warning, “I've given you every chance. When you and Auerbach came up with that antigrav unit last fall, I didn't ask a lot of fool questions. I figured you knew what you were doing. But the whole winter has passed, and here it is spring, and you haven't done anything that I can see. I didn't say anything when you told General Sanfordwaithe that you'd have to have poltergeists to carry on the work, but I looked it up. First I thought you'd flipped your lid, then I thought you were sending us all on a wild goose chase so we'd leave you alone, then I didn't know what to think."

  I nodded. He wasn't through.

  "Now I think you're just pretending the whole thing doesn't exist because you don't want to fool with it."

  I couldn't argue with that.

  "For the first time, Kennedy, I'm asking you what happened?” he said firmly, but his tone was more telling than asking. So I was going to have to discuss frameworks with Old Stone Face, after all.

  "Henry,” I asked slowly, “have you kept up your reading in theoretical physics?"

  He blinked at me. I couldn't tell whether it meant yes or no.

  "When we went to school, you and I—” I hoped my putting us both in the same age group would tend to mollify him a little, “physics was all snug, secure, safe, definite. A fact was a fact, and that's all there was to it. But there's been some changes made. There's the co-ordinate systems of Einstein, where the relationships of facts can change from framework to framework. There's the application of multivalued logic to physics where a fact becomes not a fact any longer. The astronomers talk about the expanding universe-it's a piker compared to man's expanding concepts about that universe."

  He waited for more. His face seemed to indicate that I was beating around the bush.

  "That all has a bearing on what happened,” I assured him. “You have to understand what was behind the facts before you can understand the facts themselves. First, we weren't trying to make an antigrav unit at all. Dr. Auerbach was playing around with a chemical approach to cybernetics. He made up some goop which he thought would store memory impulses, the way the brain stores them. He brought a plastic cylinder of it over to me, so I could discuss it with you. I laid it on my desk while I went on with my personnel management business at hand."

  Old Stone Face opened a humidor and took out a cigar. He lit it slowly and deliberately and looked at me sharply as he blew out the first puff of smoke.

  "The nursery over in the plant had been having trouble with a little girl, daughter of one of our production women. She'd been throwing things, setting things on fire. The teachers didn't know how she did it', she just did it. They sent her to me. I asked her about it. She threw a tantrum, and when it was all over, Auerbach's plastic cylinder of goop was trying to fall upward, through the ceiling. That's what happened,” I said.

  He looked at his cigar, and looked at me. He waited for me to tie the facts to the theory. I hesitated, and then tried to reassure myself. After all, we were in the business of manufacturing computers. The general manager ought to be able to understand something beyond primary arithmetic.

  "Jennie Malasek was a peculiar child with a peculiar background,” I went on. “Her mother was from the old country, a Slav. There's the inheritance of a lot of peculiar notions. Maybe she had passed them on to her daughter. She kept Jennie locked up in their room. The kid never got out with other children. Children, kept alone, never seeing anybody; get peculiar notions all by themselves. Who knows what kind of a coordinate system she built up, or how it worked? Her mother would come home at night and go about her tasks talking aloud, half to the daughter, half to herself. ‘I really burned that foreman up, today,’ she'd say. Or, ‘Oh, boy, was he fired in a hurry!’ Or, ‘She got herself thrown out of the place,’ things like that."

  "So what does that mean, Ralph?” he asked. His switch to my first name was encouraging.

  "To a child who never knew anything else,” I answered, “one who had never learned to distinguish reality from unreality as we would define it from our agreed frameworks special coordinate system might be built up where ‘Everybody was up in the air at work, today,’ might be taken literally. Under the old systems of physics that couldn't happen, of course-it says in the textbooks-but since it has been happening all through history, in thousands of instances, in the new systems of multivalued physics we recognize it. Under the old system, we already had all the major answers, we thought. Now that we've got our smug certainties knocked out of us, we're just fumbling along, trying to get some of the answers we thought we had.

  "We couldn't make that cylinder activate others. We tried. We're still trying. In ordinary cybernetics you can have one machine punch a tape and it can be fed into another machine, but that means you first have to know how to code and decode a tape mechanically. We don't know how to code or decode a psi effect. We know the Auerbach cylinder will store a psi impulse, but we don't know how. So we have to keep working with psi gifted people, at least until we've established some of the basic laws governing psi."

  I couldn't tell by Henry's face whether I was with him or far far away. He told me he wanted to think about it, and made a little motion with his hand that I should leave the room.

  I walked through the suite of executive offices and down a sound rebuffing hallway. The throbbing clatter of manufacture of metallic parts made a welcome sound as I went through the far doorway into the factory. I saw a blueprint spread on a foreman's desk as I walked past. Good old blueprint. So many millimeters from here to there, made of such and such an alloy, a hole punched here with an allowance of five ten-thousandths plus or minus tolerance. Snug, secure, safe. I wondered if psi could ever be blueprinted. Or suppose you put a hole here, but when you looked away and then looked back it had moved, or wasn't there at all?

  Quickly, I got myself into a conversation with a supervisor about the rising rate of employee turnover in his department. That was something also snug, secure, safe. All you had to do was figure out human beings.

  I spent the rest of the morning on such pursuits, working with things I understood.

  On his first rounds of the afternoon, the interoffice messenger brought me a memorandum from the general manager's office. I opened it with some misgivings.

  Mr. Grenoble felt he should work with me more closely on the antigrav project. He understood, from his researches, that the most positive psi effects were experienced during a seance with a medium. Would I kindly arrange for the Swami to hold a seance that evening, after office hours, so that he might analyze the man's methods and pr
ocedures to see how they could fit smoothly into Company Operation. This was not to be construed as interference in the workings of my department but in the interest of pursuing the entire matter with diligence and dispatch-

  The seance was to be held in my office.

  I had had many peculiar conferences in this room-from union leaders stripping off their coats, throwing them on the floor and stomping on them; to uplifters who wanted to ban cosmetics on our women employees so the male employees would not be tempted to think Questionable Thoughts. I could not recall ever having held a seance before.

  My desk had been moved out of the way, over into one corner of the large room. A round table was brought over from the salesmen's report writing room (used there more for surreptitious poker playing than for writing reports) and placed in the middle of my office-on the grounds that it had no sharp corners to gouge people in their middles if it got to cavorting about recklessly. In an industrial plant one always has to consider the matter of safety rules and accident insurance rates.

  In the middle of the table there rested, with dark fluid gleaming through clear plastic cases, six fresh cylinders which Auerbach had prepared in his laboratory over in the plant.

  Auerbach had shown considerable unwillingness to attend the seance; he pleaded being extra busy with experiments just now, but I gave him that look which told him I knew he had just been stalling around the last few months, the same as I had.

  If the psi effect had never come out in the first place, there wouldn't have been any mental conflict. He could have gone on with his processes of refining, simplifying, and increasing the efficiency ratings of his goop. He would have settled gladly for a chemical compound which could have added two and two upon request; but when that compound can learn and demonstrate that there's no such thing as gravity, teaching it simple arithmetic is like ashes in the mouth.

  I said as much to him. I stood there in his laboratory, leaned up against a work bench, and risked burning an acid hole in the sleeve of my jacket just to put over an air of unconcern. He was perched on the edge of an opposite work bench, swinging his feet, and hiding the expression in his eyes behind the window's reflection upon his polished glasses. I said even more.