What Thin Partitions Read Online Free PDF Page B

eye.
    "Good girl,” Jennie murmured, and rubbed the arch of one foot with the toe of the other.
    I looked at them both, and for once I didn't have anything to say.
* * * *
    There were more conferences with Auerbach. Yes, he could produce more cylinders. Some of the synthetic protein strings were a bit tricky, but otherwise it wouldn't be difficult to duplicate the cylinder. No, just an ordinary laboratory would do, at least until we went into mass production. That's nice, he'd always wanted to be a department head. The latter was said absently, and I doubted he had even heard me.
    "How are you going to activate the cylinders?” he asked curiously. I noticed the particular use of the second person pronoun, because in everything else it was “we.” Activating them was not his responsibility.
    There were conferences with Boulton, whose nose was out of joint that Auerbach had been taken out from under his jurisdiction without consulting him about it. For the sake of organization I had to mollify him. There were conferences with the plant superintendent, who could throw all sorts of petty hazards in my way if he were pulling against me. There were conferences with the controller, the carpenter boss. In short there were people, and therefore there were personal tensions to be unsnarled.
* * * *
    There was another conference in Old Stone Face's office, this time with a pink cheeked colonel, sent out as an advance scout from the Pentagon. From the look of him it was the most dangerous scouting mission he had ever tried. His pink cheeks grew red as he watched me go through my act with the antigrav cylinder. His pink cheeks grew purple when I evaded his questions with something approaching idiocy. He was certainly not one I wished to introduce to frameworks and partitions. He was a rocket man, himself.
    Auerbach was at that conference, and where I had been idiotic, the good doctor was a glib double talker. He sounded so impressive that it didn't occur to anybody he wasn't making sense.
    Since the colonel didn't believe what he saw, and didn't understand what he heard, the brass staff, deployed well back of the front lines, would have got a very poor report from their advance scout had we not been Computer Research and had not Old Stone Face been a frequent visitor to the Pentagon. In this case the colonel was afraid to embroider what he saw with too much of his own opinion. We were duly notified of an impending visitation from a full dress parade of brass and braid. Stirred to unusual action, no doubt, by the plaintive and public outcry of a country-boy Congressman, “But what do all of them do, over there in that big building?"
    During this time my staff, like good boys and girls, took over the burden of my work without complaint. I spent a great deal of my time in Auerbach's new laboratory.
    We tried all sorts of attempts to make the antigrav aspect of the first cylinder rub off on others he had made. We let them lay coyly side by side for hours and days. We lashed the first to another and let it zoom up to the now padded ceiling. We tried shocking them, freezing them, heating them. Nothing worked. Either the new cylinders had already learned that down was down-that old tired framework-or more likely hadn't learned anything at all.
    We thought at them. We stood there, Auerbach and I, working singly, working in tandem, thinking at them. Apparently our thoughts didn't amount to much; or we had learned too early in life that you can't get any effect on a physical object by just thinking about it. They just lay there, fat, oily, and inert.
    Auerbach went back to his test tubes and beakers, trying to see if antigrav wasn't inherent, somehow, in the chemical arrangements. He had accepted the hypothesis of other frameworks as an intellectual exercise, but he still hoped to prove they were not a reality, that the aspect could be accounted for within the framework he knew. He had not accepted the partitions, that his real world condition