"You children take a load off your feet," said Mom. "Now just tell me all about yourselves."
"Well, we've redone the kitchen," said Anita.
Mom was thrilled, eager for details.
Kroner hung his huge head, as though listening intently to the small talk, or, more likely, Paul thought, counting away the seconds before it would be polite to separate the men and women - a custom of the house.
As Anita paused for breath, Kroner stood, beamed, and suggested that Paul come into his study to see the guns. It was the same gambit every time - the men were to see the guns. Years ago, Anita had made the mistake of saying she was interested in guns, too. Kroner had politely told her that his weren't the kind women liked.
Mom's response was always the same, too: "Oh guns - I hate them. I can't see why men want to go around shooting sweet little animals."
The fact was, Kroner never fired his guns. His pleasure seemed to be in owning and handling them. He also used them for props, to give an air of informality to his man-to-man talks. He announced raises and promotions, demotions and firings, and praised or warned, always in seemingly casual asides made while swabbing a bore.
Paul followed him into the dark-paneled study, and waited for him to choose his weapon from the gunrack that filled one wall. Kroner ran his index finger along the collection, like a stick along a picket fence. It had been a matter of speculation among Kroner's underlings as to whether there was any significance in the guns he chose for a particular discussion. For a while the rumor was current that shotguns were bad news, rifles were good news. But it hadn't withstood the test of time. Kroner finally chose a ten-gauge shotgun, broke open the breach, and squinted through the bore at a streetight outside.
"Wouldn't dare shoot modern ammunition in this one," said Kroner. "Twist barrel - thing'd go all to pieces. But look at that inlay work, Paul."
"Beautiful. Priceless."
"Some man spent maybe two years on it. Time didn't mean anything in those days. The industrial dark ages, Paul."
"Yessir."
He selected a cleaning rod and lined up on his desk top a can of oil, ajar of grease, and several cloth patches. "Got to keep after a bore, or it'll pit on you just like that." He snapped his fingers. He oiled a patch, twisted it about the tip of the cleaning rod. "Especially in this climate."
"Yessir." Paul started to light a cigarette, and then remembered Anita's warning in the outline.
Kroner drove the cleaning rod downward. "Where's Ed Finnerty, by the way?"
"Don't know, sir."
"Police are looking for him."
"Really?"
Kroner slid the patch back and forth and didn't look at Paul. "Uh-huh. Now that he's out of a job, he's got to register with the police, and he hasn't."
"I left him downtown in Homestead last night."
"I know that. I thought maybe you knew where he went."
Kroner had a habit of saying he already knew what he'd just been told. Paul was sure the old man didn't really know anything about the night before. "I haven't any idea." He didn't want to make trouble for anyone. Let the police find out that Finnerty was with Lasher, if they could.
"Umm hmmm. See that pit right there?" He held the muzzle of the gun a few inches from Paul's face and pointed out a tiny flaw. "That's what happens if you let a bore go for even a month. They'll run right away with you."
"Yessir."
"He isn't to be trusted any more, Paul. He isn't right in his head, and it wouldn't do to take chances with him, would it?"
"Nossir."
Kroner dabbed at the pit with the corner of a patch. "I supposed you saw it that way. That's why it's a little difficult for me to understand why you let him wander around the plant unescorted."
Paul reddened. No words came.
"Or why you'd let him have your gun. He isn't authorized for firearms any more, you know. Yet they tell me they found your pistol covered with his fingerprints."
Before Paul could order his thoughts, Kroner clapped him on his knee and laughed like Santa Claus. "I'm so sure you've got a good explanation, I don't even want to hear it. Got a lot of faith in you, my boy. Don't want to see you get into any trouble. Now that your father's gone, I feel it's sort of up to me to watch out for you."
"That's nice of you, sir."
Kroner turned his back to Paul, assumed a ready stance with the shotgun, and picked off an imaginary bird flushed from behind the desk. "Kaplowie!" He ejected an imaginary shell. "These are dangerous times - more dangerous than you'd suspect from the surface. Kaplowie! But it's also the Golden Age, isn't it, Paul?"
Paul nodded.
Kroner turned to look at him. "I said, isn't this the Golden Age?"
"Yessir. I nodded."
"Pull!" said Kroner, apparently imagining clay pigeons now. "Kaboom! There have always been doubters, criers of doom, stoppers of progress."
"Yessir. About Finnerty and the pistol, I -"
"Behind us now, forgotten," said Kroner impatiently. "The slate is clean. As I was about to say, look where we are now, because men went right ahead and took forward steps with stout hearts, in spite of the people telling them not to."
"Yessir."
"Kaplowie! Some men try to make light of what we're doing, what men like your father did, by saying it's just gadgeteering, blind tinkering. It's more than that, Paul."
Paul leaned forward, eager to hear what this extra quality might be. He'd felt for some time that everyone else in the system must be seeing something he was missing. Perhaps this was it, perhaps the beginning of an overwhelming fervor like his father's.
"It's a sight more than gadgeteering, I'll tell you, Paul."
"Yessir?"
"It's strength and faith and determination. Our job is to open new doors at the head of the procession of civilization. That's what the engineer, the manager does. There is no higher calling."
Dejectedly, Paul let his spine sag back in the chair.
Kroner put a fresh patch on the cleaning rod and began swabbing the bore again. "Paul -Pittsburgh is still open. The field has been narrowed down to two men."
It was somewhat startling that he said it just that way, the way Anita had said he would. He wondered what it was she thought he should say in response. He'd never given her a chance to say, and hadn't read the outline. "It's a wonderful chance to be of real service," he said. He supposed that was pretty close to what she had in mind.
Paul felt lightheaded, having borrowed Anita's thoughts for want of enthusiasm of his own. He was being offered the Pittsburgh job, lots more money, and, since he would have risen so high with the greater portion of his life still ahead, the assurance that he would almost certainly go clear to the top. The moment of his arrival at this point of immense good fortune was curiously bland. He had known it was coming for a long time. Kroner had wanted it for him and had come close to promising it to him often - always in the name of his father. When advances had come, as now, there had been a vestigal sort of ritual of surprise and congratulation, as though Paul, like his ancestors, had arrived by cunning, tenacity, and God's will or the Devil's laxness.
"It's a tough decision, Paul, between you and Fred Garth." Garth was a much older man, nearly Kroner's age, manager of the Buffalo Works. "Frankly, Garth hasn't got your technical imagination, Paul. As a manager he's excellent, but if it wasn't for prodding, the Buffalo Works would be just as it was when he took over five years ago. But he's steady and reliable, Paul, and there's never been any question that he was one of us, that he put progress and the system ahead of his own interests."
"Garth's a fine man," said Paul. Garth was, too: foursquare, desperate to please, and he seemed to have an anthropomorphic image of the corporate personality. Garth stood in relation to that image as a lover, and Paul wondered if this prevalent type of relationship had ever been given the consideration it deserved by sexologists. On second thought, he supposed that it had - the general phenomenon of a lover's devotion to the unseen - in studies of nuns' symbolic marriages to Christ. At any rate, Paul had seen Garth at various stages of his love affair, unable to eat for anxiety, on a manic crest, moved to maudlin near-crying at recollections of the affair's tender beginnings. In short, Garth suffered all the emotional hazards of a perennial game of she-loves-me, she-loves-me-not. To carry out directions from above - an irritating business for Paul - was, for Garth, a favor to please a lady. "I'd like to see him get the job."