"I'd like to see you get the job, Paul." Kroner's expression indicated that the mention of Garth had been so much window dressing. "You've got imagination and spirit and ability -"
"Thank you, sir."
"Let me finish. Imagination, spirit, and ability, and, for all I know, I may be completely wrong in calling your loyalty into question."
"Loyalty?"
Kroner laid the shotgun aside and pulled up a chair to face Paul's. He laid his big hands on Paul's knees and lowered his thick brows. The situation had the quality of a séance, with Kroner as the medium. Again, as he had felt when Kroner took his hand at the Country Club, Paul felt his strength and will dwarfed by the old man. "Paul, I want you to tell me what's on your mind."
The hands on his knees tightened. Paul struggled resentfully against the urge to pour his heart out to this merciful, wise, gentle father. But his sullenness decayed. Paul began to talk.
His formless misgivings and disquiet of a week before, he realized, had shape now. The raw material of his discontent was now cast in another man's molds. He was saying what Lasher had said the night before, talking about the spiritual disaster across the river, about the threat of revolution, about the hierarchy that was a nightmare to most. The way he phrased it, it wasn't a condemnation, it was a plea for refutation.
Kroner, his hands still on Paul's knees, hung his head lower and lower.
Paul came to the end, and Kroner stood and turned his back to stare out of the window. The spell was still in force, and Paul looked expectantly at the broad back, waiting for wisdom.
Kroner turned suddenly. "So you're against us."
"I didn't mean to say that, certainly. They're questions that deserve some sort of answer."
"Keep to your own side of the river, Paul! Your job is management and engineering. I don't know what the answers are to Lasher's questions. I do know that it's far easier to ask questions than to answer them. I know that there have always been questions, and men like Lasher ready to make trouble by asking them."
"You know about Lasher?" Paul hadn't mentioned his name.
"Yes, I've known about him for quite some time. And, as of this noon, I know what you and Lasher and Finnerty were up to last night." He looked sad. "As district industrial security officer, there isn't much I don't know, Paul. And sometimes, like now, I wish I didn't know so much."
"And Pittsburgh?"
"I still think you're the man for the job. I'm going to pretend that you didn't do last night what you did, didn't say just now what you said. I don't believe it came from your heart."
Paul was amazed. By some freakish circumstance he'd apparently clinched the job - after having arrived with the vague intention of disqualifying himself.
"This is the main stretch, Paul. Now it's all up to you."
"I could go on the wagon, I suppose."
"It's a little more complicated than that, I'm afraid. In a very short while you managed to pile up a fairly impressive police dossier: the pistol, letting Finnerty into the plant, last night's indiscretions - and, well, I've got to be able to explain it all away to the satisfaction of Headquarters. You could go to prison, you know."
Paul laughed nervously.
"I want to be able to say, Paul, that you were doing special security work for me, and I'd like to prove it."
"I see." Paul didn't.
"You'll agree that both Lasher and Finnerty are dangerous men, potential saboteurs who should be put where they can't do any harm." He took the shotgun down from the rack again and distorted his face as he cleaned around the ejector with a toothpick. "So," he said after a few moments of silence, "I'll want you to testify that they tried to get you into a plot to sabotage the Ilium Works."
The door flew open, and Baer came in, grinning. "Congratulations, my boy. Congratulations. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful."
"Congratulations?" said Paul.
"Pittsburgh, my boy, Pittsburgh!"
"It hasn't quite been settled," said Kroner.
"But you said yesterday -"
"A little something's come up since then." Kroner winked at Paul. "Nothing very serious, though, eh, Paul? A little hurdle."
"Um, oh, I see, uh-huh; a hurdle, a hurdle. I see. Um."
Paul was shaken and confused by what had just happened to him, and he hid his lack of composure behind a vacuous smile. He wondered if Baer had come in on cue.
"Paul here had some questions," said Kroner.
"Questions? Questions, my boy?"
"He wanted to know if we weren't doing something bad in the name of progress."
Baer sat on the desk and began taking kinks out of the telephone cord. He was thinking very hard, and from the man's expression Paul could only conclude that the question had never come to Baer's attention before. Now that it had, he was giving it his earnest consideration. "Is progress bad? Uh-huh - good question." He loked up from the cord. "I don't know, don't know. Maybe progress is bad, eh?"
Kroner looked at him with surprise. "Look, you know darn good and well history's answered the question a thousand times."
"It has? Has it? You know; I wouldn't. Answered it a thousand times, has it? That's good, good. All I know is, you've got to act like it has, or you might as well throw in the towel. Don't know, my boy. Guess I should, but I don't. Just do my job. Maybe that's wrong."
It was Kroner's turn to be dismayed. "Well, what say to a refresher?" he said briskly.
"I say yes to a refresher," said Paul gratefully.
Kroner chuckled. "There, there; it wasn't so rough, now was it?"
"Nope."
"That's my boy. Chin up."
As Baer, Paul, and Kroner filed into the living room, Mom was telling Anita sadly that it took all kinds of people to make a world.
"I just want to make sure everybody understands he invited himself," said Anita. "Mom, there wasn't a thing we could do about it."
Kroner dusted his hands. "Well, what say to a pick-me-up?"
"Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful," said Baer.
"Did you men have a good time with those awful guns?" said Mom, wrinkling her nose.
"Swell, Mom," said Paul.
Anita caught Paul's eyes, and raised her brows questioningly.
Paul nodded slightly.
She smiled and lay back in her chair, exhausted, satisfied.
Mom handed out small glasses of port, while Kroner tinkered with the phonograph. "Where is it?" he said.
"Now, now - right where it always is, on the turntable," said Mom.
"Oh yes - here it is. I thought maybe somebody else had been playing something since I used it."
"No. Nobody's been near the phonograph since last night."
Kroner held the tone arm over the spinning record. "This is for you, Paul. When I said pick-me-up I really had this in mind more than the wine. This is meat for the spirit. This can pull me out of a slump like nothing I can think of."
"I gave it to him last month, and I can't think of anything that's ever pleased him as much," said Mom.
Kroner lowered the needle into the groove and hurried to a chair and covered his eyes before the music began.
The volume was turned way up, and suddenly the loudspeaker howled:
"Ooooooooooooh, give me some men, who are stout-hearted men, who will fight for the right they adore . . ."