Hawks looked at him.
Latourette was clutching his arm. “Cobey. Isn’t he ordering you to cancel it?”
“Cobey can only make requests,” Hawks said gently. “He can’t order me.”
“He’s company president, Ed! He can make your life miserable. He’s dying to get Continental Electronics off this hook.”
Hawks took Latourette’s hand away from his arm and moved it to the transmitter’s casing. He put the flats of his own palms into his back pockets, nicking up his white laboratory smock. “The Navy originally financed the transmitter’s development only because it was my idea. They wouldn’t have vouchered that kind of money for anyone else in the world. Not for a crazy idea like this.” He stared into the machine. “Even now, even though that place we found is the way it is, they still won’t let Cobey back out on his own initiative. Not as long as they think I can keep going. I don’t have to worry about Cobey.” He smiled softly and a little incredulously. “Cobey has to worry about me.”
“Well, how about you? How much longer can you keep this up?”
Hawks stepped back. He looked at Latourette thoughtfully. “Are we worrying about the project now, or are we worrying about me?”
Latourette sighed. “All right, Ed, I’m sorry,” he said. “But what’re you going to do?”
Hawks looked up and down at the matter transmitter’s towering height. In the laboratory space behind them, the technicians were now shutting off the lights in the various subsections of the control array. Darkness fell in horizontal chunks along the galleries of instruments and formed black diagonals like jackstraws being laid upon the catwalks overhead. It advanced in a proliferating body toward the solitary green bulb shining over the “NOT Powered” half of the “Powered/NOT Powered” red-and-green legend painted on the transmitter’s lintel.
“We can’t do anything about the nature of the place to which they go,” Hawks said. “And we’ve reached the limit of what we can do to improve the way we send them there. It seems to me there’s only one thing left to do. We must find a different kind of man to send. A man who won’t go insane when he feels himself die.” He looked quizzically into the machine’s interior.
“There are all sorts of people in the world,” he said. “Perhaps we can find a man who doesn’t fear Death, but loves her.”
Latourette said bitterly, “Some kind of psycho.”
“Maybe that’s what he is. But I think we need him, nevertheless.” All the other laboratory lights were out, now. “What it comes down to is that we need a man who’s attracted by what drives other men to madness. And the more so, the better. A man who’s impassioned by Death.” His eyes lost focus, and his gaze extended itself to infinity. “So now we know what I am. I’m a pimp.”
2
Continental Electronics’ Director of Personnel was a broad-faced man named Vincent Connington. He came briskly into Hawks’ office and pumped his hand enthusiastically. He was wearing a light blue shantung suit and russet cowboy boots, and as he sat down in the visitors’ chair, puckering the corners of his eyes in the mid-afternoon sunshine streaming through the venetian blinds, he looked around and remarked, “Got the same office layout myself, upstairs. But it sure looks a lot different with some carpeting on the floor and some good paintin’s on the walls.” He turned back to Hawks, smiling. “I’m glad to get down here and talk to you, Doctor. I’ve always had a lot of admiration for you. Here you are, running a department and still getting in there and working right with your crew. All I do all day is sit behind a desk and make sure my clerks handle the routine without foulin’ up.”
“They seem to do rather well,” Hawks said in a neutral voice. He was beginning to draw himself up unconsciously in his chair and to slip a mask of expressionlessness over his face. His glance touched Connington’s boots once and then stayed away. “At least, your department’s been sending me some excellent technicians.”
Connington grinned. “Nobody’s got any better.” He leaned forward. “But that’s routine stuff.” He took Hawks’ interoffice memo out of his breast pocket. “This, now — This request, I’m going to fill personally.”
Hawks said carefully, “I certainly hope you can. I expect it may take some time to find a man fitting the outlined specifications. I hope you understand that, unfortunately, we don’t have much time. I—”
Connington waved a hand. “Oh, I’ve got him already. Had him in mind for a long time.”
Hawks’ eyebrows rose. “Really?”
Connington grinned shrewdly across the plain steel desk. “Hard to believe?” He lounged back in his chair. “Doctor, suppose somebody came to you and asked you to do a particular job for him — design a circuit to do a particular job. Now, suppose you reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a piece of paper and said, ‘Here it is.’ What about that? And then when he was all through shaking his head and saying how it was hard to believe you’d have it right there, you could explain to him about how electronics was what you did all the time. About how when you’re not thinking about some specific project, you’re still thinking about electronics in general. And how, being interested in electronics, you kept up on it, and you knew pretty much where the whole field was going. And how you thought about some of the problems they were likely to run into, and sometimes answers would just come into your head so easily it couldn’t even be called work. And how you filed these things away until it was time for them to be brought out. See? That way, there’s no magic. Just a man with a talent, doing his work.”
Connington grinned again. “Now I’ve got a man who was made to work on this machine project of yours. I know him inside out. And I know a little bit about you. I’ve got a lot to learn about you, yet, but I don’t think any of it’s goin’ to surprise me. And I’ve got your man. He’s healthy, he’s available, and I’ve had security clearances run on him every six months for the last two years. He’s all yours, Doctor. No foolin’.
“You see, Doctor—” Connington folded his hands in his lap and bent them backward, cracking his knuckles, “you’re not the only mover in the world.”
Hawks frowned slightly. “Mover?” Now his face betrayed nothing.
Connington chuckled softly to himself over some private joke that was burgeoning within him. “There’re all kinds of people in this world. But they break down into two main groups, one big and one smaller. There’s the people who get moved out of the way or into line, and then there’s the people who do the moving. It’s safer and a lot more comfortable to go where you’re pushed. You don’t take any of the responsibility, and if you do what you’re told, every once in a while you get thrown a fish.
“Being a mover isn’t safe, because you may be heading for a hole, and it isn’t comfortable because you do a lot of jostling back and forth, and what’s more, it’s up to you to get your own fish. But it’s a hell of a lot of fun.” He looked into Hawks’ eyes. “Isn’t it?”
Hawks said, “Mr. Connington—” He looked directly back at the man. “I’m not convinced. This individual I requested would have to be a very rare type. Are you sure you can instantly give him to me? Do you mean to say your having him ready, as you say, isn’t a piece of conspicuous forethought? I think perhaps you may have had some other motive, and that you’re seizing on a lucky coincidence.”
Connington lolled back, chuckled, and unwrapped a greenleaved cigar from the tooled leather case in his breast pocket. He snipped open the end with a pair of gold nippers attached to the case by a golden chain, and used a gold-cased lighter set with a ruby. He puffed, and let the smoke writhe out between his large, well-spaced teeth. His eyes glinted behind the drift of smoke that hung in the air in front of his face.
“Let’s keep polite, Dr. Hawks,” he said. “Let’s look at it in the light of reason. Continental Electronics pays you to head up Research, and you’re the best there is.” Connington leaned forward just a little, shifted the cigar just a little in his fingers, and changed the curve of his smile. “Continental Electronics pays me to run Personnel.”