We walked out, Dr. Hawes stuffing the data into his brief case. I closed the door behind us. He turned to me. “Uh — Ladder, suppose you be at the Hotel Pennsylvania at two with your suitcase. We’ll go up in my car. I’ll arrange for reservations at the Lord Nelson in Poughkeepsie. Do you need any tools or anything?”
“I keep all my tack-hammers in the pockets of my overalls.”
“Ladder, we’ll get along beautifully if you’ll just coordinate.”
“That a Washington word?”
“You might call it that.”
“Doc, I’ll coordinate like crazy. I’m a bureaucrat at heart.”
“You may call me Hawes.”
“Thank you, Doc.”
He sniffed and walked out. I pulled a chair over and sat beside Ginny. “Honey, he didn’t fire me. He just told me to work for a little while with that man of vision.”
“I think he’s sweet,” she said.
“As a matter of fact, so do I; but that isn’t what I was getting around to. I was thinking that—”
“I know. Mr. Murch didn’t fire you, so you think we ought to celebrate by getting married. The answer is still the same. Stick around, and I’ll have it mimeographed.”
“But I’ve had an idea. You want a house you can stay in. The other day I saw the most beautiful all-aluminum trailer with everything that—”
“No!”
“And maybe you could even grow vines on the outside of it. Kids playing around it. You washing the dishes, and me reading the—”
“No!”
“And we go everywhere in the car with our little home rolling along behind—”
“No! No! No!”
“How about lunch today?”
“No!”
“What! Don’t you even want to have lunch with me?”
“Oh, Sam — I’m sorry! I didn’t realize you’d changed the subject. Sure, I’ll lunch with you.”
I dropped her back at the office, checked out of my hotel and raced over to the Pennsylvania with a ringing in my ears. The ringing kept saying, “No!”
I expected a conservative little business coupe and both hands tight on the wheel; but the garage people brought around a convertible low enough to step over, and he tooled it through the Manhattan welter with the ease of a hack driver. We climbed up onto the Parkway, and he leveled it out at cruising speed. I began to feel a little like the day when I was ten years old and I was invited over to the right side of the tracks to a birthday party. I remembered that the party had ended in a free-for-all, with some of the happy guests running screaming home. I hoped that my joint venture with the Doc wouldn’t end the same way — but even as I thought it, I recognized in myself a growing urge to punch him in the head. Not a politic move, considering the way J. Arthur had kowtowed to him.
The top was down, and he said, over the rush of the wind: “How’d you get into this line of business, Ladder?”
“Oh, I’ve just always liked tools and machinery, and I—”
“Never had any urge in that direction myself. More interested in the overall picture. Tools and machinery are just one of the minor aspects of the broad picture of production. They are the elements whereby labor can give a greater value-added to the raw materials with which they deal. Much like a man using stilts to step over a high fence. Not over a week ago I was talking to a Senate committee about how we, in the Government, must stop looking at the production picture through a peashooter. Yes, that’s what I said, a peashooter. We must begin, I said, to deëemphasize the strictly management-labor aspects of industrial progress and look to a broader coordination of all the aspects of production: Tools and machinery and labor and management and capital and consumer demand. Yes, consumer demand. That is the key to the picture, Ladder. I do have your name right? Because a plant which is manufacturing at peak efficiency an item which, in the marketplace is a drug-yes, a drug on the marketplace, ha-ha — that plant will be unprofitable. Hmmm. Just what do you do, Ladder?”
“Well, I mess around with production lines to see how they can be rearranged for more speed, and change speeds and feeds on tools to eliminate bottlenecks, and—”
“You know, Ladder, I envy you. You are a happy man. You work with your hands. Back in the days of the guilds, before the Industrial Revolution, this was a happy world, and man’s hope is to get back to that individual pride in workmanship. We, in the top layer of Government, are discontented. We work with the broad aspects of the problem, and yet we never get a chance really to see the result of our handiwork. I sometimes think that I should take a job in a plant, running a dirty machine.”
“You can eat off most modern equipment.”
“What? As I was saying, we are a hard-pressed, neurotic group, we who labor in the labyrinths of Washington to provide you and your kind with more satisfactory conditions under which to work—”
On and on and on and on — all the way to Poughkeepsie. I found out after twenty miles that if I nodded my head once in a while, he’d keep on yammering. That gave me time and leisure to remember the exact way the soft curls grow on the nape of my Ginny’s neck...
It was close to five when we pulled into Poughkeepsie. He had acquired for us two adjoining rooms with a bath between. He stood in my room and smiled at me as though he was doing me a great favor. “Now, Ladder,” he said, “we’ll drive on out to the plant tomorrow, so you’re on your own for the rest of the evening.”
“Thanks, Doc.”
He frowned a little at that. “I have friends near here. State Department. Be ready at nine sharp in the morning.”
“Yes sir.” I saluted him. He smiled calmly and went on into his own room. I had a therapeutic nip at the bar, a fair dinner, and afterward, I snitched the blueprints out of his briefcase. By the time I turned in at eleven, I could have found my way around the plant blindfolded. It was pretty obvious that the only way I’d get Junior off my hands was to get the job done as quickly as possible. The thing that really r’iled me was the thought that part of my income taxes were going to maintain that broad view kid in the style to which he had grown accustomed.
The September sun was shining on the long white building when we drove into the deserted parking-lot eight miles north of Poughkeepsie. The plant had been set up by Al Johannes, who really knows his business.
We presented our letter to the watchman, and he let us in. As I had learned from the blueprints, the plant production space was in one huge high ceilinged room. It was designed for straight-line flow of production. At one end were the stockrooms, with outside unloading platforms and spur tracks. At the other end was a huge room for inspection and packaging, with a loading platform and more tracks. The offices were in a double layer along one side of the main room. The upstairs offices were separated from the production area by sheets of glass. All the walls and machines were in pastel shades of green and blue. Moving parts on the tools were in bright red. The place was spotless. There was even a setup to pipe music in.
Hawes stood on the floor and looked around, wonder in his eyes. He gasped, “It’s — so pretty! The colors! So clean! Was this an experimental plant?”
“No. All the new ones are like this, for the last eight or ten years.”
“I had no idea. Where are the belts and things to drive the machinery?”
“Belts! Modern tools all have a self-contained drive.”
We wandered around. He pointed at a tool. “What’s that?”
“Cutter grinder.”
“What does it do?”
“Grinds cutters.”
“Oh.”
I pointed out milling machines and turret lathes and automatic screw machines and planers and whatall.