Mr. Adam (5 page)

The controversy between the National Re-fertilization Project and the National Research Council was essentially between the physicians and the physicists—between the scientific workers in the animate and the inanimate fields. The atom-poppers believed they needed Mr. Adam for research which they hoped would undo the
damage caused by the obscure rays which enwrapped the world after the Mississippi explosion. They needed Mr. Adam, they explained, much as they needed cyclotrons and centrifuges.

How could an antidote to the ray be developed until they knew exactly which ray had done the trick? And how could they isolate the ray which strangely wrecked male cells, and left females undisturbed, unless they had specimens for experimentation? And who was there, except Mr. Adam, to furnish these specimens?

The N.R.P. physicians pointed out, even as Maria had, that A.I. was the only sure way of keeping the globe populated. They hoped that the physicists of N.R.C. would find a method of restoring the potency of all men, but scientific research takes times. Meanwhile, they had on hand one single, priceless human who was insurance against entire extinction.

What finally decided the Joint Congressional Investigating Committee, and the Inter-Department Executive Committee, I am sure, was the unspoken fear that the scientists would make another mistake, mess up Mr. Adam, and then everybody would be finished. It was something that nobody spoke of, directly, for fear of injuring the sensibilities of men like Professor Pell, and damaging their professional reputation, but the fear was always there.

So I was not surprised, a few days later, when I picked up a copy of the New York
Post
while walking to the subway after my noon breakfast in Smith Field, to read the black headlines that covered the whole front page:

PRESIDENT OKAYS A.I.!

N.R.P. WINS OVER N.R.C. BUT SCIENTISTS TO GET FUND TO CONTINUE RESEARCH

WOULD-BE MOTHERS VOLUNTEER THROUGHOUT NATION

ENGLAND ASKS AID

When I reached the office, J.C. set me to putting together the foreign reactions in a single story. As usual there was no official comment from Moscow, but
Pravda
printed an oblique little box on its front page pointing out that is was possible for the United States to make amends for the world catastrophe caused by Mississippi, but that thus far the United States had not approached the Soviet Union directly.

The word “directly” was the important word. It was seized upon, that very day, in the Senate. Had anybody in the Administration, certain Senators wished to know, been dealing secretly on sharing Homer Adam with the Communists? If so, what arrangements had been discussed? It was hoped that Homer Adam would not be shipped outside the territorial limits of the United States.

Senator Salt plausibly replied that A.I. being what is was, it was not necessary to ship Homer Adam anywhere, just the male germ.

Any peace-loving nation, Salt said, could be helped out without Homer ever leaving Washington. Russia had as much right to hope for perpetuating herself as any other nation—more than some he could mention.

F
ROGHAM
(D. Louisiana): Will the Senator yield?

S
ALT
: I yield.

F
ROGHAM
: Is it not a fact that we could forever dispose of this damnable Communism, which is infecting the whole world and causing strikes and disturbances and menacing the very foundations of the Republic, say within two generations, by simply confining A.I. to those nations which are willing to give us definite statements as to their future foreign policies, and their territorial and ideological intentions?

V
IDMER
(R. Massachusetts): If we only give A.I. to those nations which know their future foreign policy, then we will have to exclude the United States. (Laughter.)

The story from London was matter-of-fact. England expected
that the United States would share A.I., on a population basis, and in return England would give the United States the full benefit of any happy information reaching its own scientists. The British government felt it was speaking for the whole Empire. It didn't say anything about Ireland.

In Paris, all the newspapers published editorials pointing out France's great past cultural contributions to the world, and insisting that it was a necessity that French culture continue.

Various good Germans talked of the benefits of a revival of German industrial genius in succeeding generations.

The Japanese press talked of traditional American sportsmanship, and pointed out that baseball was played in both countries.

All the little nations extolled their own virtues. But the Bucharest press pointed out, coyly, that if A.I. was denied to Hungary, then that would be a final solution to the question of Transylvania—which everybody thought had already been solved.

The cables kept rolling in, but before night J.C. Pogey came over to my desk, and motioned me into his office.

“Steve,” he said, “I just got a call from the White House. Danny Williams—the President's Secretary. Used to work for us. Well, they want you down there to handle Adam.”

“That's what I was afraid of,” I said.

“It seems they think you did a good job in Tarrytown. Adam likes you.”

“Yeah?”

“The N.R.P. asked for you. They're going to put you on their payroll. We'll give you leave of absence.”

“Haven't I got anything to say about this?” I demanded.

“Not much,” said J.C. “Danny Williams put it this way—he said it was in the interests of civilization. I don't like to lose you, but it is exactly the same as if you were drafted.”

“You don't care much, do you, J.C., whether civilization keeps on or not?”

J.C. rubbed his thumbs behind his ears. “Dunno,” he said. “Haven't made up my mind yet.”

I went home and packed. “They certainly called for you in a hurry,” Marge said.

“Yes,” I agreed, not wanting to leave her, and not wanting to leave Smith Field, and wondering how long it would be before Homer Adam could be cooled off and calmed to a point where he would become useful to civilization, and N.R.P. would let me go.

“You behave down there,” Marge commanded. “That town is full of good-looking women, and they don't seem to have any inhibitions any more.”

“I'll behave,” I promised.

“You'd better. I'm liable to pop in on you any time—any time at all. And Stephen,” she added, “do a good job, will you. It's awfully important to me.”

I telephoned to Abel Pumphrey, the Director of the National Re-fertilization Project, that I was on the way down. Marge took me to the train and kissed me goodbye as if I were off to Shanghai. The last thing she said was, “You will do your best, won't you?”

Women are such queer people.

CHAPTER 5

I
didn't have any illusions about my chore. I knew that at the very best it would be thankless, and probably a perpetual headache, and something which called for a psychiatrist rather than a newspaperman. But I felt a sort of moral responsibility for Mr. Adam. I had been the first to launch him into his career as the last productive male, and it seemed only right that I should help guide his footsteps towards whatever strange destiny awaited him. In addition, I was just plain curious.

I underestimated Washington. I didn't foresee any of the really frightening events that presently engulfed me. When I look back at it now, I was a toddling child who picks a river in flood as a nice place for wading, and instantly is seized by the current and swept downstream.

For instance, I thought the National Re-fertilization Project would be composed of a dozen or so people, with a committee of physicians like Maria Ostenheimer and Tommy Thompson acting as advisers. It wasn't like that at all. The N.R.P. was an enormous
chunk of government, expanding day by day. The creation of any new government agency is, in many respects, like bringing in a new oil field. With the N.R.P., to which the President had allotted unlimited emergency funds, it was as if gold had been discovered in California all over again.

The day on which I arrived in Washington—December 18—is eaten into my memory by the acid of shock, just as the men who were there will always remember the date of Anzio, or Omaha Beach.

I hadn't expected anyone to meet me at the station, but when I went through the gates into the concourse a neat young man with a pointed, thin, suspicious nose—the type of nose I always associate with credit managers—stopped me. “You're Mr. Smith?” he said.

“Uh-huh.”

He held out his hand. “I'm Klutz—Percy Klutz, Deputy Director on the administrative side.” When he smiled his mouth looked like that of a fresh-caught skate. “The Chief sent me down to meet you.”

“That was nice of him,” I said. The Chief would be Abel Pumphrey. I wondered how he had recognized me, and asked. He said the AP Bureau had produced a description, and a photograph. He wondered whether I'd had lunch, and when I told him no, he suggested Harvey's. Outside the station was a sedan, with a government seal, and N.R.P., stenciled on its door.

We ordered clams and steaks and then Klutz said: “I suppose this is as good a time as any to fill you in on the big picture. We're really beginning to build an organization, now. Everybody thinks the Chief is the coming man in the Administration. Of course, it has been an uphill fight all the way. First the Interior Department tried to take over, and then the Public Health Service claimed it was their baby. Right now we're operating under the Executive Office of the President, so we don't have much budget trouble. The real test will come when we go to Congress for regular annual appropriations. I guess our big break was when we got Adam away from the National Research Council.”

“How is Homer Adam?” I inquired. “I'd like to see him as soon as possible.”

He looked at me, curiously, and then took a pencil from an inside pocket and began drawing a chart on the tablecloth. “Now up at the top, of course,” he went on, ignoring my question, “is the President, and right under the President—” his deft pencil drew a little box and began filling it with names—“is the Inter-Departmental Advisory Committee. They decide top policy.”

“On what?” I asked. “I thought the idea was simply to get Adam in shape, and then start producing babies.”

“Oh, no!” Klutz said, startled. “The production end is only the smallest part of it! That comes way down here—” he indicated the bottom of the tablecloth—“in Operations.”

“Now as you see,” he went on, “the top policy group is composed of the President himself, the Secretaries of State, War, Interior, and Navy—I don't know why they put in Navy except that they put in War—the Surgeon General, Director of National Research Council—we couldn't keep him off it—and finally the Chief.”

A strange light came into Klutz's eyes, and he began to sketch more boxes, connected by lines horizontally and vertically, with lightning precision. “Now right under the top policy group N.R.P. operates. I'm over here to the right of the Chief, and under me I've got Administration, Budget, Housing, Communications, and Transportation. I don't fool around with policy, planning, or operations. I'm just the man who keeps things running.”

Klutz's pencil raced on. “Branching off this line that runs from the Chief up to top policy we have the liaison officers from the other departments or agencies—we're having a tough time finding suitable quarters for all of them—and directly under the Chief we have the Planning Board.”

“Planning Board?”

“Certainly! You see, policy flows down to the Chief from the top group, and then down to the Planning Board, which is composed
of our own heads of branches and divisions. The Planning Board issues the directives and passes them on down to be implemented. Right off the Planning Board, here, we have the Advisory Committee which is composed of leading physicians and biologists and such from all over the country. They aren't in government, of course. They're just to give us backing when we need it.”

Klutz hadn't touched his clams, and he didn't seem to notice when the waiter whisked them off the table. “The Deputy Director falls right under the Planning Board, and out from him you have our own liaison officers, who operate on the Planning Level, including the one to Congress, and our own advisory group on international problems which communicates directly with the State Department and sends proposals to the Planning Board. You see how nicely the channels flow.”

“Yes. I see.” I found I was watching like a child fascinated by a sidewalk artist sketching the Battle of Bunker Hill.

“Right under the Deputy Director come the Assistant Directors for the various branches,” Klutz went on. “Research and Analytical. Statistical. Public Relations. And of course, Operations. Then under the branches there come the various divisions, which I'll just sketch in here in small boxes, because I don't think they'd interest you just now.”

“And where do I fit in?” I asked.

“Well, you see we've already got an Assistant Director for Public Relations—Gableman. Did you ever meet him?”

“No, I don't think so.”

“He's a very fine newspaperman,” Klutz said, in some surprise. “I think he started doing publicity for the WPA, and later he shifted to the National Youth Administration. I think he also wrote for NRA. Anyway, he was one of the young writers for the Office of Facts and Figures, and then he graduated to the OWI. He went to the State Department from the OWI, and we got him from them. Very fine newspaperman. Very experienced. He's building up an excellent
branch. I'm giving them a building of their own very shortly.”

“And me?”

“Well, frankly, you're rather a problem. You see we already have an Assistant Director for Public Relations, so we'll make you Special Assistant to the Director, and put you in here.” He drew a line away from the line that connected Pumphrey to the Planning Board, and put a little box at the end of it, and wrote “Smith” inside the box. “I don't know whether you'll operate on the policy, or the planning, or the operations level,” Klutz explained, “so in any case that will take care of it.”

“Is Homer Adam in that little box with me?” I demanded.

Klutz appeared uneasy, as if the lunch he hadn't eaten wasn't agreeing with him. “Oh, no,” he said, “Adam is way down here, at the bottom. You're way up at the top.” In a little square at the end of Operations he wrote, “Adam.”

I felt a powerful urge to finish my steak, leave the check for Klutz, and catch the next train back for New York, but instead I said, “Now look, bud. The only reason I came to this goddam town was to take care of Adam. If I'm not going to take care of Adam, say so now, and I'll be on my way. This wasn't my idea. It came from Adam first, and then from the White House.”

When I mentioned the White House, Klutz gulped, and instantly his manner changed. “Oh, I'm sorry,” he said. “I didn't know that.”

I recognized Klutz as one of the public servants who has no equals. He has only superiors or inferiors. Everybody is neatly tagged either above him, or below him. He keeps his nose nestled close under the coattails of those above, and his feet firmly planted on the heads of those underneath, and if he maintains this balance for thirty years he gets a pension and retires to Chevy Chase. “Well, you know it now,” I told him.

“I didn't bring up the matter of Adam,” he explained, “because there seems to have been some confusion about him in the directives.
You see, when Adam was turned over to N.R.P. the Army still managed to keep a finger in the pie. They claimed that the presidential directive merely gave N.R.P. the use of Adam, but that his security was still a matter for the Army. We reached an agreement with the Army by which a committee was set up.”

“Another committee!”

“Yes. It was set up simply to direct overall policy on Adam, personally, rather than Adam in the productive sense, and to hand down directives to the Operations Branch. I represented N.R.P. on the committee and Phelps-Smythe—”

“That bastard!” I remarked, and Klutz jumped.

“Well, he represented the Army. Phelps-Smythe and I reached an agreement that you could also sit on the committee.”

I told him what I thought of such an arrangement in a few words, all short and Elizabethan, and Klutz said he thought Pumphrey should decide, and I told him we might as well have a showdown right away.

The National Re-fertilization Project was camped in a group of buildings near the intersection of 23rd and D streets, in Northwest Washington, and it spread out into temporary structures, lately abandoned by the Navy, that occupied adajacent parkland.

Within the Administration Building there was an impressive bustle—the scuttling back and forth of girl messengers, the clatter of a typist pool, the buzz of telephones, the passionate murmurs that rose from conference rooms. Through the building there was the smell of fresh paint, and a sense of growth and change.

A new government agency on the upgrade mushrooms within the capital like a tropical plant. Its growth is exotic and surprising as an orchid, but like a fungus it is a frail plant, likely to wither swiftly and die under the cold breath of Congress or the Bureau of the Budget.

But the offices of Abel Pumphrey were cut off from the surrounding uproar by soundproof walls, and furnished in the solid good taste
of one who has been firmly fastened to the public teat for years. Abel Pumphrey's name kept appearing in the Congressional Directory long after the bureaus and agencies he headed became half-forgotten combinations of initials. He came to Washington as a liberal Republican, at the proper time switched to being a conservative Democrat, but he was born a bureaucrat. This means that he had thousands of acquaintances, no firm allegiances or convictions, no enemies, and probably no close friends with the possible exception of his wife.

He was picked as Director of N.R.P., immediately after W.S. Day, because he was considered “safe.” There wasn't any other place to put him at the moment, and he had six children. At that time Mr. Adam had not been discovered, much less acquired by N.R.P., so the task of re-fertilization seemed more theoretical than practical. Now Pumphrey's post had suddenly become extremely important, and of the most consuming public interest, and Pumphrey was more than somewhat worried.

Outwardly, however, he seemed calm and cheery—an apple-red and apple-round man with a Herbert Hoover collar squeezing his neck—when he greeted me. “Well, well, Steve!” he said. We had never met before. “It's certainly fine of you to come down here and help us out. Fine! Fine! Percy here will get you all squared away. How about it, Percy?”

I didn't give Klutz a chance to speak. I said, “I'm afraid there's been some misunderstanding. I came here to get Adam on his feet. That's all. Nothing else. As far as I know, that's all the White House wants me to do.”

Every time I said White House, Klutz jumped. I decided to say it more often. “Naturally,” said Pumphrey. “I am in full accord with that. Didn't you explain, Percy?”

“I told him about the directive,” Klutz said, “and the little committee we'd set up, and how he could sit on the committee.”

I said, “No committees. I hate committees.”

Pumphrey spread out his hands in a placating gesture. “Now
Steve,” he said, “wouldn't it be better if there was a committee, even if you did all the work and made all the actual, ah—contacts? The protection of Adam is a very delicate matter, very delicate. Very delicate, and ticklish. If anything happened, if there was, ah—any scandal, wouldn't it be better if the War Department shared the responsibility?”

I said, “No.”

Pumphrey drooped. “I suppose ultimately,” he decided, “the responsibility is that of the President. After all, he picked you for this particular phase of our work. I'll ask him to clarify the directive. Or maybe I'd better not. I'm not sure that it's not clear now. Anyway, I'll call in Phelps-Smythe, and we'll tell him about it. Phelps-Smythe is the Army's liaison officer over here. He's been representing the Army on the committee, you know.”

“I know,” I said.

Phelps-Smythe hadn't changed since Tarrytown, neither he nor his ribbons. He knew what was up, of course, and by the way he talked I could tell he had discussed it with his general and decided upon a course of action. After Pumphrey explained that the committee was ended, he said, with the formality of a diplomat delivering a démarche to a hostile state:

“The War Department strongly disapproves of relaxing security measures for the protection of Homer Adam. The War Department wishes to point out that if anything happened to Adam the future of the nation would be endangered.”