The Golden Fleece Read Free Page A

“I’ve told you, Son,” he said, “that you don’t need the sales pitch. I know you can make me money, with or without being able to see twice as many colors as the man in the street. I gather that you’ve had difficulty in the past convincing people that you really can see things they can’t?”
     
    Adrian nodded. “Some people,” he admitted, “think I’m... well, bullshitting. Seeing is believing, they reckon, and if they can’t see something, they can’t believe in it.”
     
    Jarndyke nodded slowly. “But you’ve met other people who can make the same discriminations?” he said.
     
    “After a fashion,” Adrian admitted. “I’ve run into others who are better than average, but I’ve never actually met anyone with my degree of sensitivity—not in the flesh. I know they exist, though, because I can see it in their works. Claude Monet. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Caravaggio.”
     
    “Painters.”
     
    “That’s right. They’re probably not the only people who can reflect their perception in their work—some fashion designers can surely do it too—but painters are the most obvious.”
     
    “Why didn’t you become a painter?”
     
    The bluntness of the question surprised Adrian slightly, but he met it with his customary wry smile. “Because I can’t paint,” he said. “I can see, but I don’t have the hand-eye coordination that would allow me to reproduce what I see. I can visualize shapes very well, even in three dimensions, but I can’t reproduce them with my incompetent fingers and a pencil or a brush. I don’t even have the kind of design-control that would allow me to be an adept abstract expressionist, like Jackson Pollock. Sometimes, I think that I’m only half the person I might have been, with only half a talent, but I’m not entirely certain that the painters were that much luckier. After all, the number of people who can measure their true achievement—consciously, at any rate—is very small. Can I talk about textiles again now? I know I don’t need the sales pitch, but I really would like you to understand where I might fit in with your enterprise.”
     
    Jarndyke frowned, and his mouth twisted into what might have been an expression of annoyance, but he nodded his shaggy head. “Go on,” he said.
     
    “In the beginning,” Adrian said, “what I can do for you is help to produce a basic color range for your various fabrics. I’m a geneticist; I don’t expect to be involved in the tailoring end of your operation. I really am interested in the psychology of color as well as its genetics, though, and the way that the two intersect and interact. I’d like to do pure research in that area, for my own esthetic satisfaction—but I’d like it, too, if the results of that research had some practical application for you, and I think they might.
     
    “In the fullness of time, I hope that I might be able to help your designers understand what they need, in terms of coloring your fabrics for particular styles of tailoring. I won’t be able to give you natural patterns for a while, yet—even stripes and polka-dots might take a decade or so—when I can, I think I’ll be able to work out the best color combinations. I hope that I can not only give you the best reds, the best blues, the best browns and the best blacks, but good combinations and designs—and good advice as to how to use them for maximum subliminal effect.
     
    “I hope that you’ll see the effect on your balance-sheet of my initial labors by the end of next year, but that might be only the beginning. With the opportunities you can give me...well, I really don’t know as yet what might be possible, but I really would like the chance to find out. There’s a lifetime’s work in it, and more, but I’m keen to make what progress I can. I can’t paint—but I’m a scientist, and I can hope to do what the painters never could: understand. I could do that sort of research in Academe, I suppose, but I