What Thin Partitions Read Free Page B

out the door.
    Sara came to the door and looked in. “You took long enough on that one,” she accused.
    "It takes a little longer,” I said with pedantic gravity, “to lead a scientist to the essential point. He's a little more resourceful in figuring out hazards to keep himself from getting where he wants to go.
    But I remembered Auerbach's remarks about salesmanship. “However, in this instance,” I mused honestly, “I'm not just sure as to who was leading whom."
    "You wanted little Jennie Malasek,” Sara said. “You may have her."
    I wasn't reassured by the phrasing, the emphasis, or the look on her face.
    The time I had lost on the last two interviews, I made up on this one. Children are realists and only poorly skilled in hypocrisy. They will go along with the gag if an adult insists on being whimsical, conciliatory or fantastic, but only because adults are that way and there's nothing they can do about it.
    Sara brought Jennie in, gave me a cryptic look, and closed the door behind her as she left.
    Jennie stood at the door, a dark little thing, showing some evidence that the nursery teachers had made an attempt to clean her up before sending her over. They hadn't quite succeeded. There was no chocolate around her pinched little mouth, so Sara hadn't succeeded in capturing her either. I wondered why they hadn't combed her black hair, and then realized Jennie might have pulled it down in front of her face for something to hide behind. Her black eyes gleamed as she peered at me through the oily strands.
    "Sit in this chair, Jennie,” I said casually, and went on being busy with things on the top of my desk. My request wasn't quite a command, but took obedience entirely for granted. It didn't work with Jennie.
    She still stood at the door, the toe of one slippered foot on the arch of the other, her thin little legs twisted at an odd angle. Her look was neither defiant nor bashful. Nor was it courage covering fear. I was the nearest source of immediate danger. I should be watched. It was simply that, no more.
    I felt I should pity her, that I should warm to her desperate isolation. I was willing to feel sympathy because she did not ask for it. Because ordinarily I admired and liked people who did not accentuate their pathos with calculated fraud.
    I found, to my surprise, that I did not like her. Oddly, I felt she knew it. And even worse, I felt that, knowing it, she was not hurt. But at least she did call for respect. Whatever she was, she was sincerely-whatever she was. I would not be a fraud either. I went to the point.
    "They tell me, Jennie,” I said as matter-of-factly as I could, and I'm experienced at it, “that you throw things and set things on fire."
    If I expected either a burst of tears or defiance, I was mistaken. I didn't have time to observe reactions at all.
    It was as if a sudden hurricane and earthquake had hit the room at the same time. A desk tray full of papers whizzed by my head-my pen stand crashed through the window back of me, I got a shower of paper clips in the chest, my intercom described an arc and crashed broken into a corner. By the time I had wiped the ashes and tobacco from my ashtray out of my eyes and got them to stay open again, Jennie was gone. Sara was standing in the doorway with a look of consternation on her face.
    I was on my way home before I remembered that when Sara and I had cleaned up the mess, I had not remembered picking up Auerbach's little cylinder, his chemical impulse storer. I last saw it laying on the corner of my desk where Auerbach had left it.
    Probably Sara had picked it up and put it away. Anyway, the office was within security boundaries. The cylinder would be safe there.
    I put it out of my mind, and wondered if the library had a card index classification under the heading of “Poltergeist."
* * * *
    I wasn't much better prepared when I came into my office the following morning. Yes, of course, there was plenty of literature on the subject under such