Takeoff (Sci-Fi Classic). Cyril M. Kornbluth

      "Cliff!"

      "——Cliff, how did you get hooked up with this? I'm damned if I know what to make of the setup."

      "Neither do I. But I don't care. I got hooked up with them when Western canned me. I can't get another aircraft job because of the industrial black list, and I can't get a Government job because I'm a subversive agent or a spy or some goddamned thing like that." Suddenly he sounded bitter.

      "How's that?"

      "They don't tell you—you know that; your ad said you was with the A.E.C.—but I guess it's because I been around the world a couple of times. Maybe, they figure, just maybe, old Cliff sold out when we wasn't watching him. Also my wife's a foreigner, so better be safe than sorry, says Uncle Sam."

      "I know that game," Novak said. "Doesn't matter. You wouldn't have lasted five minutes with A.E.C. even if they did hire you."

      "Well, well! So I didn't miss a thing! Look, Mike. I gotta go show my kids how to wipe their noses, so I'll let ya rassle with your conscience and I hope to see you around." He gave Novak the oily grip again and walked cockily from the base of the rocket to the Quonsets.

      Friml was at Novak's side instantly, looking impatient.

      Driving back to Los Angeles, Novak asked bluntly: "Are you people building a moon ship or aren't you?"

      "If the A.S.F.S.F. is building a moon ship," said Friml, "I don't want to hear about it. I should tell you that, whatever is being built, they've got a well-kept set of books and a strictly controlled audit on the purchasing." He gave Novak a little sidelong look. "One man they tried before Clifton made a very common mistake. He thought that because he knew technical matters and I didn't, he could pad his purchases by arrangement with the vendors' salesmen and I'd be none the wiser. It took exactly eight days for me to see through his plan."

      "I get the hint," said Novak wearily. "But I still don't know whether I want the job. Was Clifton really a project engineer with Western Air?"

      "I really don't know. I have absolutely no responsibility for procurement of personnel. I can tell you that he has no local or F.B.I. criminal record. I consider it a part of my job to check that far on employees whose duties include recommending expenditures."

      Friml left him at the Los Angeles Airport at his request. Novak said he'd get in touch with him in the morning and let him know one way or the other; then he picked up his bag and took a taxi to a downtown hotel. It was 4.30 when he checked in, and he placed a call at once to the personnel department of Western Aircraft.

      "I'd like to enquire," he said, "About the employment record of a Mr. Clifton. He says in his, uh, application to us that he was employed as a project engineer at Western Air last year."

      "Yes, sir. Mr. Clifton's first name, sir?"

      "Ah, I can't make it out from his signature." If he had been told Clifton's first name, he couldn't remember it.

      "One moment, sir ... we have a Mr. August Clifton, project engineer, employed two years and five months, separated January seventeenth last year——"

      "What's the reason for separation?"

      "It says 'incompatibility with supervisory personnel.'"

      "That's the one. Thanks very much, miss."

      "But don't you want efficiency, health, and the rest of it, sir?"

      "Thanks, no." He didn't need them. Anybody who hung on for two years and five months at Western as a projects man and only got fired after a fight was efficient and healthy and the rest of it; otherwise he wouldn't have lasted two hours and five minutes. It wasn't like the A.E.C.; at Western, you produced.

      No, he thought, stretching out in his clothes on the bed; it wasn't like the A.E.C., and neither was the A.S.F.S.F. He felt a moment of panic at the thought, and knew why he felt it.

      Spend enough time in Government and it unmanned you. Each pay check drawn on the Treasury took that much more of yourself away from yourself. Each one of the stiff, blue-green paper oblongs punched with I.B.M. code slots made you that much more willing to forget you might be running a pointless repeat of a research that had been done and done, and done, with nobody the wiser, in scattered and classified labs across the country.

      Each swig from the public teat had more and more poppy juice in it. Gradually you forgot you had been another kind of person, holding ideas, fighting for them, working until dawn on coffee, falling for women, getting drunk sometimes. You turned grey after enough of the poppy juice—nice grey.

      You said: "Well, now, I wouldn't put it that way," and "There's something to be said on both sides, of course," and "It doesn't pay to go overboard; the big thing is to keep your objectivity."

      The nice grey people married early and had a child or two right away to demonstrate that they were normal family men. They had hobbies and talked about them to demonstrate that they weren't one-sided cranks. They drank a little, to demonstrate that they weren't puritans, but not much, to demonstrate that they weren't drunks.

      Novak wondered if they tasted bile, as he was tasting it now, thinking of what he had almost become.