Free Mr. Adam by Pat Frank

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.
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œAnother committee!”
    â€œYes. 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—”
    â€œThat bastard!” I remarked, and Klutz jumped.
    â€œWell, 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 tasteof 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.