Page:Astounding Science Fiction (1950-01).djvu/33



One thing about machines, there's an inevitable logic about them, and their organization. If a man could really follow that logic through—some deadly little bits of knowledge might turn up...

When Jim Tredel was a boy he was towheaded and already large framed. People said he would grow up to be big, like his father, and blond, and probably not bad looking. He did grow big, like his father, and not bad looking. Not good looking, just not bad looking. He fooled them on the blond business, he kept on looking like a towhead.

When Jim Tredel was six years old there had been a game, a quite wonderful, only partly understood, game which his father began to play with him. In later years Jim ran across the quotation, "Underlying oneness—" that seemed to help express all his father tried to teach him in that game.

Big Tom Tredel was a machinist. He worked in a machine shop when he was ten years old. He worked there all his life, the last forty-five years as its owner. He was in the same shop when he was past seventy. With no schooling at all he learned to read and write while he worked. He learned all the math and common sense he ever had reason to need, at the shop or away from it.

On his own, he learned a philosophy that was his own. It began to form in the first few weeks he worked, grew with the years.

"There is no such thing as a part," he would explain, over and over, to his son, Jim. It was Jim Tredel, not James, just as the father was Tom, not Thomas—a full and legal name.

"There is no such thing as a piece. There is no such thing as something that doesn't belong to something else. There is nothing, except as it fits into something else, as it's part of the whole.

"The arm of a chair now, for instance. That arm is meant to fit the back of a chair, and the seat of the chair. It is also meant to fit the forearm of the man who sits in it. A person who's never seen one before, but is trained to know relationships, should be able to reason NOT TO BE OPENED—