602
PARTISAN REVIEW
The four would look up and their busy hands stop for a second, until
one of them sighed, "That's it, they try to protect you, and they're the
noncombatants."
'''Let mama sew you some nice new pants,'" whined the third girl,
and they burst out laughing. "Like 1 haven't patched every pair of pants
in the unit, with twine when we ran out of thread."
"I don't go home," said the fourth girl. "I can't take it."
Avram would interrupt the talk when it chafed too much against his
sense of natural order.
ON
THIS PARTICULAR DAY,
there had already been one catastrophe. An
Egyptian Spitfire had flown over earlier, and a sizea ble explosion had
been heard. Then Meir from the ballistics lab had gone to Lippmann
Brothers for some bolts and come back all shaken up. The hardware
store was flattened and the bodies of both Lippmanns had been
removed. The Science Corps mourned the able brothers who had con–
spired with them on the robot dog. Getting hardware was also going to
be tougher.
Afterwards, Avram was supervising the mine workshop when a
knock came at the door. He opened it and was shocked. Weizmann in
his cravat and black suit was thin as a bookmark, a goatee fraying off
his chin. He leaned on the arm of David Bergmann, a brilliant VIP who
drove Avram crazy. Bergmann was the type who would light a cigarette
while talking, forgetting the one already in his mouth. Now he'd really
blown it. He hadn't steered Weizmann clear of the office where, natu–
rally, the poster-sized cartoon was bound to make the president wonder
aloud, "What is going on here?"
"Mister President," Avram said, full of pity and alarm, "your visit
honors us." He tried to shut the door behind him as the girls' hands rose
to their lips, but Weizmann hobbled right into his chest and made him
back into the room. Squinting at the cluttered table, the president asked,
"What is being produced here?" Avram looked at Bergmann, who
gawked. Avram looked down at Weizmann.
You have to understand the old gentleman's stature. For half a cen–
tury, he had been called the Jewish people's ambassador to the world's
heads of state. He was one of his nation's immortals.
"Mines," Avram Pardes told Chaim Weizmann. He saw no point in
calling them invisible.
The president began to tremble with misery and rage. He was
pathetic and terrifying. He spoke in a shaking, clear voice as if to a for–
mal assembly.
