Sloan Wilson - Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

An hour later Tom stepped into the United Broadcasting building. The elevator operator who took him up to Ogden’s office was a thin boy not more than eighteen years old.

A SECRETARY in a tight pink sweater told Tom that Ogden couldn’t see him for another hour, but that he had asked her to show him to the office he was to occupy. Tom thanked her and followed her down the hall. The passageway ran out of carpet by the time they got to his door, but Tom was surprised at the size of his quarters. He had a room about fifteen feet square entirely to himself, and there was a small alcove where a pert brown-haired secretary sat at a small desk copying letters. “Mr. Rath, this is Miss Lawrence,” the girl in the pink sweater said. “She will be your secretary.”

“It’s nice to meet you,” Miss Lawrence said. She stood up, and smiled.

Tom’s desk was fancily shaped, much like the one behind which Walker had given him his first interview, but he had an ordinary swivel chair instead of a reclining one. He sat down in it. There were two telephones on the desk, an interoffice communication box, and a small panel with three red buttons on it. Experimentally he pushed one of the buttons. Almost immediately, the door to his office opened and a distinguished and statuesque blond girl in a dark-green blouse and expensive-looking tweed skirt came in. “You buzzed, sir?” she asked in a rather upstage Boston accent.

“Who are you?”

“I’m the office girl. I deliver the interoffice mail. Did you buzz for me?”

“By mistake,” Tom said. “Thank you very much.”

She left, and he sat examining the other buttons with interest. Maybe the second one’s for a redhead and the third one’s for a brunette, he thought. After a moment of hesitation, he pushed the second one. This time Miss Lawrence came in. “Yes?” she asked.

“What’s the third button for?”

“Nothing,” she said, grinning. “It’s for men who have two secretaries. Do you know how to use the interoffice communication system?”

He said no, and she showed him. She also explained the telephone system and brought from her desk a stack of papers for him to sign which placed him officially on the pay roll and insured him against almost everything in the world but getting fired. Just as he finished signing them, his interoffice communication box uttered some ominous crackling sounds, like a radio in a thunderstorm. He flicked a switch on it, and Ogden’s voice suddenly shouted at him so loudly that he jumped, “Are you there, Rath?”

Tom turned the volume down to make Ogden more polite. “Just got here,” he said.

“Come up and see me in half an hour,” Ogden almost whispered. There were more noises like static.

“I’ll be there,” Tom said.

There was no reply, and he shut off the box. For a moment he busied himself looking through the drawers of his desk, inspecting with admiration a typewriter which pulled out on a special shelf. Then he turned his chair around and stared out the window. Below him, the city stretched like a map. Far away in the Hudson River a flotilla of destroyers was getting up steam. One of them was using a signal light. Tom could still read Morse Code. “Where in hell is the liberty boat?” the signalman was asking.

Twenty minutes later Tom started toward Ogden’s office. Down the hall he took a wrong turn at a junction of corridors and wound up at the entrance to an enormous room in which about thirty clerks worked at desks in neat rows as in a schoolroom. When he found Ogden’s office it was five minutes past the time set for the appointment, but that didn’t make any difference, because Ogden kept him waiting another hour.

“Glad you could start work today,” Ogden said when he finally had the girl in the pink sweater show him in. “Is your office all right?”

“It’s fine,” Tom said casually.

“About a title for you,” Ogden said. “I suppose we should give you a title. You’ll be responsible directly to me, of course, but I think we’ll call you ‘Special Assistant to Mr. Hopkins.’ There will be times when that title will be useful.”

Ogden paused, and Tom said, “That sounds like a fine title.”

“Just remember that it doesn’t apply to company business,” Ogden said. “You’re special assistant to Mr. Hopkins on this special project — nothing else. That will be made clear inside the company, but of course there will be no need to spell it out anywhere else.”

“Of course,” Tom said.

“Can you have dinner with Mr. Hopkins tonight?”

“Yes,” Tom said, trying not to sound surprised. “I think I can arrange it.”

“Meet us at seven-thirty at his apartment,” Ogden said, and gave a Park Avenue address, which Tom wrote down on a pad and put in his pocket.

“Now let me give you the pitch,” Ogden continued. “There’s a. ” Before he could go on, his telephone rang. “No,” Ogden said into the receiver. “Absolutely not.” He listened for a full minute before adding, “I’m still not convinced. Contact me on it later. Good-by.”

He hung up and shifted his gaze to Tom. With hardly a pause, he said, “The pitch is this. There’s a big convention of medical men in Atlantic City on September 15th. Hopkins has been asked to speak, and he figures it will be a good time for him to send up a trial balloon on this whole project. He can’t mention the small group of doctors who got him interested in all this. We’ve got to help him with the speech.”

“Does that mean you want me to write it?”

Ogden looked at Tom with distaste. “We don’t write speeches for Mr. Hopkins,” he said. “He writes his own speeches. We just help him with the research and try to get something on paper for him to work with.”

“I see,” Tom said, feeling he had made a strategic error.

“Tonight we’re going to kick the speech around,” Ogden said. “You better be thinking about what he should say. He’ll want your ideas.”

Tom didn’t have any idea in the world what the president of United Broadcasting should say to a convention of physicians about mental health. “Did the doctors suggest any topic when they invited him?” he asked.

“No.”

“I suppose he could talk about increasing public understanding of the mental-illness problem,” Tom said tentatively. He was tired of that thought already.

“Maybe. But keep in mind the purpose of the speech. If we achieve our purpose one hundred per cent, the audience should rise as one man when he’s through and demand that he start a national committee on mental health immediately. He shouldn’t propose such a thing, understand — they should suggest it to him. If this is the kind of speech it should be, every newspaper in the country should have it on the front page the next morning. Requests for him to form a national committee on mental health should pour in from all over the nation.”

“It’ll have to be quite a speech,” Tom said.

“Perhaps we can’t expect to achieve our purpose one hundred per cent, but we ought to keep the goal clearly in mind. And we also must not forget the possibility of a one hundred per cent failure. Do you know what that would be?”

“No response at all,” Tom said.

“No — a negative response. If the speech went one hundred per cent wrong, the doctors would all get together to prevent the formation of a national committee on mental health. Mr. Hopkins would be accused of meddling in things he didn’t know anything about. United Broadcasting would be described as a sinister influence trying to muscle in on the doctors for mysterious reasons. People would say we want socialized medicine, or that we are reactionaries fighting co-operative health plans. Hopkins would be accused of being a publicity hound. Rumors would start that he had political ambitions. If that sort of thing happened, the whole project would of course have to be abandoned.”