His mood infected those in contact with him and spread throughout the organization.
Something had to be done.
Ardmore was sufficiently honest with himself to recognize, if not to diagnose, his own weakness. He called Thomas into his office, and unburdened his soul. Concluding, he asked, “What do you think I should do about it, Jeff? Has the job got too big for me? Should I try to pick out somebody else to take over?”
Thomas shook his head slowly. “I don’t think you ought to do that,
Chief. Nobody could work any harder than you do — there are just twenty-four hours in a day. Besides, whoever relieved you would have the same problems without your intimate knowledge of the background and your imaginative grasp of what we are trying to accomplish.”
“Well, I’ve got to do something. We’re about to move into the second phase of this show, when we start in systematically trying to break the nerve of the PanAsians. When that reaches a crisis, we’ve got to have the congregation of every temple ready to act as a military unit. That means more work, not less. And I’m not ready to handle it! Good grief, man you’d think that somebody somewhere would have worked out a science of executive organization so that a big organization could be handled without driving the man at the top crazy! For the past two hundred years the damned scientists have kept hauling gadget after gadget out of their laboratories, gadgets that simply demand big organizations to use them
— but never a word about how to make those organizations run.” He struck a match savagely. “It’s not rational!”
“Wait a minute, Chief, wait a minute.” Thomas wrinkled his brow in an intense effort to remember. “Maybe there has been such work done — I seem to recall something I read once, something about Napoleon being the last of the generals.”
“Huh?”
“It’s pertinent. This chap’s idea was that Napoleon was the last of the great generals to exercise direct command, because the job got too big.
A few years later the Germans invented the principle of staff command, and, according to this guy, generals were through: as generals. He thought that Napoleon wouldn’t have stood a chance against an army headed by a general staff. Probably what you need is a staff:”
“For Pete’s sake, I’ve got a staff! A dozen secretaries and twice that many messengers and clerks — I fall over ’em.”
“I don’t think it was that kind of a staff he was talking about.
Napoleon must have had that kind of a staff.”
“Well, what did he mean?”
“I don’t know exactly, but apparently it was a standard notion in modern military organization. You’re not a graduate of the War College?”
“You know damn well I’m not.” It was true. Thomas had guessed from very early in their association that Ardmore was a layman, improvising as he went along, and Ardmore knew that he knew; yet each had kept his mouth closed.
“Well, it seems to me that a graduate of the War College might be able to give us some hints about organization.”
“Fat chance. They either died in battle, or were liquidated after the collapse. If any escaped, they are lying very low and doing their best to conceal their identity — for which you can’t blame them.”
“No, you can’t. Well, forget it — I guess it wasn’t such a good idea after all.”
“Don’t be hasty. It was a good idea. Look — armies aren’t the only big organizations. Take the big corporations, like Standard Oil and U. S.
Steel and General Motors — they must have worked out the same principles.”
“Maybe. Some of them, anyhow — although some of them burn their executives out pretty young. Generals have to be killed with an ax, it seems to me.”
“Still, some of them must know something. Will you see if you can stir out a few?”
Fifteen minutes later a punched-card selector was rapidly rifling through the personnel files of every man and woman who had been reported on by the organization. It turned out that several men of business executive experience were actually then working in the Citadel in jobs of greater or lesser administrative importance. Those were called in, and dispatches were sent out summoning about a dozen more to “make a pilgrimage” to the Mother Temple.