out what that chair arm is, and what a chair looks like.
"The arm goes with other parts to make a chair. But that chair isn't complete in itself. It's designed to hold a man who sits. It's no good unless it does that. The four legs of the chair are made to come to the same plane, so it will rest evenly on the floor. And the floor is another component, meeting the walls of the house, which are built to reach the foundations.
"The foundations lead to the street, and that street connects with other streets, so that one house is connected to all the other houses in the world. And if there's an ocean in between, they're still connected."
Tom Tredel had a hundred different ways of saying the same thing, so that the boy must understand. And, with it all, they played the game.
For a while it had been jigsaw puzzles, and the boy had seen the interconnection of the pieces, and how each piece fitted others, and yet others.
Then he had the same building toys to play with that other children had, but he learned to play with them a little differently. It was not what could be constructed with them that mattered, it was the way the units went together that was important. Then the realization that the whole was not really the whole, because it had become a part of the table, the floor, or whatever it rested upon, and thus was attached to the Earth, the Moon, the Sun, and the Universe.
Tom Tredel could take a machined part in his big, rough hands, or a piece of sheet metal that had been fashioned with a purpose, study it briefly, turning it to observe unseen attachments, and seem to see the continuations of it that were not there to be seen. From a part he could visualize the assembly of which it must be component, and then describe the connecting assemblies until he had joined it finally and without question to Earth. Only then was he satisfied, and only then did it become an orderly component of an orderly Universe.
Jim learned. At first it was a game, and fun. Later on, it was not a game, and not so much fun. Yet, he continued to learn, because at the same time he discovered it was not, actually, a game, he was old enough to know it was expected of him. Tom Tredel saw that his son did what was expected of him.
Still, it was not the trade of machinist that Tom Tredel wanted Jim to learn. Jim picked it up, the way he was taught—working in the shop to earn allowance money.
His father had other plans for Jim. Something just a little bit better than being a machinist had come along, and Tom was quick to see it. Some people might think a lot of things better than being a machinist—being a doctor, lawyer, dentist. To Tom Tredel those were the occupations that carried men along, so they
