The Big Idea

by Ray Cummings

That summer was a hard one for Jimmy. Even though he had an all-absorbing idea to fill his thoughts, the utter loneliness of his life was hard to bear. He worked all day at the office. Three evenings a week he spent at the night school; and the others he wandered aimlessly about, going to the movies often and to a play occasionally, and always alone.

At the office Jimmy made many business friends. Every one liked him; his ready smile and his ingenuous manner made friends easily. Jimmy’s work took him constantly into many different departments of the organization, and in each of them he soon found opportunity to learn what there was to know about that particular branch of the work. His system, as he developed it in his mind, was not only to learn about his own job, but about the jobs of as many others as he possibly could.

It wasn’t so very hard to do either, as he soon found out. There was no particular mystery about business, as he had always supposed, and among the clerks and under officials with whom he was working during this period, the competition, so far as brains was concerned, was not alarming.

Jimmy was not the least inclined to be conceited, but there were at least twenty young men in the company that he told himself he had “skinned to death for brains.”

It was just after his second visit home, and when he had been with the Wentworth Company about three months, that he first made friends with George Cooper outside of the office.

The office manager was a lanky chap of thirty-one. He was smooth-shaven, with big, rough-hewn features, piercing blue eyes, and sparse, sandy hair. His voice had a deep, booming quality, and, around the office, a vigorous note of authority that commanded respect.

But at the theater, where he and Jimmy went that first evening, he was very different—a modest, unassuming, laughing boy, years younger than he appeared during business hours. The change surprised Jimmy tremendously. He immediately lost the awe he had always unconsciously felt for his business superior, without losing any of the respect or admiration; and in consequence felt his own importance and confidence in himself enhanced.

This friendship of Jimmy and George Cooper grew rapidly; until finally, one evening in September, Jimmy felt he could no longer keep his great secret to himself. So he told his friend all about it, and just what Mr. Hope had said.

The office manager was enthusiastic. He knew no more than Jimmy about the feasibility of the plan itself—and Jimmy up to this time had learned very little—but he realized more than Jimmy possibly could how beneficial to the company it would be if it worked. Also, Mr. Cooper had a better idea of how to go about finding out the things Jimmy wanted to know than he had.

So they planned to “dope it out” together, and immediately started spending two evenings a week at the public library looking it up. After which, by Christmas at least, the office manager proposed taking Jimmy to one of the company’s technical men.