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Show 191 them, though, slowly, because he knew Yulyona would soon ask him another question, and his answer was going to displease her. The question came sooner than he'd hoped. "Now that you're sixteen," she asked, "what are your plans? Will you come back to school?" Karl took a deep breath. "This afternoon I applied at the employment office of the Canaan Works. Tomorrow I start to work in the rail mill. No, wait!" he said, raising his hand. "Don't look disappointed until I have a chance to explain." He folded his napkin and leaned forward, elbows on his knees, his hands clamped together to keep them steady. "Andy and I have always done a lot of talking," he said. "Andy is the smartest person I know -- except you -- and he told me that the reason men don't get ahead in the steel mills is because they never learn anything except their own jobs. A blast furnace man knows furnaces -- that's all. A rolling mill man only knows about rolling billets. Nobody bothers to learn the overall process, from ore to steel. So that's what I'm going to do -- learn everything. And the best place to do that is in the mill." "You make it sound entirely too simplistic," she said. "It will be impossible for you to...." "I'm young," he interrupted. "I'll spend a year in one part of the mill, and then transfer to the next. And I'll study. Right there in the mill, I ought to be able to understand books about steelmaking a lot better than college boys do in their classrooms." |
