* * * * *
Doc Stone made sure I wouldn't give him the "too busy" routine. He
sent Millie to get me.
"Okay, Millie," I said to Stone's secretary. "I'll be right with you."
I cleared the restricted notes and plans from my desk and locked them
in the file cabinet, per regulations, and walked beside Millie to
Stone's office.
"It's a reflex mechanism, Mike," Dr. Stone said as Millie showed me
in. "Every type knows how to fight for survival." He took one
thoughtful puff on his pipe. "The old fud," he added.
"The solenoid again, Doc?" I asked.
"What else, Mike?" he said, raising his pale eyebrows. "It's Paul
Cleary's baby, and after all these years with the company, he doesn't
figure to go down without a fight."
So I was in the middle of it. I had no business to be there, either.
The design of that solenoid certainly hadn't been mine. All I had ever
done was find out how to destroy it. And after all, that's part of
what my lab does, and what I do, for a living.
"Quit staring out the window, Mike," Doc said behind me. "Here, sit
down."
I took the chair beside the desk and watched him go through the
business of unloading his pipe, taking the carefully air-tight top off
the humidor we had machined for him down in the lab, and loading up
with the cheapest Burley you can buy. So much for air-tight
containers. Doc got it going, which took two wooden matches, because
the stuff was wringing wet--thanks again to an air-tight container.
"I just left Cleary's office, Mike," he explained. "He won't admit
that there's any significance to the failures you have introduced in
his solenoid. He insists that your test procedures affected
performance more than design did, and he wants to talk with you."
"Great," I said glumly. "Can I count on you to give me a good
recommendation for my next employer?"
"Cut it out, Mike," he said, coming as near to a snap as his careful
voice could manage. He blew smoke out around the stem of his pipe. I
think sometimes it's a part of his act, like the slightly-out-of-press
sports jacket and flannel trousers. It says he is a sure enough Ph.D.
If you ask me, he's a comer. You can't rate him for lack of brains. He
knows an awful lot about solid-state physics, and for a physicist, he
sure learned enough about micro-assemblies of electronic components. I
guess that's why he was in charge of final assembly of the Telstar
satellites for COMCORP.
"Don't worry about what Paul Cleary can do _to_ you, Mike," he
suggested. "Think a little bit more about what Fred Stone can do _for_
you. Cleary is only a year or so from retirement, and you know it."
"He could make that an awful tough year, Doc." I said. "You told me he
won't hear of design bugs in that solenoid. He'll insist something
went wrong in assembly."
Doc Stone smiled thinly at me and brushed at his blond crew cut. "It
is a tough spot, Mike," he agreed. "Because I won't hear any talk of
faulty assembly. You'll have to choose, I guess. If you think you can
make your bed by playing footsie with an old fud who has only a year
to go, try it. Just remember that I've got another thirty years to go,
and I'll breathe down your neck every minute of them if you let me
down!"
"Sure," I said. "When do I see him?"
"Now."
* * * * *
Doc Stone got someone named Sylvia on the phone and then told me to go
right up. After I got there, I had to sit and wait in Cleary's outer
office.
I shared it with a small, intense girl named Sylvia Shouff, if you
believed the little plastic sign on her desk. There was barely room
for it in the welter of paper, files, notebooks, phones, calendars and
other junk she had squirreled. She was much too busy banging at a
typewriter and handling the phone to pay any attention to me. Her
pert, lively manner said she hadn't taken any wooden nickels lately.
But I had. The last series of tests in my lab had put me in the middle
of a hell of a scrap. It had all started a couple years back, when the
final design had been approved for a whole sky-full of communications
satellites. Well, eighteen, to be exact. One of the parts in the
design had been a solenoid, part No. M1537, which handled a switching
operation too potent for a solid-state switch. That solenoid was one
of the few moving parts in the Telstars, and it had been designed for
skeighty-eight million cycles before it got sloppy or quit.
In practice, out in space, the switching operation simply hadn't
worked. After about a hundred hours of use in Telstar One, it failed.
Unfortunately, this had not been discovered until the first six
satellites had been launched. Further launchings were postponed while
they ran accelerated switching tests on satellites Two through Six out
in space. The same kind of failure took place on each bird.
There were two schools of thought on licking the bug. Doc Stone, of
course, insisted that solenoid M1537 had failed, which was one
possible interpretation of the telemetry. And Paul Cleary, who had
been in charge of design, insisted that faulty assembly was to blame.
Well, somebody would make up his mind pretty soon, and my evidence
would have a lot to do with it. I had done the appraisal tests of the
circuit in the test lab once the bug had been detected, and now Cleary
was going to smoke it out of me.
"Mr. Seaman," Sylvia Shouff said to me, kind of waking me up. "Mr.
Cleary will see you now. Have you ever met?" she added, as I came
toward her desk.
I shook my head. "I'm a working stiff," I said, "I never get to meet
the brass."
"You are also somewhat insolent," she said tartly. "Better wash out
your mouth before you try that on Paul Cleary. He eats wise young
laboratory technicians for breakfast."
"Yes, _mam_!" I said, feeling my ears burn. She led me to the door,
opened it, and introduced me to Paul Cleary. He lumbered out around
his desk and shook my hand with his rather gnarled and boney paw.
"Hello, Seaman. I'm glad to meet you, young man. Come in. We have a
lot to talk about," he said.
* * * * *
Considering that Cleary was a wheel, and had thirty years of service
with Western Electric behind him, his office wasn't especially large.
Maybe that's because Communications Corporation is owned half by the
government and half by AT&T. The government half makes us watch our
pennies.
"Have a seat, Mike," Cleary said, going around to lower himself
carefully into a tall swivel chair. He learned back and rocked slowly,
like an old woman on the front porch of a resort hotel. His pipe was
still smoking in a rather large ashtray. He picked it up, showing it
to be a curve-stemmed old-man's style, and puffed contentedly at it.
On him it didn't look like an act.
"Well," he said, pulling big shaggy eyebrows down so they shaded his
pale blue eyes. "You've become something of a celebrity around here,
Mike."
This was an unexpected approach. "Nobody told _me_," I complained.
"Does this kind of fame show up in the paycheck?"
"Not always," Cleary said, scowling a little. "I just meant that your
name gets bandied about. Every time I talk to Fred Stone he says, 'Dr.
Seaman says this,' or 'Dr. Seaman says that.' I just had to see what
this doctor looked like."
"You can forget the doctor part," I said uncomfortably. I had heard
that Cleary was sensitive about having no advanced degree. When he
went to work for the Western, college was plenty. You did your
post-graduate work on the job. He sure had--and he had a string of
patents as long as your arm to prove it.
"That's good," he said. "I'd hate to think I was competing with you in
the field of knowledge where you are the world's specialist."
I grinned at him a little sickly. "COMCORP has never made any use of
my specialty," I conceded. "You already had about ten guys around here
who had learned twice as much as I had simply by doing it every day
for a living. They could have written rings around my thesis."
"Sure," he said contentedly, puffing more smoke. "So we made a testing
engineer out of you. And you may amount to something, to hear Fred
Stone tell it."
"Thanks," I said.
"Now let me hear what you've been doing for Fred," Cleary suggested,
in a sort of avuncular tone. "I'd like to measure you myself."
"You mean the tests I ran on the switching gate?" I asked.
"Why, yes, we can start there," he nodded, squinting his blue eyes
more and blowing a real screen up between us.
* * * * *
"When Telstar One packed up, they sent me down the whole gate from
that sector," I said. "Dr. Stone asked me to run destruct tests on the
whole assembly, which I did. The only failures I have induced so far
are failures in M1537, the solenoid that all the shouting is about."
"What kind of failures did you get?"
"Armature froze on the field," I said. "I guess the bearings really
went. When there was enough load on them, they couldn't maintain
concentricity."
"What kind of loads?" he growled, sinking down lower in his chair. He
put his elbows on the arm and laced hairy-backed fingers together
under his chin.
"I put the whole gate on the centrifuge and swung it up to twelve
gees" I said. "Switching was normal there for the twenty thousand
cycles I gave the gate. But when I added undamped vibration at twelve
thousand to fifteen thousand cycles per second, I could induce failure
pretty quickly. Say an hour or so."
"You had to apply the vibration throughout the whole test period to
get these failures?"
"Yes, Mr. Cleary."
"Then how do you explain how vibration during no more than six or
eight minutes of blast-off and launch could have the same effect on
the actual installation on M1537 in a satellite, Mr. Seaman?" Smoke
poured from the curve-stem.
"I don't have to explain it," I said, beginning to get a little hot.
"All I have done is find a way to make one part quit. I haven't said
it did quit in use, or that it could be made to quit in use."
"Then what the hell are you good for?" Cleary growled.