Part 2 (1/2)
Sniff! ”He can see you at eleven.” Click.
Paul Cleary had his coat off and was poring over a large black-on-white schematic when I was shown in by sniffin' Sylvia.
”h.e.l.lo, Mike,” he growled. ”Here, Sylvia. Mike's not supposed to see this stuff. Drag it away, honey. Drag it away!”
With quick motions she rolled up the drawings, snapped a rubber binder around them and went out. Cleary wagged his hairy old paw to the chair beside his desk.
”So you've been thinking?” he asked, reaching for his curve-stemmed pipe.
”How do you know?”
”My spies tell me you haven't been out in the lab since the other day.
Certainly you were doing something besides sulk in your office.”
”Yes.”
”Well, what did you come up with? Why did that switching operation fail out in s.p.a.ce.”
”I don't know.”
His s.h.a.ggy eyebrows shot up. ”You don't know? Is that all COMCORP got for three days' pay?”
”A confession of ignorance is a h.e.l.l of a lot more revealing than a solid error,” I snapped. ”The honest answer that I get out of the telemetry data is that something in that gate broke the circuit and the switching operation failed. I think there are about seven thousand components in the gate. I don't know which one failed. A few I can rule out, because they would only cause part of the gate to fail. But a hundred different breaks could account for the data. So I don't know.”
He lit his pipe and blew smoke around the curved stem before he made reply. ”So we got a philosopher for our money,” he said. ”A confession of ignorance, eh? What are you going to do about it?”
”You tell me, Mr. Cleary. You're the old head around here.”
”So I am,” he said evenly. ”So I am. Well, my advice to young pups is that they should not be ashamed when they don't know. They should say so. But they should have something else to say along with it.”
”For example,” I suggested grumpily.
”They should say, 'I don't know, but I know where to find out,'” he said. ”Tell me, Dr. Seaman, do you know where to find out?”
He puffed at me for the two or three minutes I thought about it.
Really, that's a very long time to think. Most ideas come to you the moment you identify the problem, which is the really hard part of thinking. But this problem took some thought, and I wanted him to think I was thinking.
”Yes,” I said at last. ”I know where to find out.”
”Where?”
”Out in s.p.a.ce.”
This called for a lot more smoke. ”You mean, go out there and look at the satellite, in s.p.a.ce?”
”Yes, I can't imagine any other way really to figure it out.”
He nodded. ”You may be right, Mike. But do you know how much it costs to send a manned satellite aloft?”
”Oh,” I agreed. ”There are cheaper ways. We can beef up every part in that gate, test it much tougher than we already have, and when we get the gate to where all seven thousand components can stand any imaginable strain, we can rebuild the twelve Telstars we haven't launched yet and be pretty sure they won't have switching failures.