If
they thought it was worth something, you got your big E. If they didn't,
you tried again. And you didn't get it by default, just because somebody
thought there should be a given quota of Seniors on the list.

"Little or big," he added, "I'd like the problem."

They said no more. He knew the score. He'd had twelve years of the most
intensive training the E's themselves could devise. He knew that
sometimes a Junior spent another ten or twelve years chasing down jobs
which anybody on the spot could have solved if they'd used their heads a
little before they ran on to something that challenged that training.
He'd be lucky if this was big enough--but not too big.

That was in their minds, too.

5

On ordinary days there were only the usual few science reporters in the
press room of E.H.Q. These held their jobs by the difficult compromise
between the scientists' insistence upon accuracy and their publishers'
equal insistence upon sensationalism.

Since the publisher paid the salary; since rewrite men, like television
writers, maintained their own feeling of superiority to the mass by
writing down to the level of a not very bright twelve-year-old; since
the facts had to be trimmed and altered to fit the open space or time
slot; even these reporters had a difficult time of maintaining the usual
odds--that there is only a twenty-to-one chance that anything said in
the newspapers or on the air may be accurate.

But on this morning the press room was crowded. In spite of all efforts
of journalism to stir up old animosities to make news, or to force
factional leaders into rashness which could not be settled without
violence; the various states of world government insisted upon
negotiating ethnical differences amicably, and factional leaders
persisted in keeping their heads. There had been no world-shaking
discoveries made in the last week or so; the public no longer believed
that changing a screw thread was exactly a scientific "break-through";
no real or imagined scandals seemed of such journalistic stature as to
work the public into a frenzy of intolerance for one another's
aberrations.

In such a dry spell, when advertisers were beginning to question
circulation figures, and editors were racking their brains for a strong
hate symbol to create interest, the delayed report from Eden came as a
summer shower, that might be magnified into a flood.

EDEN SILENT quickly became COLONY FEARED LOST and progressed nor