oney. 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 space."

"I don't know."

His shaggy eyebrows shot up. "You don't know? Is that all COMCORP got
for three days' pay?"

"A confession of ignorance is a hell 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 space."

* * * * *

This called for a lot more smoke. "You mean, go out there and look at
the satellite, in space?"

"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