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.
But that isn't what you asked me."

"We'd have to fix eighteen of them," he said. "The first six are about
sixty per cent useless. They'd have to be replaced."

"I still think you should consider sending a man to examine the
Telstars in orbit," I suggested.

"Science demands it, eh" he growled.

"No, I was thinking that perhaps a simple repair could be made in
space, and that you wouldn't have to launch six extra birds."

He got out of the chair and went to the clothes tree to put on his
coat. The elbows were shiny from leaning on his desk. "It might be
cheaper at that," he said. "The first six are launched in only two
orbits. Three telstars in each orbit, separated by one hundred and
twenty degrees. Two launches of a repair man might do it, with careful
handling. Is that what you had in mind?"

"Something like that."

"We'd have to send a pretty rare kind of a repair man, Mike," he said,
coming back to sit on the corner of his desk and glower down at me.
That was about his kindest expression.

"Yes," I agreed. "You need somebody who can test and diagnose, and
then make a repair."

"And who is an astronaut, too," he said. "I wonder if there is such a
thing?"

"Make one," I suggested.

He scowled a little more fiercely. "Explain that," he ordered.

"I figure you could take one of our men from my laboratory, who knows
how to test the gate, and a man who is handy enough with miniature
components to cut out the one that failed and replace it, and teach
him how to get around in a spacesuit. That would surer than hell be
quicker than taking one of these hot-shot astronauts and teaching him
solid-state physics."

"Yes," he agreed, looking down his fingers. "That was a pretty sneaky
way to get out from between Fred Stone and me, young man."

I couldn't resist it: "That's what took most of the three days," I
said, just a little too smugly.

"I liked you better in the middle," Cleary grumped. "Well, you have a
thought, and it calls for a conference." He took his coat off again,
hung it on the clothes tree, came back to his desk and got on the
phone.

"Sylvia? Have Fred Stone come up, and you come in wi