or to lie
on, with gravity to give things a position orientation, I kept losing
tiny screws. Magnets didn't help, because the screws were nonmagnetic
for what seemed pretty good reasons. Some were made of dural for
lightness. Some were silicon bronze. None of them was steel.

That put us back in the lab to find out what would happen if we used
steel screws. The answer was, surprisingly, nothing important. So
there was one solid achievement. I had a few thousand of each of the
thirty-four different sizes of fasteners machined from steel, and
magnetized a fly-tier's tweezers. The result was that I could get
screws back into their holes without dropping them, especially when I
put little pads of Alnico on the point of each tweezer to give me a
really potent magnet. Then we had to cook up an offset screwdriver
with a ratchet that would let me reach in about a yard and still run
a number 0-80 machine screw up tight. That called for a kind of
torque-limit clutch and other snivies.

It was the fanciest and most expensive screwdriver you ever saw. The
handle was a good two feet long. The problem then became that of
seeing what you were doing, and one of the boys faked up a kind of
binocular jeweler's loupe with long focus, so that I could lie back a
yard from the screw and focus on it with about ten diameters
magnification. The trouble was that the long focal length gave a field
of vision about six times the diameter of the screw-head, which meant
that every time my heart beat my head moved enough to throw the field
of vision off the work.

* * * * *

By that time I was working in a simulated spacesuit--the actual number
was still being made to fit an accurate plaster cast of my body. So
the boys figured out a clamp that would hold my helmet firmly to the
gate, and a chin rack inside the helmet against which I could press
and hold my head steady enough to keep my binoculars focused where
they had to be focused. At a certain point I went back to Paul Cleary
and said I thought I could make the necessary tests, dismount what I
had to dismount, and replace any affected part.

"All worked out, eh?" he said, reaching for his pipe.

"Not by a county mile, Mr. Cleary. But I know what the problems are,
and the shop can figure out sensible answers. Some of the hardest
parts turned out to be the easiest."

"Name any three," he suggested.

"Well, the screws. As I take them out, I'll discard them int