on her desk. There was barely room
for it in the welter of paper, files, notebooks, phones, calendars and
other junk she had squirreled. She was much too busy banging at a
typewriter and handling the phone to pay any attention to me. Her
pert, lively manner said she hadn't taken any wooden nickels lately.

But I had. The last series of tests in my lab had put me in the middle
of a hell of a scrap. It had all started a couple years back, when the
final design had been approved for a whole sky-full of communications
satellites. Well, eighteen, to be exact. One of the parts in the
design had been a solenoid, part No. M1537, which handled a switching
operation too potent for a solid-state switch. That solenoid was one
of the few moving parts in the Telstars, and it had been designed for
skeighty-eight million cycles before it got sloppy or quit.

In practice, out in space, the switching operation simply hadn't
worked. After about a hundred hours of use in Telstar One, it failed.
Unfortunately, this had not been discovered until the first six
satellites had been launched. Further launchings were postponed while
they ran accelerated switching tests on satellites Two through Six out
in space. The same kind of failure took place on each bird.

There were two schools of thought on licking the bug. Doc Stone, of
course, insisted that solenoid M1537 had failed, which was one
possible interpretation of the telemetry. And Paul Cleary, who had
been in charge of design, insisted that faulty assembly was to blame.
Well, somebody would make up his mind pretty soon, and my evidence
would have a lot to do with it. I had done the appraisal tests of the
circuit in the test lab once the bug had been detected, and now Cleary
was going to smoke it out of me.

"Mr. Seaman," Sylvia Shouff said to me, kind of waking me up. "Mr.
Cleary will see you now. Have you ever met?" she added, as I came
toward her desk.

I shook my head. "I'm a working stiff," I said, "I never get to meet
the brass."

"You are also somewhat insolent," she said tartly. "Better wash out
your mouth before you try that on Paul Cleary. He eats wise young
laboratory technicians for breakfast."

"Yes, _mam_!" I said, feeling my ears burn. She led me to the door,
opened it, and introduced me to Paul Cleary. He lumbered out around
his desk and shook my hand with his rather gnarled and boney paw.

"Hello, Seaman. I'm glad to meet you, young man. Come in. We have a
lot to t