alk about," he said.

* * * * *

Considering that Cleary was a wheel, and had thirty years of service
with Western Electric behind him, his office wasn't especially large.
Maybe that's because Communications Corporation is owned half by the
government and half by AT&T. The government half makes us watch our
pennies.

"Have a seat, Mike," Cleary said, going around to lower himself
carefully into a tall swivel chair. He learned back and rocked slowly,
like an old woman on the front porch of a resort hotel. His pipe was
still smoking in a rather large ashtray. He picked it up, showing it
to be a curve-stemmed old-man's style, and puffed contentedly at it.
On him it didn't look like an act.

"Well," he said, pulling big shaggy eyebrows down so they shaded his
pale blue eyes. "You've become something of a celebrity around here,
Mike."

This was an unexpected approach. "Nobody told _me_," I complained.
"Does this kind of fame show up in the paycheck?"

"Not always," Cleary said, scowling a little. "I just meant that your
name gets bandied about. Every time I talk to Fred Stone he says, 'Dr.
Seaman says this,' or 'Dr. Seaman says that.' I just had to see what
this doctor looked like."

"You can forget the doctor part," I said uncomfortably. I had heard
that Cleary was sensitive about having no advanced degree. When he
went to work for the Western, college was plenty. You did your
post-graduate work on the job. He sure had--and he had a string of
patents as long as your arm to prove it.

"That's good," he said. "I'd hate to think I was competing with you in
the field of knowledge where you are the world's specialist."

I grinned at him a little sickly. "COMCORP has never made any use of
my specialty," I conceded. "You already had about ten guys around here
who had learned twice as much as I had simply by doing it every day
for a living. They could have written rings around my thesis."

"Sure," he said contentedly, puffing more smoke. "So we made a testing
engineer out of you. And you may amount to something, to hear Fred
Stone tell it."

"Thanks," I said.

"Now let me hear what you've been doing for Fred," Cleary suggested,
in a sort of avuncular tone. "I'd like to measure you myself."

"You mean the tests I ran on the switching gate?" I asked.

"Why, yes, we can start there," he nodded, squinting his blue eyes
more and blowing a real screen up between us.

* *