The Trouble with Telstar Part 2

Sniff! "He can see you at eleven." Click.

Paul Cleary had his coat off and was poring over a large black-on-white schematic when I was shown in by sniffin' Sylvia.

"h.e.l.lo, Mike," he growled. "Here, Sylvia. Mike's not supposed to see this stuff. Drag it away, honey. 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 s.p.a.ce."

"I don't know."

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

"A confession of ignorance is a h.e.l.l 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 s.p.a.ce."

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

"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 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 s.p.a.cesuit. That would surer than h.e.l.l 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 with him, eh? That's a dear."

He racked up the instrument and smiled at me as he stoked his pipe into more activity. "Relax," he advised me. "It always takes a while to round up Fred Stone."

He wanted no small talk, so I fidgeted in my chair while Cleary rocked gently in his. In about ten minutes, curly-headed Sylvia brought Dr.

Stone in with her.

It was, "h.e.l.lo, Fred," and "h.e.l.lo there, Paul," when they came in.

Sylvia didn't have anything to say, although she gave me a hot-eyed glance before pulling out the dictation board on Paul Cleary's desk and making herself comfortable with her notebook.

Cleary offered Doc Stone some of his tobacco, which was politely refused. The old man began it:

"Your Dr. Seaman has quite an idea, Fred," he said, in a mild, kindly voice, with a dumb, guileless look on his face.