The Trouble with Telstar by John Berryman (the best novels to read .TXT) 📗

"That's what your snippy little brunette said," I told him. "She told me that you'd eat me for breakfast, and she was right." I got to my feet.

"Where are you going," he growled. He was still standing behind his chair.

"To look for another job, Mr. Cleary. There must be some place where the honest result of a test will be assessed as the honest result of a test rather than a move in a political fight."

"Honest result?" he echoed, and snorted. "Was your test honest? What really happened out there in space?"

"Nobody asked me," I said hotly. "My assignment was to test that gate until a part failed."

"A dishonest assignment," Cleary said. "Sit down a minute." We both calmed down and took our seats. I got a cigar out of my coat, peeled the wrapper and made counter-smoke. "Here, I'll give you an honest assignment, Seaman. You're a test engineer. Tell me what happened out there in space. Why did that switching operation fail?"

"I haven't the faintest idea," I said.

"Then find out!"

I chewed my cigar. "Without duplicating the conditions?" I protested. "And how can we? There's zero gravity—zero pressure—all sorts of things going on out there we can't duplicate in a lab."

"I really don't care how you do it," he said. "But if it were my job I'd just light my pipe and sit here and think for a week or so. Why don't you try it?"

I got up again. "Yes, sir," I said. "I suppose it would help to have the original telemetry data so that I could evaluate for myself what went wrong."

"I thought you'd get to that," he said, passing me a fat file-folder. "Here it is." He stood up, too, and led me to the door. "And other data you might want?" he asked, now a good deal more kindly. His hand was on my elbow.

I looked at him. "How about the phone number of the brunette out there?" I asked without taking the stogey from my teeth.

"Sylvia? That's pretty valuable information," he said, beginning to grin in a sleepy old fashion. "But she only dates astronauts. If you haven't made at least three orbits, she won't even have dinner with you."

I stopped at Sylvia's desk with half an idea of asking her for a date. "Well, Dr. Seaman," she demanded as I chewed on my pacifier. "What did you learn?"

I thought about it. "That a lot depends on knowing where to put your feet," I said, puffing smoke. "And my name is Mike."

She sniffed. "If you think Paul Cleary hasn't been around long enough to catch Fred Stone trying to fake him out of position with a meaningless test," she said, "you have another think coming!"

"He'd never have tried it," I told her, "if he'd known Cleary had you to look after him." That got me a much louder sniff and toss of the dark curly head, which broke up my plans to ask her to dinner.

The telemetry results had been decoded, of course, so that a mere mortal could read them. I didn't have a pipe, which probably meant I'd be a failure as a physicist, so I chewed cigars ragged for about three days and did some serious thinking. When I got a result, I looked up Shouff, Sylvia, Secy./Mgr./Dsgn., in the phone directory, and talked to my favorite brunette.

"Mr. Cleary's office," she said.

"When would he like to see Mike Seaman?" I tried.

"Probably never," she told me. "But I suppose he'll have to. Isn't Fred Stone going to run your errand for you?"

"I'm running Fred Stone's errands, isn't that what you really think, Sylvia?" I asked her.

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. "Hello, 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 space."

"I don't know."

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

"A confession of ignorance is a hell 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 space."

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

"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 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 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, "Hello, Fred," and "Hello 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.

"Good, Paul," Doc Stone smiled thinly. "I've told you he's a good boy."

"Hm-m-m," said Cleary. "He says his tests can't prove what went wrong with the switching gate on the satellites, and in effect that the telemetry doesn't make it plain whether we have design or assembly trouble."

"Well, well!" said Fred Stone. I decided to start shopping for a marker for my grave.

"Yes," Cleary said. "He made quite a suggestion, that we send a man out in space to look over the Telstars and find out what went wrong. Even better, he says it might be possible to make a repair at the same time and get the bird working. You can see the advantages of doing that, the way they are orbiting."

"Yes, indeed," Doc Stone said, looking at me with slitted eyes. "Quite a unique adventure for some technician."

"Just what I was thinking," Cleary said. "The problem resolves into: Who do we send? Now Mike, here, says we should take a man from his lab who knows the bird and its assembly and teach him how to get around in a spacesuit—that, he claims, would be quicker than taking one of these space jockeys and making a technician out of him."

"I think he's right."

"So—there we are. Who do we send?"

"There can hardly be any choice," Dr. Stone said, looking at me with eyes like granite.

"Hardly," Cleary agreed. "The head of the lab is the best man, beyond a doubt."

They were talking about me! Try to get out of taking sides, would I? Cleary wanted me back in the middle. Stone wanted me dead. They were both likely to get their way, unless I told them off.

I opened my mouth. Cleary cleared his throat loudly.

"Oh, Dr. Seaman!" Sylvia cut in, breaking her careful silence. "What a thrilling opportunity for you!"

I gaped at her. Well, Cleary had said it. She only went out with astronauts. She was space-happy.

"There are men in the shop who deserve the chance...." I started.

"Nonsense!" she