At 12:35 word filtered into the department that one of the maintenance crew, Ramon Lopez, had been killed. A forty-foot ladder broke while atop it Lopez was hosing down a pothead, and he was driven backward into the concrete pavement by the high-pressure water. Eddie tried to identify the man. The name was distantly familiar but there was no face to go with it. Finally the face came. He smoked two cigarettes in succession. He stubbed the last one out angrily. "That was a tough one," his supervisor, Forester, said, sitting on the side of Eddie's desk. Normally exuberant, he was left melancholy and distracted by the accident. "You know the guy?" "To speak to." "Good man." "After I thought about it a little bit," Eddie said, "I remembered he was transferring tomorrow. Something like this brings a man up short, doesn't it?" "A hell of a shame. Just a hell of a shame." They were silent for a minute. "How was the market this morning?" Forester asked. "Up again. I didn't catch the closing averages." "I guess that makes a new high." "Third straight day," Eddie said. "Hell of a shame," Forester said. "Yeah, Lopez was a nice guy." "Well...." Forester's voice trailed off in embarrassment. "Yeah, well...." "I wanted to remind you about the budget meeting." Eddie glanced at his watch. "Hour and a half?" "Yeah. You know, I feel like ... never mind. What about the burial transformers, you get on it yet?" "The ones we're running in the water mains for cooling? They're out of warranty. None of the local shops can rewind them until the manufacturer sends out a field engineer to set them up for the encapsulation process." "How long is that going to take?" Forester asked. "They tell me several months. Still doesn't leave us with anything. The plant says they've fixed the trouble, but between them and the rewind shop, they can buck it back and forth forever." "I guess we'll have to go back to the pad-mounted type." "People with the Gold Medallion Homes aren't going to like the pads by their barbecues." Forester uncoiled a leg. "Draw up a memorandum on it, will you, Eddie?" He stood up. "That thing sure got me today. There's just entirely too many of these accidents. A ladder breaking. I don't know." Eddie tried to find something intelligent to say. Finally he said, "It was a rough one, all right." * * * * * After Forester left, Eddie picked up, listlessly from the top of the stack one of the preliminary reports submitted for his approval. The report dealt with three thousand capacitors purchased last year from an Eastern firm, now bankrupt. The capacitors were beginning to leak. Eddie called the electrical laboratory to see what progress was being made on the problem.