He was still wondering when the man entered. Kingman looked up and fixed his superintendent with a fish glance. "Horman, can you guess why the Venus Equilateral crowd would want two dozen gauge blocks?" "Sure. We use Johannson Blocks all the time." "Channing wants twenty-four blocks. All three inches on a side--cubes. Square to within thirty seconds of angle, and each of the six faces optically flat to one quarter wave length of Cadmium light." "_Whoosh!_" said Horman. "I presume the three-inch dimension must be within a half wave length?" "They're quite lenient," said Kingman bitterly. "A full wave length!" "White of them," grunted Horman. "I suppose the same thing applies?" "We're running over thin ice," said Kingman reflectively. "I can't afford to play rough. We'll make up their blocks." "I wonder what they want 'em for." "Something tricky, I'll bet." "But what could you use two dozen gauge blocks for? All the same size." "Inspection standards?" asked Kingman. "Not unless they're just being difficult. You don't put primary gauges on any production line. You make secondary gauges for production line use and keep a couple of primaries in the check room to try the secondaries on. In fact, you usually have a whole set of gauge blocks to build up to any desired dimension so that you don't have to stock a half-million of different sizes." "It's possible that they may be doing something extremely delicate?" "Possible," said Horman slowly. "But not too probable. On the other hand, I may be one hundred percent wrong. I don't know all the different stuff a man can make, by far. My own experience indicates that nothing like that would be needed. But that's just one man's experience." * * * * * "Channing and that gang of roughneck scientists have been known to make some fancy gadgets," said Kingman grudgingly. "If you'll pardon my mentioning the subject," said Horman in a scathing tone, "you'd have been far better off to tag along with 'em instead of fighting 'em." "I'll get 'em yet!" "What's it got you so far?" "I'm not too bad off. I've come up from the assistant chief legal counsel of Terran Electric to controlling the company." "And Terran Electric has slid down from the topmost outfit in the system to a seventh rater." "We'll climb back. At any rate, I'm better off personally. You're better off personally. In fact, everybody that had enough guts to stay with us is better off." "Yeah--I know. It sounds good on paper. But make a bum move again, Kingman, and we'll all be in jail. You'd better forget that hatred against Venus Equilateral and come down to earth." "Well, I've been a good boy for them once. After all, I did point out the error in their patent on the solar beam." "That isn't all. Don't forget that Terran Electric's patent was at error too." "Frankly it was a minor error. It's one of those things that is easy to get caught on. You know how it came about?"