Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net The Laboratorians BY EDWARD PEATTIE _Playing "Napoleon" can get to be a habit, especially when a man is devoted to pure science. Which was Dr. Whitemarsh's devotion--until Dr. Sally Chester came along!_ [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, May 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] "Yeah, we drop in just three c.c. from this here tube," said Rocco as he expertly twirled the erlenmeyer flask and watched the color shoot past the methyl orange end-point. Whitemarsh was annoyed and said so. "That's the sixth straight you've missed, and the acid comes out of the burette, not the tube; and you don't call the graduations c.c., you call them milliliters." "Yeah? Well, here we call it a tube!" "And why don't you go down to the end-point drop by drop?" "Because the book don't say so! That's why! You technos make me sick. Here we do all the blasted work, and you try to tell us how to do what we've been doing for ten years!" Rocco was beginning to work himself into one of his famous rages. His bull neck was beginning to redden; his eyes started to flash. His entire squat body started to quiver. Whitemarsh wasn't impressed. Over at the atomic plant, Phobus's Quercus Mountain, he had bossed a pretty quarrelsome crew of isotope wranglers. He had never dodged a fight in his life. But this was in a chemical laboratory and it surprised him to hear the assistants talk back. The only assistants he had ever known were clear-eyed youths taking a year away from their studies to recoup their tuition money and who tried to copy everything the chemists did. But Whitemarsh was new to the Interspatial Research Center on the Moon, and he still could not figure why the assistants acted as they did. So he waited. Rocco banged the flask down on the stone bench, glared at Whitemarsh for an instant, and then rushed out of the Laboratory, muttering a few obscenities. "Queer place this," mused Whitemarsh, filling up another flask and finishing the titration himself. "Here the helpers tell the chemists what to do and get mad if we ask them what they're doing."