"Otherwise, we wouldn't have a lawyer on the premises. They serve their purpose, no doubt, but in this gang, the engineers tell the attorneys how to run things. We shall continue to do so. Therefore you are speaking with the proper parties, and once the contract is prepared by you, we shall have an attorney run through the whereases, wherefores, and parties of the first, second, and third parts to see that there is no sleight of hand in the microscopic type." "You're taking a chance," warned Kingman. "All men are not as fundamentally honest as Terran Electric." "Kingman," smiled Channing, "I hate to remind you of this, but who got what just now? We wanted the transmission tube." "I see your point. But we have a means of getting power out of the sun." "We have a hunk of that too. It would probably have been a mere matter of time before some bright bird at Terran found the thing as it was." "I shall see that the contract gives you domain over man-made objects in space--including those that occasionally touch upon the natural celestial objects. Also the necessary equipment operating under the charter of Interplanetary Communications, wherever or whenever it may be, including any future installations." "Fine." "You may have trouble understanding our feelings. We are essentially a space-born company, and as such we can have no one at the helm that is not equipped to handle the technical details of operation in space." Channing smiled reminiscently. "We had a so-called efficiency expert running Venus Equilateral a couple of years ago, and the fool nearly wrecked us because he didn't know that the airplant was not a mass of highly complicated, chemical reaction machinery instead of what it really is. Kingman, do you know what an airplant is?" "Frankly no. I should imagine it is some sort of air-purifying device." "You'll sit down hard when I tell you that the airplant is just what it is. Martian Sawgrass! What better device in the solar system can be used for air-purifying than a chlorophyll-bearing plant; it takes in carbon dioxide and gives off oxygen. Brother Burbank tossed it in the incinerator because he thought it was just weeds, cluttering up the place. He was allergic to good engineering, anyway." "That may be good enough in space," said Kingman, "but on Terra, we feel that our engineers are not equipped to dabble in the legal tangles that follow when they force us to establish precedent by inventing something that has never been covered by a previous decision." "O.K.," said Don. "Every man to his own scope. Write up your contract, Kingman, and we'll all climb on the bandwagon with our illiterary X's." * * * * * In Evanston, North of Chicago, the leaves changed from their riotous green to a somber brown, and fell to lay a blanket over the earth. Snow covered the dead leaves, and Christmas, with its holly went into the past, followed closely by New Year's Eve with its hangover.