It was pretty good advice. I hung behind him long enough to tell Sylvia about the Chincoteague oysters they put in the stew at Grand Central Terminal, and got a dinner date. That was all, just the date, because Cleary was itching to take me to see a man. Politics must be an awfully large part of business. The man we went to see was the government side of COMCORP, and I guess he had had to do as much explaining about Telstar failures to a Senate Committee as Paul Cleary had had to do to the Western. He wanted an out just as bad as Paul did. There were a good many conferences before a sufficient number of people decided the cheapest way out was to send a man to fix the Telstars that had broken down. The question was whether it was possible. We went at it from two directions. They got a team assigned to figuring out if the Dyna-Soar rocket could be modified to make the three contacts around the orbit, carry two men and enough air and fuel for the job, and at COMCORP we appointed a crew to figure out what it meant to make the repair in orbit. Cleary put me in charge of our crew. They gave me a full-size Telstar satellite for my lab, and I went to work. Fancy electronic equipment consists of millions of parts, and Telstar is no exception. One of the bonuses America got from its poor rocket booster performance, as compared with the Russians, was a forced-draft course in miniaturization. Our engineers have learned how to make almost anything about one-tenth the size you'd think it ought to be, and still work. To get all these tiny parts into a total system, they are assembled in racks. In the Telstar each of these long skinny sticks of perforated magnesium alloy is hinged to the main framework so that it can be swung out for testing or for replacement of parts, which is why the engineers call each component a "gate." I spent several weeks learning how to take each suspected component out of the gate. Most of the time I needed a screwdriver. Sometimes I had to drill out a soft aluminium rivet. The hard part was that some of the components were so deep inside, even with a couple gates swung out the way, that I needed all kinds of extension tools. Of course, I had to visualize what it would be like doing all this out in space. I'd be in a spacesuit, wearing thick gloves, and when I removed a screw that would have looked good in a Swiss watch, there'd be no work bench on which to place it while I took out the next one. Worse yet, I would have to put it back in.