There were two schools of thought on licking the bug. Doc Stone, of course, insisted that solenoid M1537 had failed, which was one possible interpretation of the telemetry. And Paul Cleary, who had been in charge of design, insisted that faulty assembly was to blame. Well, somebody would make up his mind pretty soon, and my evidence would have a lot to do with it. I had done the appraisal tests of the circuit in the test lab once the bug had been detected, and now Cleary was going to smoke it out of me. "Mr. Seaman," Sylvia Shouff said to me, kind of waking me up. "Mr. Cleary will see you now. Have you ever met?" she added, as I came toward her desk. I shook my head. "I'm a working stiff," I said, "I never get to meet the brass." "You are also somewhat insolent," she said tartly. "Better wash out your mouth before you try that on Paul Cleary. He eats wise young laboratory technicians for breakfast." "Yes, _mam_!" I said, feeling my ears burn. She led me to the door, opened it, and introduced me to Paul Cleary. He lumbered out around his desk and shook my hand with his rather gnarled and boney paw. "Hello, Seaman. I'm glad to meet you, young man. Come in. We have a lot to talk about," he said. * * * * * Considering that Cleary was a wheel, and had thirty years of service with Western Electric behind him, his office wasn't especially large. Maybe that's because Communications Corporation is owned half by the government and half by AT&T. The government half makes us watch our pennies. "Have a seat, Mike," Cleary said, going around to lower himself carefully into a tall swivel chair. He learned back and rocked slowly, like an old woman on the front porch of a resort hotel. His pipe was still smoking in a rather large ashtray. He picked it up, showing it to be a curve-stemmed old-man's style, and puffed contentedly at it. On him it didn't look like an act. "Well," he said, pulling big shaggy eyebrows down so they shaded his pale blue eyes. "You've become something of a celebrity around here, Mike." This was an unexpected approach. "Nobody told _me_," I complained. "Does this kind of fame show up in the paycheck?" "Not always," Cleary said, scowling a little. "I just meant that your name gets bandied about. Every time I talk to Fred Stone he says, 'Dr. Seaman says this,' or 'Dr. Seaman says that.' I just had to see what this doctor looked like." "You can forget the doctor part," I said uncomfortably. I had heard that Cleary was sensitive about having no advanced degree. When he went to work for the Western, college was plenty. You did your post-graduate work on the job. He sure had--and he had a string of patents as long as your arm to prove it. "That's good," he said. "I'd hate to think I was competing with you in the field of knowledge where you are the world's specialist."