I grinned at him a little sickly. "COMCORP has never made any use of my specialty," I conceded. "You already had about ten guys around here who had learned twice as much as I had simply by doing it every day for a living. They could have written rings around my thesis." "Sure," he said contentedly, puffing more smoke. "So we made a testing engineer out of you. And you may amount to something, to hear Fred Stone tell it." "Thanks," I said. "Now let me hear what you've been doing for Fred," Cleary suggested, in a sort of avuncular tone. "I'd like to measure you myself." "You mean the tests I ran on the switching gate?" I asked. "Why, yes, we can start there," he nodded, squinting his blue eyes more and blowing a real screen up between us. * * * * * "When Telstar One packed up, they sent me down the whole gate from that sector," I said. "Dr. Stone asked me to run destruct tests on the whole assembly, which I did. The only failures I have induced so far are failures in M1537, the solenoid that all the shouting is about." "What kind of failures did you get?" "Armature froze on the field," I said. "I guess the bearings really went. When there was enough load on them, they couldn't maintain concentricity." "What kind of loads?" he growled, sinking down lower in his chair. He put his elbows on the arm and laced hairy-backed fingers together under his chin. "I put the whole gate on the centrifuge and swung it up to twelve gees" I said. "Switching was normal there for the twenty thousand cycles I gave the gate. But when I added undamped vibration at twelve thousand to fifteen thousand cycles per second, I could induce failure pretty quickly. Say an hour or so." "You had to apply the vibration throughout the whole test period to get these failures?" "Yes, Mr. Cleary." "Then how do you explain how vibration during no more than six or eight minutes of blast-off and launch could have the same effect on the actual installation on M1537 in a satellite, Mr. Seaman?" Smoke poured from the curve-stem. "I don't have to explain it," I said, beginning to get a little hot. "All I have done is find a way to make one part quit. I haven't said it did quit in use, or that it could be made to quit in use." "Then what the hell are you good for?" Cleary growled. I didn't have any answer for that. He repeated his question, blue eyes glittering. "I asked you what the hell you were good for, Seaman!" he said, much more loudly. "For putting in the middle," I snapped back. "That's how you interpret this affair, then?" "Yes." "All right," Cleary said, straightening up. "We'll stop talking about your work as if it were scientific study and talk about it as a play in office politics. Is that what you want?"