I got up again. "Yes, sir," I said. "I suppose it would help to have the original telemetry data so that I could evaluate for myself what went wrong." "I thought you'd get to that," he said, passing me a fat file-folder. "Here it is." He stood up, too, and led me to the door. "And other data you might want?" he asked, now a good deal more kindly. His hand was on my elbow. I looked at him. "How about the phone number of the brunette out there?" I asked without taking the stogey from my teeth. "Sylvia? That's pretty valuable information," he said, beginning to grin in a sleepy old fashion. "But she only dates astronauts. If you haven't made at least three orbits, she won't even have dinner with you." [Illustration] I stopped at Sylvia's desk with half an idea of asking her for a date. "Well, Dr. Seaman," she demanded as I chewed on my pacifier. "What did you learn?" I thought about it. "That a lot depends on knowing where to put your feet," I said, puffing smoke. "And my name is Mike." She sniffed. "If you think Paul Cleary hasn't been around long enough to catch Fred Stone trying to fake him out of position with a meaningless test," she said, "you have another think coming!" "He'd never have tried it," I told her, "if he'd known Cleary had you to look after him." That got me a much louder sniff and toss of the dark curly head, which broke up my plans to ask her to dinner. The telemetry results had been decoded, of course, so that a mere mortal could read them. I didn't have a pipe, which probably meant I'd be a failure as a physicist, so I chewed cigars ragged for about three days and did some serious thinking. When I got a result, I looked up Shouff, Sylvia, Secy./Mgr./Dsgn., in the phone directory, and talked to my favorite brunette. "Mr. Cleary's office," she said. "When would he like to see Mike Seaman?" I tried. "Probably never," she told me. "But I suppose he'll have to. Isn't Fred Stone going to run your errand for you?" "I'm running Fred Stone's errands, isn't that what you really think, Sylvia?" I asked her. Sniff! "He can see you at eleven." Click. Paul Cleary had his coat off and was poring over a large black-on-white schematic when I was shown in by sniffin' Sylvia. "Hello, Mike," he growled. "Here, Sylvia. Mike's not supposed to see this stuff. Drag it away, honey. Drag it away!" With quick motions she rolled up the drawings, snapped a rubber binder around them and went out. Cleary wagged his hairy old paw to the chair beside his desk. "So you've been thinking?" he asked, reaching for his curve-stemmed pipe. "How do you know?" "My spies tell me you haven't been out in the lab since the other day. Certainly you were doing something besides sulk in your office." "Yes." "Well, what did you come up with? Why did that switching operation fail out in space." "I don't know." His shaggy eyebrows shot up. "You don't know? Is that all COMCORP got for three days' pay?"