"If you are referring to me," said the Senator's voice behind them, "I
most certainly am going to make a note of it. And I suggest you both
start advertising for other jobs."
* * * * *
Brinton had been indulging in a pleasant little fantasy in which he had
cut Senator MacNeill up into twenty-eight pieces, placed them in
aluminum cans, and made them radioactive in the Station pile. He was
smiling at the newsreel cameras, about to fire the first
Senator-powered spaceship in the history of mankind, when his alarm
clock, which had maliciously been waiting for just such an opportunity,
spoiled his dream by waking him up.
That was how the next day started. It continued in the same vein when,
in a fit of petulance, he strode into his clothes closet and kicked the
alarm control box, barefoot. He was working the combination dial for
the third or fourth time when he noticed that his feet were getting
wet. His kick must have jammed some relays in the control box; the bath
water was overflowing. Since the box was sealed to prevent him from
fooling with it, he had had to prevent a flood by limping downstairs
and pulling the master switch.
With no electricity, his breakfast consisted of cold fruit juice, cold
cereal, and cold milk. When he got to his office, he ordered a pot of
coffee and made out a requisition for a pipe wrench. If it ever
happened again, he was going to shut the water off instead.
His secretary came in with the coffee and poured him a cup.
"I have some letters for you to sign," she said brightly, to cheer him
up. Dr. Brinton drank his coffee. "Our new filing system is working
very well," she added, pouring him another cup. The doctor's face
relaxed a little, but it was because the snow bank in his stomach was
beginning to melt. His secretary played her trump. "And somebody from
the Fuels Department phoned and said something was passing the yellow
line and might make the blue."
She was never sure afterward whether Dr. Brinton had gone around his
desk, or over it. She had blinked and by the time her eyes were open
again, he was gone.
Dr. Brinton found a crowd in the indoor test lab, chuckling over the
line being drawn by a differential analyzer. He elbowed his way to the
front, looked himself, and began a little dance of impatience. The
analyzer was connected with linkages to the test stand where a tiny
rocket motor was thrusting out a hot blue pencil of flame. The results
from the analyzer were plotted as range capability against time on a
piece of graph paper which had four curved colored lines overprinted on
it. The curved lines were marked in succession: "Earth," "Moon," "Moon"
and "Earth."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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