The Trouble with Telstar Part 1

The Trouble with Telstar.

by John Berryman.

Doc Stone made sure I wouldn't give him the "too busy" routine. He sent Millie to get me.

"Okay, Millie," I said to Stone's secretary. "I'll be right with you."

I cleared the restricted notes and plans from my desk and locked them in the file cabinet, per regulations, and walked beside Millie to Stone's office.

"It's a reflex mechanism, Mike," Dr. Stone said as Millie showed me in. "Every type knows how to fight for survival." He took one thoughtful puff on his pipe. "The old fud," he added.

"The solenoid again, Doc?" I asked.

"What else, Mike?" he said, raising his pale eyebrows. "It's Paul Cleary's baby, and after all these years with the company, he doesn't figure to go down without a fight."

So I was in the middle of it. I had no business to be there, either.

The design of that solenoid certainly hadn't been mine. All I had ever done was find out how to destroy it. And after all, that's part of what my lab does, and what I do, for a living.

"Quit staring out the window, Mike," Doc said behind me. "Here, sit down."

I took the chair beside the desk and watched him go through the business of unloading his pipe, taking the carefully air-tight top off the humidor we had machined for him down in the lab, and loading up with the cheapest Burley you can buy. So much for air-tight containers. Doc got it going, which took two wooden matches, because the stuff was wringing wet--thanks again to an air-tight container.

"I just left Cleary's office, Mike," he explained. "He won't admit that there's any significance to the failures you have introduced in his solenoid. He insists that your test procedures affected performance more than design did, and he wants to talk with you."

"Great," I said glumly. "Can I count on you to give me a good recommendation for my next employer?"

"Cut it out, Mike," he said, coming as near to a snap as his careful voice could manage. He blew smoke out around the stem of his pipe. I think sometimes it's a part of his act, like the slightly-out-of-press sports jacket and flannel trousers. It says he is a sure enough Ph.D.

If you ask me, he's a comer. You can't rate him for lack of brains. He knows an awful lot about solid-state physics, and for a physicist, he sure learned enough about micro-a.s.semblies of electronic components. I guess that's why he was in charge of final a.s.sembly of the Telstar satellites for COMCORP.

"Don't worry about what Paul Cleary can do _to_ you, Mike," he suggested. "Think a little bit more about what Fred Stone can do _for_ you. Cleary is only a year or so from retirement, and you know it."

"He could make that an awful tough year, Doc." I said. "You told me he won't hear of design bugs in that solenoid. He'll insist something went wrong in a.s.sembly."

Doc Stone smiled thinly at me and brushed at his blond crew cut. "It is a tough spot, Mike," he agreed. "Because I won't hear any talk of faulty a.s.sembly. You'll have to choose, I guess. If you think you can make your bed by playing footsie with an old fud who has only a year to go, try it. Just remember that I've got another thirty years to go, and I'll breathe down your neck every minute of them if you let me down!"

"Sure," I said. "When do I see him?"

"Now."

Doc Stone got someone named Sylvia on the phone and then told me to go right up. After I got there, I had to sit and wait in Cleary's outer office.

I shared it with a small, intense girl named Sylvia Shouff, if you believed the little plastic sign on her desk. There was barely room for it in the welter of paper, files, notebooks, phones, calendars and other junk she had squirreled. She was much too busy banging at a typewriter and handling the phone to pay any attention to me. Her pert, lively manner said she hadn't taken any wooden nickels lately.

But I had. The last series of tests in my lab had put me in the middle of a h.e.l.l of a sc.r.a.p. It had all started a couple years back, when the final design had been approved for a whole sky-full of communications satellites. Well, eighteen, to be exact. One of the parts in the design had been a solenoid, part No. M1537, which handled a switching operation too potent for a solid-state switch. That solenoid was one of the few moving parts in the Telstars, and it had been designed for skeighty-eight million cycles before it got sloppy or quit.

In practice, out in s.p.a.ce, the switching operation simply hadn't worked. After about a hundred hours of use in Telstar One, it failed.

Unfortunately, this had not been discovered until the first six satellites had been launched. Further launchings were postponed while they ran accelerated switching tests on satellites Two through Six out in s.p.a.ce. The same kind of failure took place on each bird.

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 a.s.sembly 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 bra.s.s."

"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.

"h.e.l.lo, 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 s.h.a.ggy eyebrows down so they shaded his pale blue eyes. "You've become something of a celebrity around here, Mike."

This was an unexpected approach. "n.o.body 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."

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 a.s.sembly, which I did. The only failures I have induced so far are failures in M1537, the solenoid that all the shouting is about."