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Clifford met the group later that morning at one of the informal meetings that Aub had instigated as a
means to review regularly the progress of design work on the detector which was proceeding in leaps
and bounds.
"Brad, this is the crew," Aub said as Clifford nodded in response to the "hi's" from around the table.
"Alice, Sandra, Penny, Mike, Joe, Phil, and Art." They acknowledged their names in turn as Aub pointed
them out. "Crew, this is Brad the guy you've been hearing about for the last month or so. And now that
the team is at last complete, to business." Aub opened a folder that was lying in front of him, extracted a
sheet titledAction Points, passed a copy to Clifford without comment, and glanced briefly at his own.
Clifford had only been in the room for a minute, and yet already they were at work. He was impressed; if
this was typical of how Aub's enthusiasm was rubbing off, it was small wonder that the project was
racing at breakneck speed. Somehow Aub had never before struck Clifford as an effective manager of
people; Clifford wondered how many more unsuspected talents lay beneath that outlandish exterior.
"It says hereMode-Hold Synthesizers," Aub stated. He looked up. "Mike, how's it going?"
"I've got a prototype circuit breadboarded in the lab downstairs," a red-haired young man dressed in a
Pendleton shirt and green jeans replied from the far end. "It's going to need tighter tuning at the h.f. end,
and there's still some stray leakage capacitance somewhere that needs tracking down, but I think it'll be
okay. Gimme . . . say . . . another week on it."
"Review again next Monday," Aub mumbled, marking the margin of the paper. "Okay?"
"Sure."
"Mode Interpretation Routine, Alice?" Aub read the next item and shot an inquiring look at one of the
girls.
"Bit of a problem there," she replied. "I need to know more about the mathematical derivation of the
phase functions."
"Well, we now have just the guy with us," Aub said, looking over to Clifford. "Brad, how about sitting
down with us after we break up and going over it?"
"Sure thing," Clifford answered.
"Special analogue IC chips from Intercontinental Semiconductors," Aub went on. "Did you get any joy
on those, Joe?"
"No dice," Joe answered. "They're on a six-month waiting list. Nothing they can do about it."
"Shit!" Aub began drumming his fingers on the table irritably.
"But . . . despair not," Joe added. "I tracked a dozen down in a surplus shop in Boston, and Penny's
going over to pick them up tomorrow. Cheap too."
"Fantastic." Aub brightened up again. "Next . . . Penny . . . two hundred feet of low-loss cable . . ."
The meeting was rapid-fire all the way through and lasted less than forty minutes. By the end of it
Clifford felt completely at home. As Al had said just before Clifford and Aub departed on the first day
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
they had come to Sudbury, it was a great team.
* * *
"I knew you were here so I brought you a coffee." The voice from behind him made Clifford look round
from the screen with a start. Standing just inside the door of the office, Joe was holding a steaming cup in
each hand. The time was twenty minutes before midnight; three months had gone by since Clifford's
arrival at Sudbury.
"You must be a mind reader, Joe," Clifford said. "Thanks, put it down there." He indicated a spot on the
table next to his chair, amid the disorderly piles of folders and papers. "What's the matter; can't you sleep
these days either?"
"I got a bit carried away with testing out that stabilizer subsystem," Joe said, putting down one of the
cups. "Today was the first time we've had a chance to try it out on-line. I couldn't wait to see the results."
"How'd they come out?" Clifford asked.
"They're looking good. I think we've got the compensation derivatives right now. Aub and Penny are
downstairs now tuning it in."
"Doesn't anybody ever go home in this place?" Clifford asked with a sigh. "You know, Joe, if we were
paid overtime, we could all have retired by now."
"Yeah, well . . . I guess we'd all find we've forgotten how to spend time any other way if we did," Joe
said. "Besides, this is more fun."
"You like it still, eh? That's good."
"Beats baseball," Joe declared. "How about you . . . things working out?" He slid into an empty chair
beside Clifford's and gestured toward the strings of equations frozen on the screen at which Clifford had
been working. "What are you into here now, for instance?"
Clifford returned his gaze to the screen and relaxed back in his chair. "If this detector that Aub's making
works, we will have for the first time ever an instrument that responds directly to hi-radiation. We'll
actually be able to observe effects taking place in the universe we know, that are the results of causes [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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