Read Ebook: Stroke of Genius by Garrett Randall Phillips R Illustrator

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Ebook has 195 lines and 9739 words, and 4 pages

Klythe tapped his finger on the control board at which he had seated himself. The technicians began to disassemble the model, stripping it down to its last essential part, as Klythe watched with a critical eye.

Klythe had tapped the board, but he hadn't actually energized the gloves. This was to be a dry run; there was no need to record a disassembly; it was the assembly that would go down on tape.

It took an hour to complete the job, and all that time Klythe said nothing. He watched the men work, eying each move, each nut removed, each wire unwound.

When it was over, the men folded their hands in their laps, and Klythe tapped the control board once more.

"Let's see if we can't assemble it a little faster than that," he said coldly. He pressed the recording button, and the technicians began rebuilding the model.

Crayley stepped over to the monitor screen set in one wall of the recording room and switched it on. Then he cut in the experimental secondaries, connecting them to the recording primaries. They went through the same motions, their arms waving and gesticulating oddly in the air, since there was nothing for them to work on.

Klythe wasn't silent during the rebuilding. The disassembly had taught him everything he needed to know about the new unit; that was his job and his genius.

"Seven! Move that plate in straight next time! And you, Four, keep your guides straighter!" His voice rang clearly and concisely in the huge room. "Eighty-four! Don't wait so long before you hit that welder! As soon as Nine moves his left away from the shell, hit it!"

Little things, small savings of time, but they added up to greater efficiency in the long run. Klythe watched for every wasted motion, every fumble, every tiny error in timing or spacing, and corrected it with a whiplash voice.

When they had put the model completely back together, they folded their hands and looked at Klythe. Klythe jammed his finger down on the stop button and set the machine to erase the tape they had just made.

He scowled at the men. "I have seen more fumble-fingered recorders," he said acidly, "but they were trainees." He sighed as though his burden was too much. "All right. Rip her down and let's try it again."

The next time through, he was even more vituperative. If a man made an error the second time, Klythe was not above insults--personal ones.

An emergency call came in for Crayley. Something wrong on the second level. He stepped out the door in the middle of one of Klythe's high-tension blasts at a technician.

All the way down to the second level, Crayley was happy.

It took three days of hard work to pound all the kinks out of the recorders' technique. Not all, actually; Klythe still expressed dissatisfaction.

Crayley was in Klythe's office on the morning of the fourth day, sitting on Klythe's desk and smoking one of Klythe's cigarettes.

"The whole damned crew are butterfingers," Klythe was complaining. "I think they've all got arthritis. Why, oh, why couldn't they let me use my own crew?"

"Speed things up, I suppose," Crayley said cautiously.

"Oh, hell yes! Speed things up! Sure, I'll admit that it would have taken my boys a little time in disassembly to get the hang of this new generator, but we'd have made it up in recording time. That's the way the goddam military mind works! Nuts!"

Crayley rubbed the tip of his nose with a finger. "Is the team ready for recording today?"

Klythe grinned. "As close as they'll ever be. It takes time to get a team accustomed to my way of doing things. They hate my guts for the way I've yelled at them. But it's as much my fault as theirs. If their own engineer were to take over one of my crews, he wouldn't have any better results. The military just has to do things differently, that's all."

They recorded that afternoon. This time, when Klythe pressed the starter, he said nothing. Only his hands and eyes directed the men through their tasks. And every motion of the men's fingers and arms sent their special impulses to the recording tape that hummed through the machinery.

Crayley looked out from behind his face and smiled secretly.

When the recording was finished, Klythe nodded with satisfaction. "I think we could have shaved a few more seconds off that," he said, "but it'll do. Now disassemble it and we'll run her through on the tape."

They took the model down below to the radiation-proofed assembly tables for the test. The thing was pulled to pieces and each piece positioned. Then Klythe threw the switch that started the waldoes.

The tape purred through the pickup head, transmitting the little bits of information it had received, squirting little pulses of energy to the steel-and-plastic arms that jutted out of the domes atop the pillars. In exact duplication of the men's motions, the waldoes picked up the pieces and put them in their proper places.

It was like a great four-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. Each piece not only had to be located properly in space, but placed there at just exactly the right time. If there were any bugs in the recording, now was the time to find out. When the real thing was assembled, mistakes could be costly.

But there were no flaws in the recording. The model was rebuilt exactly as the men themselves had rebuilt it. That was Klythe's genius; he worked for perfection and got it.

Klythe looked at the model after the last pair of hands had fallen inert, and nodded slowly. Then he climbed all over the model, checking for errors. The interior circuits were tested electrically, one by one and in co-ordination with each other. The test machines showed it clear.

Finally, Klythe said: "I think it'll do. But now we'll disassemble it again by hand--slowly, this time--and see if we've screwed up anywhere."

He woke up with a horrible headache, but he felt wonderful inside.

Sure enough, Berin was in his usual state of "first-run jitters." Crayley had been a little afraid that Klythe's enthusiasm wouldn't be up to par on this project, but it evidently was.

He was rubbing his hands together, a nervous smile playing around his mouth, coming and going unpredictably.

"Well, we'll see today. Major Stratford will be here with the Space Force Research Staff at fourteen hundred to watch the first one off. I hope the bugs aren't too rough on us."

"Nothing will go wrong," Crayley assured him.

"That's easy to say," Klythe grumbled, "but you know how things can go at the last minute. I'm worried about those tensile differences."

Crayley stroked his mustache and nodded. The material used in the interior of the model was supposed to approximate the highly radioactive material in the real thing as closely as possible, but there might be just enough difference in critical spots to require some small adjustments in the tape. If a man's hand applied just enough pressure and torque to twist a piece of copper wire just so, it might be too much or too little for a radioactive alloy wire that would be used in the same place in the production piece.

After the suppressor field had been switched on in the hull of the finished generator, the energy generated by the workings of the intensely radioactive interior would be compressed to the sub-nucleonic level, where it could be controlled. Unfortunately, the machine couldn't be built inside a suppressor field; that would be like trying to build a ship in a bottle when the bottle's neck was sealed shut.

Crayley said, "I've got a lot of stuff to do on Line Number Two this morning, but I'd like to see the run-off."

"Sure," said Klythe abstractedly, "come ahead."

Crayley didn't go to Number Two. He headed directly for the recording room. All he needed was ten minutes alone in there. Provided, of course, that it was empty.

It was. Crayley took a quick look up and down the corridor and stepped inside. He locked the door behind him. If anyone tried to come in, he'd be able to cover. It was better to have someone wonder why the door was locked than to be caught messing with the tapes when he shouldn't be. Of course, if someone did try the door, it would mean that his chance of getting Klythe this time would be gone. But there would always be another time.

First, the tape. He flipped open the cover to the receiving reel. Sure enough, it was still there from yesterday's trial run, a huge reel of foot-wide blue plastic ribbon. Good enough.

He punched the "fast" button and ran it through to the last few minutes of the recording. He glanced at the monitor screen. The model was still on the assembly table in the tunnel deep underground.

He cut off the current to the secondaries and switched on the manual controls. Then he put his hands into one set of gloves and wiggled his fingers. The secondaries in the room below remained motionless.

Number Nineteen Experimental ought to be empty. He withdrew his hand and turned the selector knob on the monitor screen to Nineteen. No one there. He switched on the power, letting the last few minutes of the taped recording feed into the secondaries in Nineteen.

The waldoes in the screen went through the motions of finishing the assembly--meaningless gestures in the empty air--then fell into the "ready" position. Crayley hit the stop button, then switched back to the tunnel where the model lay.

He took a deep breath. Now came the touchy part. He hadn't handled a pair of primary waldoes for years, and this thing had to be done just right.

He had already decided which of the positions he would have to use and what he would have to do. Now, if only his timing was good. It didn't have to be perfect; that was the beauty of the plan. But it did have to be pretty close.

He turned on the waldoes without turning on the recorder and slipped his hands into the gloves. Then, using the foot switch, he kicked on the close-up screen for the position he was occupying. The screen showed the secondaries of the hands he was using. He wiggled his fingers. The secondaries wiggled theirs.

Then he reached out and gingerly touched the model. The secondaries touched the steel plate, and the feedbacks sent back a signal. Crayley's gloves felt the resistance just as though the model were right there in the room.

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