The Trouble with Telstar

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  Transcriber's Note:

  This etext was produced from Analog Science Fact & Fiction June 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

  THE TROUBLE WITH TELSTAR

  The real trouble with communications satellites is the enormous difficulty of repairing even the simplest little trouble. You need such a loooong screwdriver.

  by JOHN BERRYMAN

  ILLUSTRATED BY JOHN SCHOENHERR

  * * * * *

  Doc Stone made sure I wouldn't give him the "too busy" routine. Hesent 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 themin the file cabinet, per regulations, and walked beside Millie toStone's office.

  "It's a reflex mechanism, Mike," Dr. Stone said as Millie showed mein. "Every type knows how to fight for survival." He took onethoughtful 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 PaulCleary's baby, and after all these years with the company, he doesn'tfigure 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 everdone was find out how to destroy it. And after all, that's part ofwhat my lab does, and what I do, for a living.

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

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

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

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

  "Cut it out, Mike," he said, coming as near to a snap as his carefulvoice could manage. He blew smoke out around the stem of his pipe. Ithink sometimes it's a part of his act, like the slightly-out-of-presssports 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. Heknows an awful lot about solid-state physics, and for a physicist, hesure learned enough about micro-assemblies of electronic components. Iguess that's why he was in charge of final assembly of the Telstarsatellites for COMCORP.

  "Don't worry about what Paul Cleary can do _to_ you, Mike," hesuggested. "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 hewon't hear of design bugs in that solenoid. He'll insist somethingwent wrong in assembly."

  Doc Stone smiled thinly at me and brushed at his blond crew cut. "Itis a tough spot, Mike," he agreed. "Because I won't hear any talk offaulty assembly. You'll have to choose, I guess. If you think you canmake your bed by playing footsie with an old fud who has only a yearto 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 medown!"

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

  "Now."

  * * * * *

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

  I shared it with a small, intense girl named Sylvia Shouff, if youbelieved the little plastic sign on her desk. There was barely roomfor it in the welter of paper, files, notebooks, phones, calendars andother junk she had squirreled. She was much too busy banging at atypewriter and handling the phone to pay any attention to me. Herpert, 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 middleof a hell of a scrap. It had all started a couple years back, when thefinal design had been approved for a whole sky-full of communicationssatellites. Well, eighteen, to be exact. One of the parts in thedesign had been a solenoid, part No. M1537, which handled a switchingoperation too potent for a solid-state switch. That solenoid was oneof the few moving parts in the Telstars, and it had been designed forskeighty-eight million cycles before it got sloppy or quit.

  In practice, out in space, the switching operation simply hadn'tworked. After about a hundred hours of use in Telstar One, it failed.Unfortunately, this had not been discovered until the first sixsatellites had been launched. Further launchings were postponed whilethey ran accelerated switching tests on satellites Two through Six outin space. The same kind of failure took place on each bird.

  There were two schools of thought on licking the bug. Doc Stone, ofcourse, insisted that solenoid M1537 had failed, which was onepossible interpretation of the telemetry. And Paul Cleary, who hadbeen in charge of design, insisted that faulty assembly was to blame.Well, somebody would make up his mind pretty soon, and my evidencewould have a lot to do with it. I had done the appraisal tests of thecircuit in the test lab once the bug had been detected, and now Clearywas 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 cametoward her desk.

  I shook my head. "I'm a working stiff," I said, "I never get to meetthe brass."

  "You are also somewhat insolent," she said tartly. "Better wash outyour mouth before you try that on Paul Cleary. He eats wise younglaboratory 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 aroundhis desk and shook my hand with his rather gnarled and boney paw.

  "Hello, Seaman. I'm glad to meet you, young man. Come in. We have alot to talk about," he said.

  * * * * *

  Considering that Cleary was a wheel, and had thirty years of servicewith Western Electric behind him, his office wasn't especially large.Maybe that's because Communications Corporation is owned half by thegovernment and half by AT&T. The government half makes us watch ourpennies.

  "Have a seat, Mike," Cleary said, going around to lower himselfcarefully 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 wasstill smoking in a rather large ashtray. He picked it up, showing itto 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 shaggy eyebrows down so they shaded hispale blue eyes. "You've become something of a celebrity around here,Mike."

  This was an unexpected approach. "Nobody 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 yourname 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 whatthis doctor looked like."

  "You can forget the doctor part," I said uncomfortably. I had heardthat Cleary was sensitiv
e about having no advanced degree. When hewent to work for the Western, college was plenty. You did yourpost-graduate work on the job. He sure had--and he had a string ofpatents as long as your arm to prove it.

  "That's good," he said. "I'd hate to think I was competing with you inthe field of knowledge where you are the world's specialist."

  I grinned at him a little sickly. "COMCORP has never made any use ofmy specialty," I conceded. "You already had about ten guys around herewho had learned twice as much as I had simply by doing it every dayfor a living. They could have written rings around my