"Bother lunch." He gave Melrose a sidelong glare. "We've got a guest here who's got a lot of words he's going to eat for us...."
Ten minutes later they rode the elevator down to the transit levels and boarded the little shuttle car in the terminal below the Hoffman Center. They sat in silence as the car dipped down into the rapid-transit channels beneath the great city, swinging northward in the express circuit through Philadelphia and Camden sectors, surfacing briefly in Trenton sector, then dropping underground once again for the long pull beneath Newark, Manhattan and Westchester sectors. In less than twenty minutes the car surfaced on a Parkway channel and buzzed north and east through the verdant Connecticut countryside.
"What about Tommy?" Lessing asked Dorffman as the car sped along through the afternoon sun.
"I just finished the prelims. He's not cooperating."
Lessing ground his teeth. "I should be running him now instead of beating the bushes with this—" He broke off to glare at young Melrose.
Melrose grinned. "I've heard you have quite a place up here."
"It's—unconventional, at any rate," Lessing snapped.
"Well, that depends on your standards. Sounds like a country day school, from what I've heard. According to your papers, you've even used conventional statistical analysis on your data from up here."
"Until we had to throw it out. We discovered that what we were trying to measure didn't make sense in a statistical analysis."