"I suppose so. The funny pictures, eh?" Delcamp had learned much, the previous day; his own performance with the Pleiades had humbled him markedly.
"By no means, my friend," Garlock said, cheerfully. "While your stuff isn't exactly like ours—it couldn't be, hardly; the field is so big and so new—that alone is no reason for it not to work. James can tell you. He's the Solar System's top engineer. What do you think, Jim?"
"What I saw in the ship yesterday will work. What few of the prints I saw yesterday will fabricate, and the fabrications will work. The main trouble with this project, it seems to me, is that nobody's building the ship."
"What do you mean by that crack?" Fao blazed.
"Just that. You're a bunch of prima donnas; each doing exactly as he pleases. So some of the stuff is getting done three or four times, in three or four different ways, while a lot of it isn't getting done at all."
"Such as?" Delcamp demanded, and—
"Well, if you don't like the way we are doing things you can...." Fao began.
"Just a minute, everybody." Lola came in, with a disarming grin. "How much of that is hindsight, Jim? You've built one, you know—and from all accounts, progress wasn't nearly as smooth as your story can be taken to indicate."
"You've got a point there, Lola," Garlock agreed. "We slid back two steps for every three we took forward."
"Well ... maybe," James admitted.