Stan picked up the tape and sat down.
"All right, go find him then. And bring him over here while I run out the sample. We can make with the talk after that."
The tape was perfect, with neither patch nor correction. Stan finally raised his head, growling to himself.
"Guy's competent enough at programming, anyway. Now, what's wrong with him?"
He snapped the power switch from stand-by to on, then waited as the indicators came up. Delicately, he turned a couple of microdrive dials till the needles settled on their red lines. Then he opened the control head, poked the tape in, and punched the starter lever.
The tape clicked steadily through the head. Stan kept his eyes moving about as he checked the meters.
The tape ran out of the head and dropped into the catcher basket and hydraulics squished as a delivery arm set a small block on the sample table. Stan picked it up, turning it over to examine it.
It was a simple, rectangular block of black material, about the size of a cigarette lighter. On five sides were intricate patterns of silvery connector dots. An identifying number covered the sixth. Inside, Stan knew, lay complex circuitry, traced into the insulation. Tiny dots of alloy formed critical junctions, connected by minute, sprayed-in threads of conductor material. He glanced around.