As he swept his hand through his snow-white crew cut and called the board to order a dispatch was handed to him—a preliminary report from a quickly-dispatched company trouble-shooter team. He read it to the board, stone-faced.
A veteran heat-transfer man, the first to recover, growled:
"Some vibration thing—and seepage from the oil pool. Sloppy drilling!" He sneered. "Big deal! So a couple hundred meters of shaft have to be plugged and pumped. So six or eight compartments go pop. Since when did we start to believe the cack Research & Development hands out? Armor's armor. Sure it pops—when something makes it pop. If Atlantic oil was easy to get at, it wouldn't be here waiting for us now. Put a gang on the job. Find out what happened, make sure it doesn't happen again. Big deal!"
Muhlenhoff smiled his attractive smile. "Breck," he said, "thank God you've got guts. Perhaps we were in a bit of a panic. Gentlemen, I hope we'll all take heart from Mr. Breck's level-headed—what did you say, Breck?"
Breck didn't look up. He was pawing through the dispatch Muhlenhoff had dropped to the table. "Nine-inch plate," he read aloud, whitefaced. "And time of installation, not quite seven weeks ago. If this goes on in a straight line—" he grabbed for a pocket slide-rule—"we have, uh—" he swallowed—"less time than the probable error," he finished.
"Breck!" Muhlenhoff yelled. "Where are you going?"
The veteran heat-transfer man said grimly as he sped through the door: "To find a submarine."
The rest of the Engineering Board was suddenly pulling chairs toward the trouble-shooting team's dispatch. Muhlenhoff slammed a fist on the table.
"Stop it," he said evenly. "The next man who leaves the meeting will have his contract canceled. Is that clear, gentlemen? Good. We will now proceed to get organized."
He had them; they were listening. He said forcefully: "I want a task force consisting of a petrochemist, a vibrations man, a hydrostatics man and a structural engineer. Co-opt mathematicians and computermen as needed. I will have all machines capable of handling Fourier series and up cleared for your use. The work of the task force will be divided into two phases. For Phase One, members will keep their staffs as small as possible. The objective of Phase One is to find the cause of the leaks and predict whether similar leaks are likely elsewhere in the project. On receiving a first approximation from the force I will proceed to set up Phase Two, to deal with counter-measures."