Now it was silent in the computation laboratory, save for the occasional clicking of the super calculator that lined one wall of the room. Pages and pages of equations were piled high in the file box and Bronson sat in the control console of the big machine and worked. Hour after hour he alternated moments of quick activity over the keyboard with periods of quiet contemplation and reasoning as the answers to his mathematical problems came clicking back.
Dimly he heard the door open behind him and he accepted it vaguely—disinterestedly—because the problem at hand was far more important. He felt her presence beside him and she was silent as she read his notes.
He set up another problem on the keyboard and leaned back, looking up at her.
"Found something?" she asked.
"No," he replied. "Except that the space-resonant elements do not make sense in the mass spectrograph."
"I know," she said. "We've known that for years."
Bronson waved a book. "And I'm a little shocked at the lack of true basic research to be found on Earth Three."
"What?" asked Virginia.
"It seems as though they know a lot," he explained. "But they know no more about this stuff than the nineteen hundreds knew about the electricity they used."
"That's natural," she said. "People are always willing to use something beneficial though they know little about its basic fundamentals. One out of a thousand automobile drivers really knows anything about the internal combustion engine. The rest are merely drivers, controlling a mammoth they know nothing about."