"Deny it," smiled Wrightwood in a superior manner. "Just to prove to yourself and to your superiors, you've been cracking down hard on me."
Steve eyed Wrightwood sharply. "Seems to me that your underlings might be more considerate of your holdings," he snapped.
"What do you mean?"
"It doesn't take a lot to keep things ship-shape. Faulty wiring, frayed connections, generators with rattles, loose bearings, electron tubes working past their safety-period. I found three hydrogen thyatrons running at one-and-one-half times their rating because they were so old that they were beginning to get sluggish. Just last week in one of your ships.
"Sure," sneered Steve, "you can get another couple of hundred operating hours out of a tube by running the filament hotter than normal when it starts to get weak. But you're running a spaceline, not a spot-welder; when one of them blows, it's a job for the mop-up squad. Someone's cutting corners, saving a hundred bucks worth of tubes for a couple of weeks doesn't pay for lost lives and—"
"I'm aware of the safety factors," said Wrightwood angrily. "The trouble with these safety factors is that they've been set up because someone in your outfit took the figures presented by the tube manufacturers and divided them by two. Instead of running on a hundred percent safety factor, you've forced us to run on five or six hundred percent. And do you know why?"
Steve did not reply.
"Because one of the guys who makes standards for the Guardians holds some stock in a tube company."
"That's a lie!" roared Steve, slamming his fist on the table.