"In the comparative quiet that followed, there was a rapid-fire shifting of ideas, deleting some, adding to others, and Prunella was doomed. The plot wasn't too thick. It depended only on the fact that an expert's eye was needed to detect the difference between sheer Enduron, the newest and best of the synthetic fibers, and sheer silk. By the same token, the reverse was true. That is, given silk, one could easily mistake it for Enduron.
"The services of a woman on Terra were necessary to us, so Sparks magnanimously recruited his young sister, a writer or artist or something of the sort, who lives somewhere in southern Europe. All she had to do was buy a dozen pairs of the fluffiest, frilliest, most outrageously feminine silk undies she could find in the most chi-chi shop in Paris and then send them to Prunella with a note honoring her as the first woman on Xenon and asking Prunella to accept them as a token of admiration from one woman to another. Some fictitious name was to be signed to it.
"We raided the office, obtained Prunella's file and copied out the proper measurements from it. Sparks fed the message, measurements and a blank signed photo-check into the coder and the automatic ultra-wave transmitter took it with a swift blip of sound and that was that."
waited for Lee to catch his breath, which he did by inhaling from a full glass. Then he continued talking.
"All this occurred about the middle of Xenon's third month. We expected the skivies to arrive on a supply ship due the first of the following month, which gave us nearly three Earth weeks to wait, but we didn't mind. After all, we had something to wait for.
"The ship, bless the crew, was on schedule almost to the hour. Adams had had his wide-angle 'scope aimed at the sky above Xenon since long before breakfast, and he and the detectors ran a dead heat when the ship winked out of sub-space about two million or so miles out.
"By mid-morning, the ship's gravitors had floated her into the field for the usual feather-light landing, and mail call, always the first order of business, was over.
"Women have a well-deserved reputation for dawdling over trifles when important matters wait, but that morning Prunella broke all previous records. She gossiped with the ship's captain about interminable bills of lading, she inspected the field for any possible damage by the ship, she swallowed enough coffee to start a fair-sized shortage. Finally, just in time to save the station from a mass nervous collapse, she left the office for her quarters, carrying her mail in one hand and that small, all-important package in the other.