"Doc, after this project you know more about contemp' stuff than any professor who got his degree studying the textbooks you wrote."
It was impossible to dislike Madison except for practiced periods—that was probably one reason he had his job.
"All right," I growled. "Get your dirty pants off my clean desk and I'll get out the bottle. We'll—celebrate, huh?"
But you know how I felt, General? You remember how I tried to get out of it. I felt like I had led in the lambs and now I had to help shear them. As a part-time historian I can tell you there's a word for that—Judas goat. Give or take a word.
"It isn't the real thing, Doc," Madison spelled out for me, wearing a lemon twist of smile.
I looked at the twin banks of gauge-facings and circuit housings in which centered TV screens picturing either Meyverik or Johnson. Red and sea-green lights chased each other around the control boards, died, were born again. On the screens the three color negatives mixed to purple, shifted through a series of wrong combinations and settled to normal as the stereo-oscillation echoed, convexed insanely, and deepened to hold. Video reception is lousy from five hundred thousand miles out.
I was too eye-heavy to be surprised.
"Don't tell me this is The Strange Flight of Richard Clayton all over again?"
Madison clapped me on the shoulder and breathed mint at me, eyes on twittering round faces.