"A confession of ignorance is a hell of a lot more revealing than a solid error," I snapped. "The honest answer that I get out of the telemetry data is that something in that gate broke the circuit and the switching operation failed. I think there are about seven thousand components in the gate. I don't know which one failed. A few I can rule out, because they would only cause part of the gate to fail. But a hundred different breaks could account for the data. So I don't know."
He lit his pipe and blew smoke around the curved stem before he made reply. "So we got a philosopher for our money," he said. "A confession of ignorance, eh? What are you going to do about it?"
"You tell me, Mr. Cleary. You're the old head around here."
"So I am," he said evenly. "So I am. Well, my advice to young pups is that they should not be ashamed when they don't know. They should say so. But they should have something else to say along with it."
"For example," I suggested grumpily.
"They should say, 'I don't know, but I know where to find out,'" he said. "Tell me, Dr. Seaman, do you know where to find out?"
He puffed at me for the two or three minutes I thought about it. Really, that's a very long time to think. Most ideas come to you the moment you identify the problem, which is the really hard part of thinking. But this problem took some thought, and I wanted him to think I was thinking.
"Yes," I said at last. "I know where to find out."
"Where?"
"Out in space."