"Have a seat, Mike," Cleary said, going around to lower himself carefully into a tall swivel chair. He learned back and rocked slowly, like an old woman on the front porch of a resort hotel. His pipe was still smoking in a rather large ashtray. He picked it up, showing it to be a curve-stemmed old-man's style, and puffed contentedly at it. On him it didn't look like an act.
"Well," he said, pulling big shaggy eyebrows down so they shaded his pale blue eyes. "You've become something of a celebrity around here, Mike."
This was an unexpected approach. "Nobody told me," I complained. "Does this kind of fame show up in the paycheck?"
"Not always," Cleary said, scowling a little. "I just meant that your name gets bandied about. Every time I talk to Fred Stone he says, 'Dr. Seaman says this,' or 'Dr. Seaman says that.' I just had to see what this doctor looked like."
"You can forget the doctor part," I said uncomfortably. I had heard that Cleary was sensitive about having no advanced degree. When he went to work for the Western, college was plenty. You did your post-graduate work on the job. He sure had—and he had a string of patents as long as your arm to prove it.
"That's good," he said. "I'd hate to think I was competing with you in the field of knowledge where you are the world's specialist."
I grinned at him a little sickly. "COMCORP has never made any use of my specialty," I conceded. "You already had about ten guys around here who had learned twice as much as I had simply by doing it every day for a living. They could have written rings around my thesis."
"Sure," he said contentedly, puffing more smoke. "So we made a testing engineer out of you. And you may amount to something, to hear Fred Stone tell it."
"Thanks," I said.
"Now let me hear what you've been doing for Fred," Cleary suggested, in a sort of avuncular tone. "I'd like to measure you myself."