"You mean the tests I ran on the switching gate?" I asked.
"Why, yes, we can start there," he nodded, squinting his blue eyes more and blowing a real screen up between us.
"When Telstar One packed up, they sent me down the whole gate from that sector," I said. "Dr. Stone asked me to run destruct tests on the whole assembly, which I did. The only failures I have induced so far are failures in M1537, the solenoid that all the shouting is about."
"What kind of failures did you get?"
"Armature froze on the field," I said. "I guess the bearings really went. When there was enough load on them, they couldn't maintain concentricity."
"What kind of loads?" he growled, sinking down lower in his chair. He put his elbows on the arm and laced hairy-backed fingers together under his chin.
"I put the whole gate on the centrifuge and swung it up to twelve gees" I said. "Switching was normal there for the twenty thousand cycles I gave the gate. But when I added undamped vibration at twelve thousand to fifteen thousand cycles per second, I could induce failure pretty quickly. Say an hour or so."
"You had to apply the vibration throughout the whole test period to get these failures?"
"Yes, Mr. Cleary."