He closed the door behind him, snapped the safety.
"It's about Gilchrist I wanted to talk—"
"Then do your talking," I advised him rudely, "somewhere else. If I never hear that skunk's name again, it will be too soon."
"Don't be hasty, Sparks. He's not a bad chap. Just a trifle headstrong, maybe—"
"Some people," I scorned, "like spiders. There's no accounting for tastes. Headstrong? You could use that skull of his to split granite. And you—" My indignation rose as I talked—"you're as bad as he is! Feeding him the good old soft-soap till it ran out of his ears!"
"It doesn't pay," said Biggs in that peculiar, soft, schoolmarm fashion he sometimes affects, "to antagonize folks you have to get along with. Whether we like it or not, Major Gilchrist has senior authority on this ship. But we can talk about that some other time, Sparks. This is what I wanted to show you—"
And he hauled a plot-chart from his pocket, gazed at me anxiously as I scanned it.
Well, you know how plot-charts are. Nothing but one solid mess of figures, figures, figures. Trajectory, flight-velocity, loft and acceleration computations—all that junk. They're about as easy to read as the shorthand scribblings of an illiterate Choctaw. I passed it back. I said:
"Looks O.Q. to me. Why the corrugated forehead?"
"Look again, Bert," demanded Biggs. "Look carefully at those trajectory co-ordinates. I may be wrong, and I don't want to influence your opinion by saying anything, but—"