"What's the matter? Don't they like the color scheme? I never thought scientists had any artistic taste, anyway."
"It's got nothing to do with that. The—"
The phone rang. Colonel Spaulding scooped it up and identified himself. Then: "What? Yeah. All right, send him in."
He hung up and looked back at Lenny. "Davenport. We can get his story firsthand. Just sit there and look important."
Lenny nodded. He knew that Dr. Amadeus Davenport was aware that the source of those drawings was Soviet Russia, but he did not know how they had been obtained. As far as he knew, it was just plain, ordinary spy work.
He came in briskly. He was a tall, intelligent-looking man with a rather craggy face and thoughtful brown eyes. He put a large brief case on the floor, and, after the preliminaries were over, he came right to the point.
"Colonel Spaulding, I spoke to the Secretary of Defense, and he agreed that perhaps this situation might be cleared up if I talked directly with you."
"I hope so," the colonel said. "Just what is it that seems to be bothering you?"
"These drawings," Davenport said, "don't make any sense. The device they're supposed to represent couldn't do anything. Look; I'll show you."
He took from his brief case photostatic copies of some of the drawings Lenny had made. Five of them were straight blueprint-type drawings; the sixth was a copy of Lenny's near-photographic paintings of the device itself.