"Well ... uh—" Davenport hesitated. "I can't be sure on my own say-so, of course. I don't understand Russian. But I assure you that Mr. Berensky is perfectly reliable."
"Oh, I have no doubt of that," Colonel Spaulding said easily. "But, tell me, does Mr. Berensky know how to read a circuit diagram?"
"He does," Davenport said, somewhat testily. "Of course, he wasn't shown the diagram itself. We had the Russian labels copied, and he translated from a list."
"I had a sneaking suspicion that was it," said Spaulding. "Tell me, doctor, what does L-E-A-D spell?"
"Lead," said the doctor promptly, pronouncing it leed. Then, after a pause, he said: "Or lead," this time pronouncing it led. "It would depend on the context."
"Suppose it was on a circuit diagram," the colonel prompted.
"Then it would probably be leed. What's all this leading up to, colonel?"
"Bear with me. Suppose you had a cable coming from a storage battery, and you wanted to make sure that the cable was reasonably resistant to corrosion, so you order it made out of the metal, lead. It would be a led leed, wouldn't it?"
"Um-m-m ... I suppose so."
"You might get pretty confused if you didn't have a circuit diagram in front of you to tell you what the label was talking about, mightn't you?"