Henry Mintner came back into the lab. I hadn't seen him leave, nor missed him. He was carrying several small cartons of electronic parts. Orville Snyder was back at work again.
Did I have some work—as Dave Thordsen—that I was supposed to get busy at? If so, I didn't know what it was. Anyway, I had more engrossing things to occupy me. My thoughts.
It was now obvious to me that Hank and Orville did work here. So did I, or rather, Dave Thordsen. There were just the three of us. No one else worked in the lab.
Yet I was first, last and always Fred Martin, who lived in a bachelor apartment. And I had been working in this lab for three years. The bench Orville was working at was my bench. The work he was doing was my work.
"Dave!" I snapped out of my thoughts at the sound of Mintner's voice. "This stuff's no good," he called to me. "It's as bad as the other dialectric we used. It holds the proper saturation charge without breakdown, but on discharge it holds too high a residual charge." He came over to my desk and sat down on one corner of it. "Damn it," he said. "It seems there's no in-between. We either get a dialectric that discharges instead of holding, or we get one that holds and never lets go completely. We get a computer that doesn't work, or one that jams with random stuff after it's been in use."
"Keep trying," I said vaguely.
"I will," he said. He grinned. "That's what I get paid for."
I looked up at him speculatively. I had the impulse to try something. I snapped my fingers suddenly and sat up, as though just remembering something. "Fred Martin!" I said.
"Who's he?" Mintner asked, and I could tell he had never heard the name before.
"Skip it," I said. "I was just thinking of something I had forgotten."