"It's a lousy thing to do," cried Donnelly as he snapped off the set. "A rotten, heartless way of giving the lad false hopes. But then you don't give a damn about anybody's feelings but your own, do you, Doc?"
"Take it easy, Joe—"
"Shut up, Williams. I'm talking to this little Government time-server over here, not to you."
The psychiatrist shrugged wearily. "I don't care what you think. I've worked with you both on cases similar to this before, though I'll admit that none of them were quite as hopeless. In any case, I'll do it my way, or not at all."
"Maybe you will, maybe you will," said Donnelly. "But if I had to wait thirty days in that thing and somebody told me it was only a matter of hours—"
"I know what I'm doing even if you think that I don't. The Government has developed a set approach in matters like this. Fortunately, there aren't many of them. Perhaps if there were—"
"Let me take over, Doc," broke in Donnelly. "I'm a space-engineer and that makes me far better qualified to handle this than you are. Why the hell they ever put a psychiatrist on this job in the first place is something I'll never know, if I live to be a hundred and ten. It's a job for an engineer, not a brain washer."
"There's a lot of things you'll never know, Donnelly," the gaunt, thin little man sighed wearily. He sat down at the long mahogany table in the Radio Room. With a careless wave of one arm, he swept a pile of papers and magazines to the floor.
"Try and get this through your head, Donnelly. There's not too much you can do by yourself for that boy up there. You just don't know how to cope with the psychological intangibles. That's why they have me here—so that we could work together as a team.
"Now the sooner you get on that radio and follow my instructions for the pilot the sooner we'll get this over with. Then maybe I can go home and spend a hundred years trying to forget about it. Until then please try and keep your personal opinions to yourself. Please."