"Good idea," said Albie. "There's no telling when we'll get another chance. I hear the army has a plan to extend radar coverage clear around the continent. That'll involve a lot of work for Urei. Best get the new circuits in now; if any bugs pop up we'll have time to correct them in the next few days. After that there mightn't be an opportunity for months...."
The test was perfect; such things were more or less standardized. Problems which required a fair sampling of the great machine's stored memories were used. Dr. Albie checked the solution speeds on the various tests against the speeds recorded with the old control circuits. He was as smugly satisfied as if he had devised the entire system himself. Benton's enthusiasm was verbose; he talked more than usual because speech involves the use of muscles and that requires strong surface thoughts. It wouldn't pay, at this point in his campaign, to let Urei suspect that his choice of circuits to test was anything but as haphazard as it appeared to Dr. Albie.
There were nine of these test problems. Benton fed them at random into the circuits marked Ten, Three, Twenty-one, Sixteen, Twenty-four, Fifteen, One, Eight and Eighteen. He did it blithely, keeping up a running description of the many annoyances that had cropped up in the morning's work, and commenting on the quality of the help he had been given by the various technicians.
"There isn't a bad one in the crop," he said. "But if we are going to cut the control staff, I'd recommend putting Hackett and McGivern upstairs. Hackett has family problems that he likes to hand Urei when nobody's around; he's capable, though, and he'd do all right on the memory circuits. McGivern has already asked for a transfer, so we may as well oblige."
Dr. Albie nodded absently, being completely engrossed in checking the speeds as each solution popped up on the board. In about a half-hour they were all in, and all clipped several minutes from previous tests.
"Excellent, excellent," Dr. Albie pronounced, his face hovering between a smile and a frown. "I'll cut the other half of the board and you can get started immediately. If it takes longer than you expect, stay with it; I'll cover in for the next three days while you catch up on your rest."
Benton forced his mind into safe channels. Once more it had almost run away with him. The completion of his plan was so imminent that already he felt a surge of nostalgia. His work had been exactly to his liking, as no other could ever be; and certainly Dr. Albie, while not a gregarious man, was without peer as a colleague. His strict emotional control and the virtue of carefully weighing many sides of a question before making a decision occasionally irked the more mercurial Benton; but generous compensation was provided in the fact that the doctor leaned over backward rather than take advantage of his position as nominal head of the operating staff of Urei. He rated Benton as his equal, for to the doctor nobody could be inferior by reason of position.
As the afternoon wore on Benton felt his nervous tension mount to heights he had never thought possible. Not, that is, and retain his sanity. Yet he worked coolly, in rigid control of his thoughts every instant. That, of course, and the necessity for trigger alertness as he waited for the sound of the gong, accounted for the rising tension. Benton didn't dare think of his next step; yet he must be ready for it momentarily.
There would be no more than five minutes in which to act when the signal came, and he hadn't as yet allowed the thought of that action to enter his mind! Benton knew that he would do the right thing when the time came; there was no necessity for him to crystallize the thought or to plan the action. Sometime in the half-awake-half-asleep hours he had spent working circuit equations that morning, the plan had reached that stage and he had allowed it to go no further.