Question of Comfort
the System Project. Next day, it was going the rounds as TS project. Words, words, and men will always fight with words.

Actually, the initials were worthy of the name. The engineering problems mounted like crazy. Words, words, and one of them got to the outside world. Or maybe it was the additional construction crew we hired.

One logical spot for the building was next to the moon flight. The Tour building now would be bigger than first planned, so we extended it southeasterly. This meant changing the roadbed of the Santa Fe & Disneyland R.R. It put me up to my ears in plane surveying—and gave me a nasty shock.

I looked up at someone's shout, in time to see a ton of cat rolling down the embankment at me.

What we were doing was easy. Using a spiral to transition gradually from tangent to circular curve and from circular curve to tangent. Easy? Yeah. Sure.

If this was my baby, I'd damned well better know its personality traits. I was out with the surveyors, I was out with the construction gang, I was out at the wrong time.

As the yellow beast, mindless servant of man, thundered down, I dove for the rocks. Thank God for the rocks—we'd had to import them: the soil in Orange County is fine for oranges, but too soft for train roadbeds.

Choking on the dust, I rolled over. The cat perched, grinning drunkenly, on the rocks. The opposition or an accident? Surely the Mind wasn't that desperate. But I was; I had to keep the idea alive, for myself as well as completion of the original mission.

Several million hands pulled me out; several million more patted away the dust. Motionless, I'd just seen the driver of the cat. Seen him—and was sorry.

He stood tall but hunched over; gaunt, with pasty skin, vapid eyes, and a kind of yellow-nondescript hair.

It wasn't the physical characteristics, very similar to mine, that bothered me—once after an incomplete pass, I'd been told by a young lady that I was a "thin, sallow lecher." I was swept by waves of impending trouble, more frightened of him than of the opposition in toto. Then, relieved, I realized the man wasn't the one I was expecting.

Back in my office, I wasn't allowed the luxury of nervous reaction. Our spacesuit man wanted an Ok on design changes. Changes? What changes?... Oh, yes, go ahead.


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