I went back to work refreshed by the prospect of an extramural session with the shapely Dr. Frances von Munger.

It proved an interesting evening. Despite her polyglot propensities and monumental economic erudition, Frances von Munger had never drunk a negroni cocktail, never cracked a lobster. Later I discovered that she danced as though she'd heard of the art, but had never practiced it before. So mostly we sat and talked. We swapped genealogies and reminisced over our school days. Frances had been the only girl in a class of boy engineers at a fresh-water college in Indiana, I discovered. She'd got her B. S. in Mechanical before she'd gone to Chicago to study economics. I grinned sheepishly at this, remembering the times I'd explained my simple math procedures to her as though she'd been a dewy-eyed home-economics girl. "But why did you drop engineering?" I wanted to know.

"It wasn't going anywhere," she said. A cryptic statement, but I left it alone.

Well, I took the boss home and kissed her goodnight; and hummed Verdi overtures in the taxi all the way home. In the morning, of course, she'd be the same schoolmarmish dame she'd always been, the government girl in the gray flannel suit. Decorative, but distant.

Back at my cluttered desk the next morning, facing the medley of newspaper clippings and half-baked hypotheses that represented my contribution to Economic Analysis (spaceship division), I felt a cold wave of panic. In six days I'd have to stand at a table decked by admirals and generals, and expose this flimsy structure of Sunday work to their merited contempt.

I tugged out my file marked Propulsion System and leafed through it. I was as clever as that Dutch paleontologist who'd reconstructed the greater blue-eyed auk from a single petrified tail-feather. I'd shuffled a mess of inferences taken from the journals of a nation not too celebrated for guilelessness, dropped them in a hat, and pulled out a spaceship by the ears. For all I knew, really knew, the Reds could be propelling the KEZ with twisted rubber bands.

I was supposed to be building the ship the way I'd build it—if I had the gear delivered by that overworked railhead at Kysyl Khoto, if I were a Russian-trained engineer, if I had my ear at the Kremlin's keyhole and my hand in its till, and if our intelligence wasn't a fiction born of paperwork. OK. Back into the desk went the Propulsion file while my keen engineering mind relaxed by considering the dimensions of Dr. Frances von Munger. After a while I got out the old copy 

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