t having to drag up the facts that had been
analyzed and settled long ago.

He saw himself compared with the producer of a show, and theatrical
performers didn't come any more temperamental than scientists. He'd be
hearing about how much of their time he'd wasted for months to come.
Every time any administrator asked why they hadn't produced whatever it
was they were working on, it would be because Chief Hayes had
interrupted them at the most crucial moment and they'd had to begin all
over again.

Oh, they'd drag their heels, all right, and he'd have to remind them,
tactfully, that their prime duty was to serve the Extrapolators; that
they were employed here only because someday, in some co-ordinate
system, somebody might be able to supply a key fact that some E might
want to know.

They'd ask him, slyly, what guarantee he had that any E would be
listening if they did produce a review of the Eden complex, knowing he
could give no such guarantee.

They'd drag their heels because, deep down, they carried a basic
resentment against the E--because, experts though they were, each of
them, somewhere along the line, had learned the bitter limits in his
mind that prevented him from going on to become an E.

They'd drag their heels because the E's, each blasted one of them, would
regard the absolutely true facts proved beyond question by science with
an attitude of skepticism, temporarily accepting the uncontestably
immutable as only provisionary, and probably quite wrong.

Oh, they'd grumble, and they'd drag their heels at first; but they would
get into it. They'd get into it, not because the sector chief had babied
them along, kidded them, coaxed them, but because, as surely as his
name was Bill Hayes, some unprintable E would ask a question for which
they had no answer. Or even worse, some question that made no sense, but
left the scientist feeling that perhaps it should have!

That was the E brand of thinking which gave everybody trouble--and
without which man could never have gone on creeping outward and outward
among the stars. Every new planet, or subplanet, or sun or blasted
asteroid seemed to call for some revision of known laws. Sometimes an
entirely new co-ordinate system had to be resolved. Oh, science was
easy, a veritable snap, while man crawled around on the muddy bottom of
his ocean of air and concluded that throughout all the universe things
must conform to his then notion of what they must be. As ignora