unctive. Would sounded like wood. Wood might
bring up the thought of termites.

We could see the Chief was weighing the advantages of keeping them
against the risks of upsetting the department constantly. As we
expected, greed won. We knew he would not risk giving up the prestige
and extra bonuses he got for Kenzie's work. And he knew he had to keep
those discoveries coming, because our management has a short memory of
what a guy has done in the past.

The Chief even let Kenzie have Pringle as his own personal tech. It
served two purposes. It isolated them from the rest of us. It made
Kenzie happy.

I will say for the lads, they spent most of their time on Company
problems, at first. But gradually, on one corner of Kenzie's bench, a
gadget began to take shape. The two of them worked on it when there
were no urgent, frantic, must-be-out-today-without-fail problems to be
solved first. None of us could figure out the purpose of the
mechanism.

We knew if we couldn't figure it, the Chief couldn't. But we could
practically see him rub his hands in glee when he thought of the extra
bonus he might get for this new gadget.

Of course the Chief wasn't a complete slouch as an electronics
engineer. But it was a long time since he did his study, and he had
grown hazy by spending too many years as an administrator. The word
got around that for hours at a time, after we had gone home, the Chief
would stand at Kenzie's bench.

The way we reasoned it, he figured he ought to know something about
the gadget when he took it in to Old Rock Jaw, and palmed it off as
his latest discovery. We also reasoned that since we couldn't figure
it, the Chief must have been an awfully troubled man.

Obviously, it had something to do with microwave transmission and
reception. There was the usual high-frequency condensor, the magnatron
tubes, the tuning cavities. All company stock, of course. But then
none of us ever worried about cost. That was the Chief's problem.

He didn't worry much about it either, except at budget time. Then
there were screams of anguish from the front office over experimental
requisitions. Every year, Old Rock Jaw promised to fire us all, if we
didn't cut costs, but in a couple of weeks we always forgot about it.

Trouble was, the Chief had been getting edgy about costs lately, so we
knew it was about time for the annual budget battle. Significantly, he
didn't say a word to Kenzie about the gadget.

* *