ere that sort.

I couldn't know the GG was foredoomed to failure by its very collective
nature; nor could I know, by its nature, the GG meant the difference
between my success and failure.

The opposition put one over; we'd started referring to the job as Tour
of 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 offi