he staff had not realized he was her adjutant.

* * * * *

The Mayo psychiatrist and the Yale psychologist had been in conference
with Bridget for almost an hour. She had been giving them preliminary
findings and the results of tests and interviews with the base pilots.

When they finally broke up, Bridget approached Grant with a
there's-something-I-want-from-you look. Grant nearly had a chance to
offer lunch before she suggested it.

What she wanted from him came out over their aerated sherbet pie. By the
time she finished, Grant's dessert was beginning to taste like
vitaminized space rations.

"Impossible," he said, dabbing at sherbet spots on his trousers. "The
general would react faster than to a red alert."

"Your concern may be the general's reactions, but mine's not," Bridget
snapped. "I just want an objective engineering answer, yes or no."

Grant threw up his hands. "O.K., O.K. With a live pilot, yes, you can
get a TV transmitter in an atomjet with some doing. You'd have to jerk
out the extra oxygen space and--"

"Wonderful! When can you have it for me?"

"Bridget, what I'm getting at, the general will take this as a slap at
him and his pilots. We've had TV transmission from robotized atomjets
dozens of times--"

"With no results."

"With no results," Grant admitted, "but that doesn't mean that with a
pilot you'll necessarily get any, either."

"No, but why hasn't someone tried?" Bridget waited for him to answer a
decent two seconds and then added, "The general, naturally."

They left the base lunchroom in silence, Bridget pouting a lip-edge more
than Grant. Before entering the office, Grant brought up a rebuttal.

"Another thing, no pilot is going to push up under those conditions,
with you down there hoping something will happen."

Bridget had her hand on the door, but instead of opening it, paused.
"The pilot would have to trust me." Her eyes darkened, widened, split
Grant emotionally down the middle. He could understand, for an instant
when he let himself, how a man could be inveigled to do anything for a
woman.

"Yeah," he said. "A pilot like that might be hard to find. I'll see what
I can do."

As he walked toward the hangars, he heard the office door close softly
behind him.

* * * * *

At the engineering conference after supper Grant had never seen General
Morrison looking quite that old. The man was sustaining an over