lding was quite certain that that wasn't what
was wrong now.

Still--

"Lenny," he said carefully, "are you sure you didn't jigger up those
drawings to make 'em look prettier?"

Lenny Poe gave the colonel a look of disgust. "Positive. Rafe checked 'em
over every inch of the way as I was drawing them, and he rechecked again
last night--or this morning--on those photostats Davenport gave us. That's
when he said there was something wrong with the translations.

"But he couldn't make it clear just what was wrong, eh?"

Lenny shrugged. "How anybody could make any sense out of that gobbledegook
is beyond me."

The colonel blew out a cloud of cigar smoke and looked thoughtfully at the
ceiling. As long as the diagrams were just designs on paper, Lenny Poe
could pick them up fine. Which meant that everything was jim-dandy as long
as the wiring diagrams were labeled in the Cyrillic alphabet. The labels
were just more squiggles to be copied as a part of the design.

But if the labels were in English, Lenny's mind would try to "make sense"
out of them, and since scientific concepts did _not_ "make sense" to him,
the labels came out as pure nonsense. In one of his drawings, a lead wire
had been labeled "simply ground to powder," and if the original drawing
hadn't been handy to check with, it might have taken quite a bit of
thought to realize that what was meant was "to power supply ground."
Another time, a GE 2N 188A transistor had come out labeled GEZNISSA. There
were others--much worse.

Russian characters, on the other hand, didn't have to make any sense to
Lenny, so his mind didn't try to force them into a preconceived mold.

* * * * *

Lenny unzipped the leather portfolio he had brought with him--a
specially-made carrier that looked somewhat like an oversized brief case.

"Maybe these'll help," he said.

"We managed to get two good sketches of the gadget--at least, as much of
it as that Russian lady scientist has put together so far. I kind of like
the rather abstract effect you get from all those wires snaking in and
around, with that green glass tube in the center. Pretty, isn't it?"

[Illustration]

"Very," said the colonel without conviction. "I wonder if it will help
Davenport any?" He looked at the pictures for several seconds more, then,
suddenly, his eyes narrowed. "Lenny--this piece of green glass--the
thing's shaped like the letter Q."

"Yeah, sort of. Why?"

"You sai