r to manned space
flight.

"You will work on wiring in the drone control section. Just remember
that every touch of your soldering iron is critical. Take no chances at
all; everything must be perfect. Do your job and do it well, and someday
you'll be able to say that you made the big horse's wings work when it
really counted. Now come on, and I'll introduce you to Dick Earle and
you can get started."

Dick Earle turned out to be a bigger and darker copy of Gee-Gee. He had
the same crew cut and mustache, but his hair was jet black.

Rick also met Dr. Carleton Bond, a tall, slender man of advanced years
who was a consultant on drone controls, and Frank Miller, a studious,
rather curt young man who was an electronics design engineer.

He began to make some order out of the organization. Gee-Gee Gould was
electronics chief for all three projects. Dick Earle was electronics
chief for Pegasus, under Gould, and there were also electronics chiefs
for Orion and Cetus. Similarly, the projects had air-frame departments,
propulsion departments, instrumentation departments, and administrative
departments.

Each project also had a technical director, who was a sort of
co-ordinator, trouble shooter, and general expert. The technical
directors reported to Dr. John Gordon, on loan from Spindrift, who had
the title of Senior Project Engineer.

Later, Rick explained it to Scotty. "Each project has its own staff, but
there's a top staff that is responsible for all projects. I'm making a
little sense out of it, but people keep showing up that I can't fit into
the organization."

"They're probably support people," Scotty explained. "Seems the base is
divided into two groups; the scientific gang and the support gang. I'm
in support, in the vehicle maintenance section. Lomac runs the whole
support group. Besides transportation, there's the tracking and
monitoring gang--that's what Big Mac and Pancho are in--the machine-shop
gang, and all the housekeeping facilities like the fire department, the
security force, housing and feeding, and so on."

The boys' roommates turned out to be a security officer named Hank
Leeming and one of the janitors, an elderly man of Mexican descent named
Maximilian Rodriguez.

On the second day of work Rick met another interesting character,
although a nonhuman one, and got an additional duty imposed on him.

He was at work installing a tiny servomotor in the drone control unit
when something landed on h