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this.
    “Well, we’ve got a pretty full day on,” he replied, deliberately making his voice a trifle gruff. “You’ll have to bear with being squeezed in somewhere. Chris just got back from vacation today and I wanted to check up on how he and Ron are getting along before lunch.” Already he could feel his resolve beginning to melt. In the uncanny way that Laura had of speaking with her eyes, she was telling him that to go marching off and leave her standing there wouldn’t really be becoming and he’d only feel mean afterward if he went and made an issue out of it. He paused for a second as his mind went off on a tangent searching for a face-saving way out. “They should have FISE up and running this morning,” he said. “Why don’t you come and have a look at it instead of hanging around here.”
    “Thanks. I’d like that,” she said brightly. “I’ve never had a chance to see it before. Every time I’ve been in, somebody’s always been fiddling around with some part of it or other.” She began walking around the partitions that formed Chris and Ron’s office and toward the lab area behind. “You’d really do yourself a favor if you’d just accept gracefully that you can’t win,” said the eyes.
    As Dyer turned to follow, he caught a glimpse, through the half-open doorway next to Kim’s office, of Pattie sitting on the edge of Allan Morrow’s desk with her arm draped loosely on Al’s shoulder while they talked earnestly in lowered tones. Dyer turned back and muttered irascibly to Betty.
    “How long’s she been in there?”
    “Over half an hour,” Betty replied tonelessly.
    “Did you talk to her?”
    “Yes I did. She said she’d make a point of showing up on time in future.”
    “What about this kind of thing?” Dyer asked, gesturing.
    “I didn’t go into that. I was hoping she’d be capable of figuring the rest out for herself, Want me to spell it out when she gets back?”
    “If you would, Betty.” Dyer nodded wearily. “Give it a try anyhow. If you find you need help, let me know.” Shaking his head, he turned and began following the direction that Laura had taken toward the lab area.
    Laura Fenning worked for the Production Research Department of Klaus Zeegram Productions, Inc., one of the larger corporations that made movies and documentaries for the public sector of the TITAN general-purpose network. Zeegram’s productions covered the spectrum from soap opera to comedy to highly authentic historical epics, but the corporation tended to specialize in adventure and suspense with strongly scientific themes and backgrounds.
    It was in this latter area that the ratings were beginning to reveal potential problems. Audiences were becoming more sophisticated and more demanding. In particular they were tiring of the familiar packaged versions of brilliant but mildly eccentric scientists, scientists’ antiseptic wives and scientifically naïve politicians, all of which were becoming as stereotyped as the veteran sheriff, novice deputy and drifting loner of the old-style Westerns. The viewers wanted something more plausible.
    Then somebody at Zeegram who was paid to be creative had come up with the revolutionary idea of putting some effort into finding out what scientists were really like instead of making them what everybody thought they were like. The idea was to assign a few people to spend six months getting to know real-life scientists solving real-life problems in a number of selected environments covering pure research, government, medical and industrial scientific activities. The wealth of information thus obtained on how scientists really worked, how they lived, what they talked about, and so on would be enough to create a whole “character bank” that script writers would be able to draw upon for years to come.
    Implementation of the scheme duly became the responsibility of the Production Research Department, which succeeded in persuading a number of organizations to agree