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doors he had to remind himself again that Daniels and the others were not the Other Side. Neither were they careless. They did their own typing, they did not leave project paperwork lying around and they went to a great deal of trouble to destroy that which they did not, for some reason, burn in the privacy of their homes. He wondered suddenly if the material was so sensitive that they dare not risk taking it off company limits because of the very slight possibility that one of them might have a car accident while carrying it.
    Could it be as secret as that?
    By the time he returned to the patrol office he felt so impatient that it was an effort to chat with his men while he drank their coffee. Outside the night was clear and cold and full of stars.
    He wondered which one of them was Tau Ceti.
     

Chapter Six
     
    ‘Waste,’ said Herbie Patterson, ‘sheer waste. Somebody gives somebody a bum figure and hundreds of the things are made before somebody else catches on. If I had a tenth of the money wasted in this place in a year I could live in luxury for the next fifty ...’
    Carson doubted that but he nodded agreement anyway. Herbie Patterson was a very conscientious and able clerical supervisor who expected everyone else to be the same. The fact that they weren’t had soured his disposition over the years until now he was the biggest sorehead in the company. But only his wife and a few people at Hart-Ewing’s knew about his heart condition and that he had more to gripe about than even he realised.
    Herbie never really understood why he had been allocated a parking space only twenty-five yards from his office when the usual distance between parking slot and place of employment was nearer half a mile, but it had made him Carson’s friend for life.
    Taking advantages of that friendship made Carson feel like a particularly obnoxious form of ghoul.
    ‘... The material wasted, made up to wrong specs and scrapped during the past few years … You just wouldn’t believe it, Joe.’
    ‘Try me,’ said Carson.
    ‘It’s a complicated business. To understand what has been going on you would really have had to observe the temporary bouts of insanity which periodically overtakes our masters--some of our masters, that is. The ones who spend fifty-one weeks in the year counting pennies and one week chucking thousands down the drain!‘
    ‘Are you bitching about your immediate lord and master, or lords and masters generally?’ said Carson, forcing a tone of indifference into his voice. Herbie’s immediate superior was Reg Saunderson, the company’s chief accountant.
    ‘I’m talking about one in particular,’ Herbie replied, He shook his head and went on, ‘Could you believe that somebody at the top could make a mistake and, apparently to save face, let the error go down through planning, tooling, estimating and production not only to the point where metal was cut but to the major sub-assembly stage? Could you also believe that the sub-assemblies concerned, which in one case had been intended for the Panda module if they had been properly dimensioned, did not reach the scrap pile? They were dumped somewhere out of sight for a while and eventually sold or written off in such a way that on paper, at least, we did not show a loss.’
    ‘Incredible...’ said Carson.
    By the time he left Patterson’s office he was in possession of a great deal of information on clerical trace-covering but knew very little about what it was that was being covered up. He had done about as much prying into Reg Saunderson’s department as it was possible for him to do without making his interest too obvious, but there was the module final assembly and inspection area which was the joint responsibility of the project members Brady and Soames. He had time to get there with a few minutes to spare before lunch.
    George Long was a big, soft-spoken man who smiled a lot, but it put an unfair strain on his good humour when someone like Carson started a