“Well, I’ve never had too much time for being secretive and all that. We’ll be sending you formal letters and that kind of stuff, but I don’t see any doubt about it. I’m looking forward to working with you guys. It’s gonna be a great team.”
They arrived back at Clifford’s house at nine o’clock. Sarah couldn’t really feign surprise at the news. She was already dressed to go out.
Chapter 12
The day after they returned from Massachusetts, Aub had already begun making preliminary notes for the design of the detector. He worked through the following night, hogging the upstairs terminal and amassing a mountain of notes and diagrams, and seemed only to have whetted his appetite for more by the morning.
That same morning the formal job offers came through from Sudbury and were promptly accepted. By late afternoon Aub had, via the Infonet, found himself an apartment in Concord, within easy reach of the Institute, and by evening he was packed and ready to go.
“That’s one of the problems about having houses to sell and being married,” he grinned as he bade Clifford and Sarah au revoir from the doorway. “Like I always said, it suits me to travel light. See you both back East when you’ve sorted out all the chores, huh?”
Sarah turned from the door after he had gone and shook her head wonderingly.
“What a character,” she mused to Clifford. “I’ve never seen anybody so eager to start a new job. He won’t sleep for weeks.”
“You haven’t met Al yet,” Clifford told her. “Once the two of them really get going together, anything could happen. If those two had been the Wright Brothers, World War I would have been fought with supersonic jets.”
Just over a month later, Clifford and Sarah moved into an attractive house on the outskirts of Marlboro, within easy distance of both Sudbury and Concord. Sarah had already gotten a job at the Marlboro General Hospital, and for once everything seemed to be going smoothly.
By the time Clifford arrived at the Institute to commence his first day’s work there, Aub had already persuaded Morelli to assign a team of technicians and junior scientists to assist full-time on the project. Clifford met the group later that morning at one of the informal meetings that Aub had instigated as a means to review regularly the progress of design work on the detector—which was proceeding in leaps and bounds.
“Brad, this is the crew,” Aub said as Clifford nodded in response to the “hi’s” from around the table. “Alice, Sandra, Penny, Mike, Joe, Phil, and Art.” They acknowledged their names in turn as Aub pointed them out. “Crew, this is Brad—the guy you’ve been hearing about for the last month or so. And now that the team is at last complete, to business.” Aub opened a folder that was lying in front of him, extracted a sheet titled Action Points, passed a copy to Clifford without comment, and glanced briefly at his own. Clifford had only been in the room for a minute, and yet already they were at work. He was impressed; if this was typical of how Aub’s enthusiasm was rubbing off, it was small wonder that the project was racing at breakneck speed. Somehow Aub had never before struck Clifford as an effective manager of people; Clifford wondered how many more unsuspected talents lay beneath that outlandish exterior.
“It says here Mode-Hold Synthesizers,” Aub stated. He looked up. “Mike, how’s it going?”
“I’ve got a prototype circuit breadboarded in the lab downstairs,” a red-haired young man dressed in a Pendleton shirt and green jeans replied from the far end. “It’s going to need tighter tuning at the h.f. end, and there’s still some stray leakage capacitance somewhere that needs tracking down, but I think it’ll be okay. Gimme . . . say . . . another week on it.”
“Review again next Monday,” Aub mumbled, marking the margin of the paper. “Okay?”
“Sure.”
“Mode Interpretation Routine, Alice?” Aub read the next item and shot an inquiring look at one of the girls.
“Bit of a problem there,” she replied. “I need to know more about the mathematical derivation of the phase functions.”