Wall leaned forward, his eyes brightening. “A spaceship is necessarily big and complicated. Some manual controls are required. But they cannot move in a straight line; construction necessitates that such controls must turn sharp corners, follow an erratic and eccentric path from here to here”
“Well—”
“Thus,” Wall said, “you want to turn on a water faucet in a house two blocks away. And you want to do it while you’re here, in your laboratory. How?”
“String. Wire. Rope.”
“Which could wind around corners as… say… a rigid rod could not. However, Mr. Gallegher, let me repeat my statement of two weeks ago. That faucet is hard to turn. And it must be turned often, hundreds of times a day when a ship is in free space. Our toughest wire cables have proved unsatisfactory. The stress and strain snap them. When a cable is bent, and when it is also straight —you see?”
Gallegher nodded. “Sure. You can break wire by bending it back and forth often enough.”
“That is the problem we asked you to solve. You said it could be done. Now—have you done it? And how?”
A manual control that could turn corners and withstand repeated stresses. Gallegher eyed the machine. Nitrogen—a thought was moving in the back of his mind, but he could not quite capture it.
The buzzer rang. “Smeith,” Gallegher thought, and nodded to Narcissus. The robot vanished.
He returned with four men at his heels. Two of them were uniformed officers. The others were, respectively, Smeith and Dell Hopper.