It was trouble in the computing section that first brought Ruth Cleveland to the observatory.
He had secured a grant of military funds to pay for, the battery of electronic calculators and hire a staff to run them.
The section was planned to do all the routine math for the research staff as well as for the military projects to be set up later, but it began with a persistent series of expensive errors.
Ruth had been the remarkably enchanting expert sent by the instrument firm to repair the machines.
Briskly efficient, she tested the equipment and interviewed the staff - the chief computer and his four assistants and the graduate astronomer in charge.
She even talked with Frank Ironsmith, who was not quite twenty then, only the office boy and janitor.
"The machines are perfect," she reported to Forester.
"Your whole trouble has evidently been in the human equation.
What you need is a mathematician.
My recommendation is to transfer the rest of your staff, and put Mr. Ironsmith in charge." "Ironsmith?"
Forester remembered staring at her, his incredulous protest slowly melting into a shy approval of the fine, straight line of her nose and the clear intelligence behind her dark eyes.
"That fresh kid?" he muttered weakly.
"He hasn't a single degree."
"I know.
He's a prospector's son, and he didn't have much schooling.
But he reads, and he has a mind for math." A persuasive smile warmed her lean loveliness.
"Even Einstein, the mathematician back on the mother planet who first discovered atomic energy, was once just a patent office clerk.
Frank told me so today."
Forester had never suspected any unusual ability behind Ironsmith's cheerful indolence, but the unsolved problems were piling up.
The math section was as essential to his purpose as the telescope itself.
Reluctantly, because Ruth would admit no choice, he agreed to try Ironsmith.
And the errors somehow ceased.
As casually unhurried as when his chief tool had been a broom, that slender youth never seemed too busy to drink coffee in the cafeteria and elaborate his idle paradoxes to anybody with time enough to listen, but that mountain of undone work somehow melted away.
All the preliminary problems were solved.
When the Crater Supernova blazed out at last, a star of incredible promise, Forester was ready.
He and Ruth were newly married, then.
He grinned wearily at her picture now, thinking how shaken he had been to find unplanned passion upsetting the neat scheme of his career, almost astonished at the remembered pain of his jealousy and desire, and his sick fear that she would choose Ironsmith.
He wondered, now that he thought of it, why she hadn't.
She had stayed at first just to teach Ironsmith to run the section, and the two had gone about together all that winter while the new telescope claimed his own nights.
They were nearly the same age; Ironsmith was probably good enough looking and certainly sufficiently brilliant, and Forester felt sure he had loved her.
Perhaps the answer was Ironsmith's indolence, his want of push and drive.
He hadn't been making enough to support her, nor had he ever even asked for a raise.
She must have seen that he would never achieve anything, despite the easy glitter of his talk.
Anyhow, from whatever mixture of love and respect and common prudence, she had chosen Forester, fifteen years the older and already eminent.
And Ironsmith, to his relief, hadn't seemed upset about it.
That was one thing he almost liked about the easygoing youth; Ironsmith never seemed to worry over anything.
Forester had forgotten the telephone, in his wistful introspections, and now the sudden burr of it startled him unpleasantly.
That uneasy expectation of disaster at the project came back to shake his thin hand as he picked up the receiver.
"Chief?"
The troubled voice was Armstrong's, just as he had feared.
"Sorry to bother you, but something has come up that Mr. Ironsmith says you ought to know."
"Well?" He gulped uneasily. "What is it?"
"Were you expecting any message by special courier?" That competent technician seemed oddly hesitant.
"From anybody named White?"
"No." He could breathe again.
"Why?"
"Mr. Ironsmith just called about a child asking for you at the main gate.
The guard didn't let her in, because she had no proper identification, but Mr. Ironsmith talked to her.
She claimed to have a confidential message from some Mr. White."
"I don't know any Mr. White." For a moment he was merely grateful that this had been no Red Alert against space raiders from the Triplanet Powers, and then he asked, "Where's this child?"