He was sorry about it, he said, but I was the only one with the necessary technical qualifications for the particular work they had on hand. No, he couldn't give me any details; they were an odd lot down there, and shut themselves up behind barbed wire at the slightest provocation. The place had been a radar experimental station a few years back, but this was finished, and any experiments that were going on now were of an entirely different nature, something to do with vibrations and the pitch of sound. 'I'll be perfectly frank with you,' said my chief, removing his horn-rimmed spectacles and waving them in the air apologetically. 'The fact is that James MacLean is a very old friend of mine. We were at Cambridge together and I saw a lot of him then and afterwards, but our paths diverged, and he tied himself up in experimental work of rather a dubious nature. Lost the government a lot of money, and didn't do his own reputation much good either. I gather that's forgotten, and he's been reinstated down at Saxmere with his own hand-picked team of experts and a government grant.
