passing tools back and forth and generally anticipating each other's wants with scarcely a word spoken. For fifteen years they had thus worked together, one of the oddest looking scientific teams at the Western Institute of Technology, but one that had also proven itself amazingly productive. Stoddard at forty had the general shape of an old-fashioned beer barrel, with big hands, big feet, and a big protruding stomach. His half-closed eyes gave him a perpetually sleepy expression, a highly effective mask for one of the keenest minds in the business. Arnold, although nearly as old as his partner, somehow still gave the impression of youth. He was small and slight with an eager boyish expression that often caused visitors to mistake him for a graduate student embarking on his first research problem. Stoddard was the practical man of the firm who designed the apparatus for their various investigations and took the bulk of the observations. Arnold was the one who reduced the observations
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