"Okay," he said, lighting a cigarette. "And the next step?"
"The next wasn't really a technical step forward in telefactoring. It was an economic shift. The pursestrings were loosened and we could afford to send men out. We landed them where we could land them, and in many of the places where we could not, we sent down the telefactors and orbited the men again. Like in the old days. The time-lag problem was removed because the operator was on top of things once more. If anything, you can look at it as a reversion to earlier methods. It is what we still often do, though, and it works."
He shook his head.
"You left something out between the computers and the bigger budget." I shrugged.
"A number of things were tried during that period, but none of them proved as effective as what we already had going in the human-computer partnership with the telefactors."
"There was one project," he said, "which attempted to get around the time-lag troubles by sending the computer along with the telefactor as part of the package. Only the computer wasn't exactly a computer and the telefactor wasn't exactly a telefactor. Do you know which one I am referring to?"
I lit a cigarette of my own while I thought about it, then, "I think you are talking about the Hangman," I said.
"That's right and this is where I get lost. Can you tell me how it works?"
"Ultimately, it was a failure," I told him.
"But it worked at first."
"Apparently. But only on the easy stuff, on Io. It conked out later and had to be written off as a failure, albeit a noble one. The venture was overly ambitious from the very beginning. What seems to have happened was that the