Lin arrives late at her science class and is bewildered by the lever problem her teacher sets. 'Levers? Leavers are the only levers I'm interested in,' Lin says. 'As if I could be a scientist, as if I would be a scientist, there's no way.' Meanwhile, on the other side of the galaxy, the inhabitants of Zilch are searching for a logical, practical, problem-solving person, an engineer. Lin is off to the planet to be greeted with disdain. Earthlings can't be engineers. Needled by the aliens' lack of