Dickerson, Lake and Jeff

I was leafing through False Colors the other day and happened to notice an unusual reference I wanted to explore a litle further. This paragraph is from when the Landreich fleet is assembling to recover the Karga and it introduces two of the ship captains thusly:

Diaz would be working closely with the captains of the tender Sindri and the huge factory ship Andrew Carnegie, a Mutt-and-Jeff pair whose names were Dickerson and Lake—Bondarevsky still wasn't entirely sure which one was which. Their commands, though non-combatants, would have the pivotal part in the Goliath Project, the tender serving as a deep-space repair platform for the supercarrier while the mammoth Andrew Carnegie, designed for semi-automated minerals extraction and fabrication work on unsettled frontier worlds, had been pressed into service to manufacture whatever the Kilrathi derelict might be lacking right on the spot.

Mutt-and-Jeff stuck out to me as a very odd reference for the 27th century. Mutt and Jeff was one of the first daily comic strips which ran from 1907 to 1983. The reference specifically is to how the characters are a mismatched pair, one tall and one short. But as far as pop culture goes, the memory has already faded in our time!

"That's where we come in," Dickerson—or was it Lake?—put in. "The quicker your gang gets things secured and calls us in, the sooner you'll have all the comforts of home, courtesy of the good ship Sindri."

Later we learn that this was, indeed, Dickerson and that his first name is Charles. Sadly, we see him only briefly as the Sindri is destroyed by pirates. Lake is the captain of the Carnegie and he does show up again later in the book at another planning meeting. But what we never learn is which was Mutt (tall) and which was Jeff (short).