"As soon as we key the screen to drop it through, some bright lad in central will pick up the data. They're watching us too closely."
"We'll take that chance. People's lives are more important than O'Conners' regulations. Better send out a boarding party if you haven't heard for that long. See if anyone can get into them. Let me know what their trouble is."
"0.K. I'll send out Perkins and his crew."
Joe moved away and stood by the window again. This out there was his, he thought savagely, and no bureaucrat was going to regulate him into murdering his customers. He'd built up this business from the modest scratch his father had started, and it was his to use. He only wished he had someone to pass it on to. There was Richard, of course, but Richard had disappeared fifteen hundred light-years away twelve years ago. It would be a vain hope to suppose that Richard would ever inherit "Joe's Service and Repair".
In the early days of intergalactic flight, when the super-cee ships were first brought out, a vessel was little more than a flying machine shop and laboratory. It had to be equipped with facilities for virtually rebuilding itself in case of failure or disaster.
That robbed the ships, especiallty the early small ones, of much of their useful load. Finally, when men made contact with other intelligent life they found it was almost the same among every other group.
For some reason, ninety percent of other inhabited worlds were almost diametrically across the galaxy. When the first meager flights probed earthward, in response to man's explorations, old Joe Williams had been just a boy. He'd walked through the alien hulls in ecstatic rapture. He was only fifteen when he saw the first crippled ship whose occupants had managed to land it on alien earth at the end of its last flight.
They were technicians and navigators, but not engineers. They could not duplicate or repair the worn and shattered power plant of their ship. For five years they lived as prisoners aboard their ship until they were able to get transportation back.
That incident gave him the clue to what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. This was only the start of a new frontier of technology. There would be increasing hoardes of visitors from other worlds, now that they were aware that an inhabited planet in this region had been located. There would be a place for Earthmen who could repair those alien vessels when the need came.
There were others who had the same idea. But Old Joe had got the jump on them. He saw that mere skill in terrestrial technology would not be enough. After he graduated from the best schools on Earth, he spent five years hopping from one planetary system to another studying where he could, picking up clues and scraps of information about other world technologies, how their spaceships were powered and run, the biology of their occupants, the needs that he might be able to supply on Earth.
It wasn't easy. The worlds across the galaxy were just beginning to set up the First Galactic Council. There were suspicions and doubts, and uneasy meetings. But he obtained enough.
Returning to Earth, he bought twenty-five square miles of American desert and set up business in a veritable shack. For three years he had no customers.
Then he dickered with the government for that impounded vessel which had been abandoned when he was a boy. It was decided that, since the original owners had not come for it by now that a precedent might well be established by selling it to Joe for a big chunk of his few remaining bucks.
And he rebuilt it. It was a pip, in view of his knowledge and experience he'd gained from his travels. He'd run across an almost identical drive among the Irdians. But he was too broke to do more than take it on a single test run to Mars and back.
That was enough. Somehow the news got around the galaxy faster than the ship itself could have done.
Joe was made.
That was the beginning. The infant FGA sponsored a program of approved service and repair stations at strategic points throughout the galaxy and Joe was automatically for it because by then he knew more than any other Earthman about foreign ships and drives.
It had been a reputation for Young Joe to maintain — and he'd maintained it. If only there were someone to turn it over to —
As usual, the politicians came pounding hard on the heels of the scientists, bent on regulating their betters. Some worlds were more prone to this tendency than others, but Earth was right up front in this respect. There had been a few unfortunate incidents in the meeting of alien cultures — but far fewer than even the most hopeful had supposed. An almost universal fact was that by the time a race had reached the stars it had begun to mature.
Joe turned back to the desk on which lay the data on the strangers from Nerane IV. Their planet was one of the most nonterrestrian so far encountered. Little commerce passed between its peoples and the rest of the galaxy, yet their ships occasionally called on exploratory or cultural missions, though none had been to Earth before.
The creatures had a hard exoskeleton. Stiff, bony appendages supported them on a planet eight times the mass of Earth. They lived in a yellow-brown fog of nitrogen peroxide at a pressure of about one sixth Earth atmosphere.
In an almost symbiotic relationship they lived with another species, a small, remotely monkeylike creature called mensa. These were controlled by telepathic forces and performed, the physical work which the clumsy exoskeletons of the more intelligent creatures did not permit.
Joe read through the data from the massive library his company had accumulated on a hundred thousand planets and cultures. He did not have the slightest conception of what kind of metabolism an atmosphere of nitrogen peroxide could support — or even if it were necessary to the creatures' metabolism. But, at any rate, it was reported that their ships were provided with such an atmosphere.
Winfield called as he finished the file.
"Perkins is in contact with them," he said, "They were just about to give up and go away. He didn't think it necessary to go aboard since they seemed to be doing all right for the time being. One of ihem is very sick, they said. That's one reason why they're in such a steam to get the ship repaired."
"All right. We still have no official clearance on them. Get them down. Use one of the pressure hangars, just in case. We wouldn't want to smash them with our atmospheric pressure in case of accident. And I'd hate to have theirs get loose on the field."
"Think we ought to have quarters for the crew?"
"Do you know how many there are?"
"Just two, they say."
"Two? On a ship that size?" Joe recalled the photographs and plans of Neranian ships. "I'd say there ought to be a hundred of them at least. Something funny if only two are aboard. Anyway, we'd better get quarters ready. It might be necessary to evacuate the ship to work on it."
It was about a half hour later that the dark oval of the ship appeared over the field. The service ship in which Perkins and his crew rode followed at a little distance, talking the strangers down.
It wasn't without reason that Old Joe had picked a desert site for his operations. Some of the visitors were sloppy pilots near a planet, and at other times ships came in almost completely out of control, crashing all over the landscape in a futile attempt to set down normally.
But the Nerane ship was adequately controlled. Joe wouldn't have called it a first-class landing, but it was good enough. He Saw Perkins land a short distance away. Within minutes the ship was being towed towards the large, pressurized hangar where no damage would be done if the obnoxious atmosphere within the ship were to get free.
Joe turned away. He would have liked to have gone out and handled the job himself, but there were too many other matters at hand. Too many executive matters. Joe gagged on that word. It made him think of plump, jolly men at luncheon clubs.