October 20, 2025 • 31 mins
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
The repair man by Harry Harrison being an interstellar troubleshooter.
Wouldn't be so bad if I could shoot the trouble
The old man had that look of intense glee on
his face that meant some one was in for a
very rough time. Since we were alone, it took no
(00:20):
great feat of intelligence to figure it would be me.
I talked first, bold attack being the best defense, and
so forth. I quit. Don't bother telling me what a
dirty job you have cooked up, because I already quit
and you don't want to reveal company secrets to me.
The grin was even wider now, and he actually chortled
as he thumbed a button on his console. A thick
(00:43):
legal document slid out of the delivery slot on his desk.
This is your contract, he said. It tells how and
when you will work a steel and vanadium bound contract
that you couldn't crack with a molecular disruptor. I leaned forward,
quickly grabbed it, and threw it into the air with
a single motion. Before it could fall, I had my
(01:03):
solar out and with a wide angle shot burned the
contract to ashes. The old man pressed the button again,
and another contract slid out on his desk, if possible.
The smile was still wider. Now I should have said
a duplicate of your contract like this one. Here, he
made a quick note on his secretary plate. I have
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deducted thirteen credits from your salary for the cost of
the duplicate, as well as a one hundred credit fine
for firing a solar inside a building. I slumped, defeated,
waiting for the blow to land. The old man fondled
my contract. According to this contract, you can't quit. Ever. Therefore,
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I have a little job. I know you'll enjoy repair job.
The century beacon has shut down. It's a Mark three beacon.
What kind of beacon? I ask him. I have repaired
hyperspace beacons from one arm of the galaxy to the other,
and I was sure I had worked on every type
or model made. But I had never heard of this
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kind Mark three, the old man repeated, practically chortling. I
never heard of it either. Until records dug up the specks.
They found them buried in the back of the oldest warehouse.
This was the earliest type of beacon ever built by Earth,
no less considering its location on one of the Proxima
century planets. It might as well have been the first beacon.
(02:29):
I looked at the blue prints he handed me and
felt my eyes glaze with horror. It's a monstrosity. It
looks more like a distillery than a beacon. Must be
at least a few hundred meters high. I'm a repair man,
not an archaeologist. This pile of junk is over two
thousand years old. Just forget about it and build a
new one. The old man leaned over his desk, breathing
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into my face. It would take a year to install
a new beacon, besides being too expensive, and this relic
is on one of the main routes. We have ships
making fifteen light year detours. Now, he leaned back, wiped
his hands on his handkerchief, and gave me lecture forty
four on company duty and my troubles The department is
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officially called maintenance and repair, when it really should be
called troubleshooting. Hyperspace beacons are to last forever or damn
close to it. When one of them breaks down, it
is never an accident, and repairing the thing is never
a matter of just plugging in a new part. He
was telling me, the guy who did the job. While
he sat back on his fat paycheck in an air
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conditioned office, he rambled on, how I wish that were
all it took. I would have a fleet of parts
ships and junior mechanics to install them. But it's not
like that at all. I have a fleet of expensive
ships that are equipped to do almost anything, manned by
a bunch of irresponsibles like you. I nodded moodily at
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his pointing finger. How I wish I could fire you
all combination space jockeys, mechanics, engineers, soldiers, con men, and
everything else it takes to do the repairs. I have
to browbeat, bribe, blackmail and bulldoze you thugs into doing
a simple job. If you think you're fed up, just
think how I feel. But the ships must go through,
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the beacons must operate. I recognized this deathless line as
the curtain speech, and crawled to my feet. He threw
the mark three file at me and went back to
scratching in his papers. Just as I reached the door,
he looked up and impaled me on his finger again.
And don't get any fancy ideas about jumping your contract.
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We can attach that bank account of yours on all,
goll Io, long before you can draw the money out,
I smiled a little weakly. I'm afraid as if I
had never meant to keep that account a secret. His
spies were getting more efficient every day. Walking down the hall,
I tried to figure a way to transfer the money
without his catching on, and knew at the same time
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he was figuring a way to outfigure me. It was
all very depressing, so I stopped for a drink and
then went to the spaceport. By the time the ship
was serviced, I had a course charted. The nearest beacon
to the broken down Proximus and Tury beacon was on
one of the planets of Betas Orcinus, and I headed
there first, a short trip of only about nine days
(05:23):
in hyperspace. To understand the importance of the beacons, you
have to understand hyperspace, not that people do, but it
is easy enough to understand that in this non space,
the regular rules don't apply. Speed and measurements are a
matter of relationship, not constant facts like the fixed universe.
The first ships to enter hyperspace had no place to
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go and no way even to tell if they had moved.
The beacons solved that problem and opened the entire universe.
They are built on planets and generate tremendous amounts of power.
This power is turned into radiation that is punched through
into hyperspace. Every beacon has a code signal as part
of its radiation and represents a measurable point in hyperspace.
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Triangulation and quadrature of the beacon works for navigation only.
It follows its own rules. The rules are complex and variable,
but they are still rules that a navigator can follow.
For a hyperspace jump, you need at least four beacons
for an accurate fix. For long jumps, navigators uses many
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a seven or eight. So every beacon is important and
every one has to keep operating. That is where I
and the other troubleshooters come in. We travel in well
stocked ships that carry a little bit of everything. Only
one man to a ship, because that is all it
takes to operate the overly efficient repair machinery. Due to
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the very nature of our job, we spend most of
our time just rocketing through normal space. After all, when
a beacon breaks down, how do you find it? Not
through hyperspace. All you can do is approach as close
as you can by using other beacons, then finish the
trip in normal space. This can take months, and often does.
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This job didn't turn out quite that bad. I zeroed
in on Beta Cercina's beacon and ran a complicated eight
point problem through the navigator. Using every beacon I could
get an accurate fix on. The computer gave me a
course with an estimated point of arrival, as well as
a built in safety factor I never could eliminate from
the machine. I would much rather take a chance of
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breaking through near some star than spend time just barreling
through normal space. But apparently tech knows this too. They
had a safety factor built into the computer, so you
can't end up inside a star no matter how hard
you tried. I'm sure there was no humanness in this decision.
They just didn't want to lose the ship. It was
a twenty four hour jump ship's time, and I came
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through in the middle of nowhere. The robot analyzer chuckled
to itself and scanned all the stars, comparing them to
a spectra of Proximus and Chury. It finally rang a
bell and blinked a light. I peeped through the eyepiece
a fast reading with the photo cell gave me the
apparent magnitude, and a comparison with its absolute magnitude showed
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its distance not as bad as I had thought a
six week run, give or take. A few days. After
feeding a course into the robot pilot, I strapped into
the accelerator tank and went to sleep. The time went fast.
I rebuilt my camera for about the twentieth time and
just about finished a correspondence course on nucleonics. Most repairmen
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take these courses. Besides, they're always coming in handy. The
company grades your pay by the number of specialties you
can handle. All this with some oil painting and free
fall workouts in the gym pass the time. I was
asleep when the alarm went off that announced planetary distance.
Planet two, where the beacon was situated according to the
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old charts, was a mushy looking, wet kind of globe.
I tried to make sense out of the ancient directions
and finally located the right area. Staying outside the atmosphere,
I sent a flying eye down to look things over.
In this business you learn early when and where to
risk your own skin. The eye would be good enough
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for the preliminary survey. The old boys had enough brains
to choose a traceable site for the beacon, equidistant on
a line between two of the most prominent mountain peaks.
I located the peaks easily enough and started the eye
out from the first peak and kept it on a
course directly towards the second. There was a nose and
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tail radar in the eye, and I fed their signals
into a scope as an amplitude curve. When the two
peaks coincided, I spun the eye controls and dived the
thing down out the radar and cut the nose orthicon
and sat back to watch the beacon appear on the screen.
The image blinked focused and a great damn pyramid swam
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into view. I cursed and wheeled the eye in circles,
scanning the surrounding country. It was flat, marshy bottom land
without a bump. The only thing in a ten mile
circle was this pyramid, and that definitely wasn't my beacon,
or wasn't it. I dived the eye lower. The pyramid
was a crude looking thing of undressed stone, without carvings
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or decorations. There was a shimmer of light from the top,
and I took a closer look at it. On the
peak of the pyramid was a hollow basin filled with water.
When I saw that, something clicked in my mind, locking
the eye in a circular course. I dug through the
mark three plans, and there it was. The beacon had
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a precipitating field and a basin on top of it
for water. This was used to cool the react that
powered the monstrosity. If the water was still there, the
beacon was still there. Inside the pyramid. The natives, who
of course weren't ever mentioned by the idiots who constructed
the thing, had built a nice, heavy, thick stone pyramid
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around the beacon. I took another look at the screen
and realized that I had locked the eye into a
circular orbit. About twenty feet above the pyramid. The summit
of the stone pile was now covered with lizards of
some type, apparently the local life form. They had what
looked like throwing sticks and arbalasts and were trying to
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shoot down the eye, a cloud of arrows and rocks
flying in every direction. I pulled the eye straight up
and away and threw in the control circuit that would
return it automatically to the ship. Then I went to
the galley for a long, strong drink. My beacon was
not only locked inside a mountain of hand made stone,
but I had managed to irritate the things who had
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built the pyramid. Great beginning for a job, and one
clearly designed to drive a stronger man than me to
the bottle. Normally, a repair man stays away from native cultures.
They are poison. Anthropologists may not mind being dissected for
their science, but a repair man wants to make no
sacrifices of any kind for his job. For this reason,
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most beacons are built on uninhabitable planets. If a beacon
has to go on a planet with a culture, it
is usually built in some inaccessible place. Why this beacon
was built within reach of the local clause I had
yet to find out, but that would come in time.
The first thing to do was make contact. To make contact,
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you have to know the local language, and for that
I had long before worked out a system that was
fool proof. I had a pry eye of my own construction.
It looked like a piece of rock about a foot long.
Once on the ground, it would never be noticed, though
it was a little disconcerting to see it float by.
I located a lizard town about a thousand kilometers from
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the pyramid and dropped the eye. It swished down and
landed at night in the bank of a local mud wallow.
This was a favorite spot that drew a good crowd
during the day. In the morning, when the first wallowers arrived,
I flipped on the recorder. After about five of the
local days, I had a sea of native conversation in
the memory bank of the machine translator and tagged a
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few expressions. This is fairly easy to do when you
have a machine memory to work with. One of the
lizards gargled at another one, and the second one turned around.
I tagged this expression with a phrase, hey George, and
waited my chance to use it. Later the same day,
I caught one of them alone and shouted hey George
at him. It gurgled out through the speaker in the
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local tongue, and he turned around. When you get enough
reference phrases like this in the memory bank, the MT
brain takes over and starts filling in the missing pieces.
As soon as the MT could give a running translation
of any conversation I heard, I figured it was time
to make contact. I found him easily enough. He was
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the Centorian version of a goat boy. He heard it
a particularly loathsome form of local life in the swamps
outside the town. I had one of the working eyes
dig a cave in an outcropping of rock and wait
for him. When he passed. Next day, I whispered into
the mic, welcome O, goat boy, grandson, this is your
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grandfather's spirit speaking from Paradise. This fitted in with what
I could make out of the local religion. Goat boy
stopped as if he'd been shot. Before he could move.
I pushed a switch, and a handful of local currency
wampum type shells rolled out of the cave and landed
at his feet. Here is some money from Paradise, because
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you have been a good boy, Not really from Paradise.
I lifted it from the treasury the night before. Come
back tomorrow and we will talk some more. I called
after the fleeing figure. I was pleased to notice that
he took the cash before taking off. After that, Grandpa
in Paradise had many heart to heart talks with grandson,
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who found the heavenly loot more than he could resist.
Grandpa had been out of touch with things since his death,
and goat boy happily filled him in. I learned all
I needed to know of the history, past and recent,
and it wasn't nice. In addition to the pyramid being
around the beacon, there was a nice little religious war
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going on around the pyramid. It all began with the
land bridge. Apparently, the local lizards had been living in
the swamps when the beacon was built, but the builders
didn't think much of them. They were a low type
and confined to a distant continent. The idea that the
race would develop and might reach this continent never occurred
to the beacon mechanics, which is of course what happened.
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A little geology turnover, A swampy land bridge bridge formed
in the right spot, and the lizards began to wander
up the Beacon valley and found religion. A shiny metal
temple out of which poured a constant stream of magic water.
The reactor cooling water pumped down from the atmosphere condenser
on the roof. The radioactivity in the water didn't hurt
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the natives, it caused mutations that bred true. A city
was built around the temple, and through the centuries the
pyramid was put up around the beacon. A special branch
of the priesthood served the temple. All went well until
one of the priests violated the temple and destroyed the
holy waters. There had been a revolt, strife, murder, and
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destruction since then, but still the holy waters would not flow. Now,
armed mobs fought around the temple each day, and a
new band of priests guarded the sacred font, and eye
had to walk into the middle of that mess and
repair the thing. It would have been easy enough if
we were allowed a little mayhem. I could have had
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a lizard fry, fixed the beacon and taken off only
native life forms were quite well protected. There were spy
cells on my ship, all of which I hadn't found,
that would cheerfully rat on me. When I got back,
diplomacy was called for. I sighed and dragged out the
plastiflesh equipment. Working from three D snaps of Grandson, I
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modeled a passable reptile head over my own features. It
was a little short in the jaw, me not having
one of their toothy mandibles, but it was all right.
I didn't have to look exactly like them, just something
close to soothe the native mind. It's logical if I
were an ignorant aborigine of Earth, and I ran into
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a spicken who looks like a two foot gob of
dried shellick. I would immediately leave the scene. However, if
the spicken was wearing a suit of plastiflesh that looked
remotely humanoid, I would at least stay and talk to him.
That is what I was aiming to do with the centurions.
When the head was done, I peeled it off and
attached it to an attractive suit of green plastic, complete
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with tail. I was really glad they had tails. Lizards
don't wear clothes, and I wanted to take along a
lot of electronic equipment. I built the tail over a
metal frame that anchored around my waist. Then I filled
the frame with all the equipment I would need and
began to wire the suit. When it was done, I
tried it on in front of a full length mirror.
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It was horrible, but effective. The tail dragged me down
in the rear and gave me a duck waddle, but
that only helped the resemblance. That night, I took the
ship down into the hills nearest the pyramid and out
of the way dry spot where the amphibious natives would
never go a little before dawn, the eye hooked onto
my shoulders and we sailed straight up. We hovered above
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the temple at about two thousand meters and till it
was light, and then dropped straight down. It must have
been a grand sight. The eye was camouflaged to look
like a flying lizard, sort of a cardboard pterodactyl, and
the slowly flapping wings obviously had nothing to do with
our flight, but it was impressive enough for the natives.
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The first one that spotted me screamed and dropped over
on his back. The others came running. They milled and
mobbed and piled on top of one another, and by
that time I had landed in the plaza fronting the temple.
The priesthood arrived. I folded my arms in a regal stance.
Greetings O, noble servers of the Great God, I said,
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of course. I didn't say it out loud, just whispered
loud enough for the throat mike to catch. This was
radioed back to the m T and the translation shot
back to a speaker in my jaws. The natives chomped
and rattled, and the translation rolled out almost instantly. I
had the volume turned up and the whole square echoed.
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Some of the more credulous natives prostrated themselves, and others
fled screaming. One doubtful type raised a spear, but no
one else tried that after the pterodactyl eye picked him
up and dropped him in the swamp. The priests were
a hard headed lot and weren't buying any lizards in
a poke. They just stood and muttered. I had to
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take the offensive again. Begone, O faithful steed, I said
to the eye, and pressed the control in my palm.
At the same time. It took off straight up, a
bit faster than I wanted. Little pieces of wind torn
plastic rained down. While the crowd was ogling this ascent,
I walked through the temple doors. I would talk with you,
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o noble priests, I said, Before they could think up
a good answer, I was inside. The temple was a
small one built against the base of the pyramid. I
hoped I wasn't breaking too many taboos by going in.
I wasn't stopped, so it looked all right. The temple
was a single room with a murking looking pool at
one end. Sloshing in the pool was an ancient reptile
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who clearly was one of the leaders. I waddled toward him,
and he gave me a cold and fishy eye, then
growled something. The mt whispered in my ear. Just what
in the name of the thirteenth Sin are you and
what are you doing here? I drew up my scaly
figure in a noble gesture and pointed toward the ceiling.
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I come from your ancestors to help you. I am
here to restore the holy waters. This raised a buzz
of conversation behind me, but got no rise out of
the chief. He sank slowly into the water until only
his eyes were showing. I could almost hear the wheels
turning behind that moss covered forehead. Then he lunged up
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and pointed a dripping finger at me. You are a liar,
You are no ancestor of ours. We will stop, I thundered,
before he got so far in that he couldn't back out.
I said, your ancestors sent me as emissary. I am
not one of your ancestors. Do not try to harm me,
or the wrath of those who have passed on will
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turn against you. When I said this, I turned to
jab a claw at the other priests, using the motion
to cover my flicking a coin grenade toward them. It
blew a nice hole in the floor with a great
show of noise and smoke. The first Lizard knew I
was talking since then and immediately called a meeting of
the shamans. It of course, took place in the public bathtub,
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and I had to join them there. We jawed and
gurgled for about an hour and settled all the major points.
I found out that they were new priests. The previous
ones had all been boiled for letting the holy waters cease.
They found out I was there only to help them
restore the flow of the waters. They bought this tentatively,
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and we all heaved out of the tub and trickled
muddy paths across the floor. There was a bolted and
guarded door that led into the pyramids proper. While it
was being opened, the first Lizard turned to me, Undoubtedly
you know the rule, he said, because the old priest
did pry and peer, it was ruled henceforth that only
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the blind could enter the Holy of Holies. I'd swear
he was smiling if thirty teeth peeking out of what
looked like a crack in an old suit case could
be called smiling. He was also signaling to an under
priest who carried a brazier of charcoal, complete with red
hot irons. All I could do was stand and watch
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as he stirred up the coals, pulled out the ruddiest iron,
and turned toward me. He was just drawing a bead
on my right eye when my brain got back in gear.
Of course, I said, blinding is only right, but in
my case, you will have to blind me after I
leave the Holy of Holies, not now. I need my
eyes to see and mend the fount of holy waters.
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Once the waters flow again, I will laugh as I
hurl myself on the burning iron. He took a good
thirty seconds to think this over and had to agree
with me. The local torturer sniffed a bit and threw
a little more charcoal on the fire. The gate crashed
open and I stalked through. Then it banged behind me,
and I was alone in the dark, but not for long.
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There was a shuffling near by, and I took a
chance and turned on my flash. Three priests were groping
towards me, their eye sockets red pits of burned flesh.
They knew what I wanted and led the way without
a word. A crumbling and cracked stairway brought us up
to the solid metal doorway labeled in Arcaic script mark
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three beacon authorized personnel Only. The trusting builders counted on
the sign to do the whole job, for there wasn't
a trace of a lock on the door. One lizard
merely turned the handle and we were inside the beacon.
I unzipped the front of my camouflage suit and pulled
out the blue prints. With the faithful priests stumbling around me,
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I located the control room and turned on the lights.
There was a residue of charge in the emergency batteries,
just enough to give a dim light. The meters and
indicators looked to be in good shape, if anything unexpectedly
bright from constant polishing. I checked the readings carefully and
found just what I suspected. One of the eager lizards
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had managed to open a circuit box and had polished
the switches inside. While doing this, he had thrown one
of the switches, and that had caused the trouble. Rather
that had started the trouble. It wasn't going to be
ended by just reversing the water valve switch. The valve
was supposed to be used only for repairs after the
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pile was damped. When the water was cut off with
the pile in operation, it had started to overheat and
the automatic safeties had dumped the charge down the pit.
I could start the water again easily enough, but there
was no fuel left in the reactor. I wasn't going
to play with the fuel problem at all. It would
be far easier to install a new power plant. I
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had one in the ship that was about a tenth
the size of the ancient bucket of bolts and produced
at least four times the power. Before I sent for it,
I checked over the rest of the beacon. In two
thousand years, there should be some sign of wear. The
old boys had built well, I'll give them credit for that.
Ninety percent of the machinery had no moving parts and
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had suffered nowhere whatever other parts they had beefed up,
figuring they would wear but slowly. The water fed pipe
from the roof, for example, the pipe walls were at
least three meters thick, and the pipe opening itself no
bigger than my head. There were some things I could do, though,
and I made a list of parts. The parts the
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new power plant and a few odds and ends were
shooted into a neat pile on the ship. I checked
all the parts by screen before they were loaded in
a metal crate. In the darkest hour before dawn. The
heavy duty eye dropped the crate outside the temple and
darted away without being seen. I watched the priests through
the pry eye while they tried to open it. When
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they had given up, I boomed orders at them through
the speaker in the crate. They spent most of the
day sweating the heavy box up through the narrow temple stairs,
and I enjoyed a good sleep. It was resting inside
the beacon door when I woke up. The repairs didn't
take long, though there was plenty of groaning from the
blind lizards when they heard me ripping the wall open
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to get at the power leagues. I even hooked a
gadget to the water pipe so their holy waters would
have the usual refreshing radioactivity when they started flowing again.
The moment this was all finished, I did the job
they were waiting for. I threw the switch that started
the water flowing again. There were a few minutes while
the water began to gurgle down through the dry pipe.
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Then a roar came from outside the pyramids that must
have shaken its stone walls. Shaking my hands over my head,
I went down for the eye burning ceremony. The blind
lizards were waiting for me by the door and looked
even unhappier than usual. When I tried the door, I
found out why it was bolted and barred from the
other side. It has been decided a lizard said that
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you should remain here forever and tend the holy waters.
We will stay with you and serve your every need.
A delightful prospect, an eternity in a locked beacon with
three blind lizards, in spite of their hospitality, I couldn't
accept what you dare interfere with the messenger of your ancestors.
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I had the speaker on full volume, and the vibration
almost shook my head off. The lizards cringed, and I
set my solar for narrow beam and ran it around
the door jam. There was a great crunching and banging
from the junk piled against it, and then the door
swung free. I threw it open. Before they could protest,
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I had pushed the priests out through it. The rest
of their clan showed up at the foot of the
stairs and made a great rucas while I finished welding
the door shut. Running through the crowd, I faced the
first lizard in his tub. He sank slowly beneath the surface.
What a lack of courtesy, I shouted, He made little
bubbles in the water. The ancestors are annoyed and have
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decided to forbid entrance to the Inner Temple forever, though
out of kindness they will let the waters flow. Now
I must return on with the ceremony. The torture master
was too frightened to move, so I grabbed out his
hot iron. A touch on the side of my face
dropped a steel plate over my eyes under the plaster skin.
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I jammed the iron hard into my phony eye sockets,
and the plastic gave off an authentic odor. A cry
went up from the crowd as I dropped the iron
and staggered in blind circles. I must admit went off
pretty well. Before they could get any more bright ideas,
I threw the switch and my plastic pterodactyl sailed through
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the door. I couldn't see it, of course, but I
knew it had arrived when the grapples in the claws
latched on to the steel plates on my shoulders. I
had got turned around after the eye burning, and my
flying beast hooked onto me backward. I had meant to
sail out bravely, blind eyes facing into the sun set. Instead,
I faced the crowd as I soared away. So I
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made the most of a bad situation and threw them
a snappy military salute. Then I was out in the
fresh air and away. When I lifted the plate and
poked holes in the seared plastic, I could see the
pyramid growing smaller behind me, water gushing out of the base,
and a happy crowd of reptiles sporting in its radioactive rush.
(30:50):
I counted off on my talons to see if I
had forgotten anything. One the beacon was repaired. Two the
door was sealed, so the would be no more sabotage,
accidental or deliberate. Three the priests should be satisfied. The
water was running again, my eyes had been duly burned out,
and they were back in business, which added up to four.
(31:15):
The fact that they would probably let another repair man
in under the same conditions. If the beacon conked out again,
at least I had done nothing like butchering a few
of them that would make them antagonistic toward future ancestral messengers.
I stripped off my tattered lizard suit back in the ship,
very glad that it would be some other repairman who'd
(31:36):
get the job end of the repairman by Harry Harrison
The repair man by Harry Harrison being an interstellar troubleshooter.
Wouldn't be so bad if I could shoot the trouble
The old man had that look of intense glee on
his face that meant some one was in for a
very rough time. Since we were alone, it took no
(00:20):
great feat of intelligence to figure it would be me.
I talked first, bold attack being the best defense, and
so forth. I quit. Don't bother telling me what a
dirty job you have cooked up, because I already quit
and you don't want to reveal company secrets to me.
The grin was even wider now, and he actually chortled
as he thumbed a button on his console. A thick
(00:43):
legal document slid out of the delivery slot on his desk.
This is your contract, he said. It tells how and
when you will work a steel and vanadium bound contract
that you couldn't crack with a molecular disruptor. I leaned forward,
quickly grabbed it, and threw it into the air with
a single motion. Before it could fall, I had my
(01:03):
solar out and with a wide angle shot burned the
contract to ashes. The old man pressed the button again,
and another contract slid out on his desk, if possible.
The smile was still wider. Now I should have said
a duplicate of your contract like this one. Here, he
made a quick note on his secretary plate. I have
(01:24):
deducted thirteen credits from your salary for the cost of
the duplicate, as well as a one hundred credit fine
for firing a solar inside a building. I slumped, defeated,
waiting for the blow to land. The old man fondled
my contract. According to this contract, you can't quit. Ever. Therefore,
(01:45):
I have a little job. I know you'll enjoy repair job.
The century beacon has shut down. It's a Mark three beacon.
What kind of beacon? I ask him. I have repaired
hyperspace beacons from one arm of the galaxy to the other,
and I was sure I had worked on every type
or model made. But I had never heard of this
(02:06):
kind Mark three, the old man repeated, practically chortling. I
never heard of it either. Until records dug up the specks.
They found them buried in the back of the oldest warehouse.
This was the earliest type of beacon ever built by Earth,
no less considering its location on one of the Proxima
century planets. It might as well have been the first beacon.
(02:29):
I looked at the blue prints he handed me and
felt my eyes glaze with horror. It's a monstrosity. It
looks more like a distillery than a beacon. Must be
at least a few hundred meters high. I'm a repair man,
not an archaeologist. This pile of junk is over two
thousand years old. Just forget about it and build a
new one. The old man leaned over his desk, breathing
(02:52):
into my face. It would take a year to install
a new beacon, besides being too expensive, and this relic
is on one of the main routes. We have ships
making fifteen light year detours. Now, he leaned back, wiped
his hands on his handkerchief, and gave me lecture forty
four on company duty and my troubles The department is
(03:13):
officially called maintenance and repair, when it really should be
called troubleshooting. Hyperspace beacons are to last forever or damn
close to it. When one of them breaks down, it
is never an accident, and repairing the thing is never
a matter of just plugging in a new part. He
was telling me, the guy who did the job. While
he sat back on his fat paycheck in an air
(03:35):
conditioned office, he rambled on, how I wish that were
all it took. I would have a fleet of parts
ships and junior mechanics to install them. But it's not
like that at all. I have a fleet of expensive
ships that are equipped to do almost anything, manned by
a bunch of irresponsibles like you. I nodded moodily at
(03:55):
his pointing finger. How I wish I could fire you
all combination space jockeys, mechanics, engineers, soldiers, con men, and
everything else it takes to do the repairs. I have
to browbeat, bribe, blackmail and bulldoze you thugs into doing
a simple job. If you think you're fed up, just
think how I feel. But the ships must go through,
(04:18):
the beacons must operate. I recognized this deathless line as
the curtain speech, and crawled to my feet. He threw
the mark three file at me and went back to
scratching in his papers. Just as I reached the door,
he looked up and impaled me on his finger again.
And don't get any fancy ideas about jumping your contract.
(04:39):
We can attach that bank account of yours on all,
goll Io, long before you can draw the money out,
I smiled a little weakly. I'm afraid as if I
had never meant to keep that account a secret. His
spies were getting more efficient every day. Walking down the hall,
I tried to figure a way to transfer the money
without his catching on, and knew at the same time
(05:00):
he was figuring a way to outfigure me. It was
all very depressing, so I stopped for a drink and
then went to the spaceport. By the time the ship
was serviced, I had a course charted. The nearest beacon
to the broken down Proximus and Tury beacon was on
one of the planets of Betas Orcinus, and I headed
there first, a short trip of only about nine days
(05:23):
in hyperspace. To understand the importance of the beacons, you
have to understand hyperspace, not that people do, but it
is easy enough to understand that in this non space,
the regular rules don't apply. Speed and measurements are a
matter of relationship, not constant facts like the fixed universe.
The first ships to enter hyperspace had no place to
(05:45):
go and no way even to tell if they had moved.
The beacons solved that problem and opened the entire universe.
They are built on planets and generate tremendous amounts of power.
This power is turned into radiation that is punched through
into hyperspace. Every beacon has a code signal as part
of its radiation and represents a measurable point in hyperspace.
(06:10):
Triangulation and quadrature of the beacon works for navigation only.
It follows its own rules. The rules are complex and variable,
but they are still rules that a navigator can follow.
For a hyperspace jump, you need at least four beacons
for an accurate fix. For long jumps, navigators uses many
(06:30):
a seven or eight. So every beacon is important and
every one has to keep operating. That is where I
and the other troubleshooters come in. We travel in well
stocked ships that carry a little bit of everything. Only
one man to a ship, because that is all it
takes to operate the overly efficient repair machinery. Due to
(06:51):
the very nature of our job, we spend most of
our time just rocketing through normal space. After all, when
a beacon breaks down, how do you find it? Not
through hyperspace. All you can do is approach as close
as you can by using other beacons, then finish the
trip in normal space. This can take months, and often does.
(07:14):
This job didn't turn out quite that bad. I zeroed
in on Beta Cercina's beacon and ran a complicated eight
point problem through the navigator. Using every beacon I could
get an accurate fix on. The computer gave me a
course with an estimated point of arrival, as well as
a built in safety factor I never could eliminate from
the machine. I would much rather take a chance of
(07:36):
breaking through near some star than spend time just barreling
through normal space. But apparently tech knows this too. They
had a safety factor built into the computer, so you
can't end up inside a star no matter how hard
you tried. I'm sure there was no humanness in this decision.
They just didn't want to lose the ship. It was
a twenty four hour jump ship's time, and I came
(07:59):
through in the middle of nowhere. The robot analyzer chuckled
to itself and scanned all the stars, comparing them to
a spectra of Proximus and Chury. It finally rang a
bell and blinked a light. I peeped through the eyepiece
a fast reading with the photo cell gave me the
apparent magnitude, and a comparison with its absolute magnitude showed
(08:21):
its distance not as bad as I had thought a
six week run, give or take. A few days. After
feeding a course into the robot pilot, I strapped into
the accelerator tank and went to sleep. The time went fast.
I rebuilt my camera for about the twentieth time and
just about finished a correspondence course on nucleonics. Most repairmen
(08:44):
take these courses. Besides, they're always coming in handy. The
company grades your pay by the number of specialties you
can handle. All this with some oil painting and free
fall workouts in the gym pass the time. I was
asleep when the alarm went off that announced planetary distance.
Planet two, where the beacon was situated according to the
(09:06):
old charts, was a mushy looking, wet kind of globe.
I tried to make sense out of the ancient directions
and finally located the right area. Staying outside the atmosphere,
I sent a flying eye down to look things over.
In this business you learn early when and where to
risk your own skin. The eye would be good enough
(09:27):
for the preliminary survey. The old boys had enough brains
to choose a traceable site for the beacon, equidistant on
a line between two of the most prominent mountain peaks.
I located the peaks easily enough and started the eye
out from the first peak and kept it on a
course directly towards the second. There was a nose and
(09:47):
tail radar in the eye, and I fed their signals
into a scope as an amplitude curve. When the two
peaks coincided, I spun the eye controls and dived the
thing down out the radar and cut the nose orthicon
and sat back to watch the beacon appear on the screen.
The image blinked focused and a great damn pyramid swam
(10:09):
into view. I cursed and wheeled the eye in circles,
scanning the surrounding country. It was flat, marshy bottom land
without a bump. The only thing in a ten mile
circle was this pyramid, and that definitely wasn't my beacon,
or wasn't it. I dived the eye lower. The pyramid
was a crude looking thing of undressed stone, without carvings
(10:33):
or decorations. There was a shimmer of light from the top,
and I took a closer look at it. On the
peak of the pyramid was a hollow basin filled with water.
When I saw that, something clicked in my mind, locking
the eye in a circular course. I dug through the
mark three plans, and there it was. The beacon had
(10:53):
a precipitating field and a basin on top of it
for water. This was used to cool the react that
powered the monstrosity. If the water was still there, the
beacon was still there. Inside the pyramid. The natives, who
of course weren't ever mentioned by the idiots who constructed
the thing, had built a nice, heavy, thick stone pyramid
(11:16):
around the beacon. I took another look at the screen
and realized that I had locked the eye into a
circular orbit. About twenty feet above the pyramid. The summit
of the stone pile was now covered with lizards of
some type, apparently the local life form. They had what
looked like throwing sticks and arbalasts and were trying to
(11:36):
shoot down the eye, a cloud of arrows and rocks
flying in every direction. I pulled the eye straight up
and away and threw in the control circuit that would
return it automatically to the ship. Then I went to
the galley for a long, strong drink. My beacon was
not only locked inside a mountain of hand made stone,
but I had managed to irritate the things who had
(11:58):
built the pyramid. Great beginning for a job, and one
clearly designed to drive a stronger man than me to
the bottle. Normally, a repair man stays away from native cultures.
They are poison. Anthropologists may not mind being dissected for
their science, but a repair man wants to make no
sacrifices of any kind for his job. For this reason,
(12:20):
most beacons are built on uninhabitable planets. If a beacon
has to go on a planet with a culture, it
is usually built in some inaccessible place. Why this beacon
was built within reach of the local clause I had
yet to find out, but that would come in time.
The first thing to do was make contact. To make contact,
(12:41):
you have to know the local language, and for that
I had long before worked out a system that was
fool proof. I had a pry eye of my own construction.
It looked like a piece of rock about a foot long.
Once on the ground, it would never be noticed, though
it was a little disconcerting to see it float by.
I located a lizard town about a thousand kilometers from
(13:04):
the pyramid and dropped the eye. It swished down and
landed at night in the bank of a local mud wallow.
This was a favorite spot that drew a good crowd
during the day. In the morning, when the first wallowers arrived,
I flipped on the recorder. After about five of the
local days, I had a sea of native conversation in
the memory bank of the machine translator and tagged a
(13:26):
few expressions. This is fairly easy to do when you
have a machine memory to work with. One of the
lizards gargled at another one, and the second one turned around.
I tagged this expression with a phrase, hey George, and
waited my chance to use it. Later the same day,
I caught one of them alone and shouted hey George
at him. It gurgled out through the speaker in the
(13:50):
local tongue, and he turned around. When you get enough
reference phrases like this in the memory bank, the MT
brain takes over and starts filling in the missing pieces.
As soon as the MT could give a running translation
of any conversation I heard, I figured it was time
to make contact. I found him easily enough. He was
(14:10):
the Centorian version of a goat boy. He heard it
a particularly loathsome form of local life in the swamps
outside the town. I had one of the working eyes
dig a cave in an outcropping of rock and wait
for him. When he passed. Next day, I whispered into
the mic, welcome O, goat boy, grandson, this is your
(14:31):
grandfather's spirit speaking from Paradise. This fitted in with what
I could make out of the local religion. Goat boy
stopped as if he'd been shot. Before he could move.
I pushed a switch, and a handful of local currency
wampum type shells rolled out of the cave and landed
at his feet. Here is some money from Paradise, because
(14:52):
you have been a good boy, Not really from Paradise.
I lifted it from the treasury the night before. Come
back tomorrow and we will talk some more. I called
after the fleeing figure. I was pleased to notice that
he took the cash before taking off. After that, Grandpa
in Paradise had many heart to heart talks with grandson,
(15:12):
who found the heavenly loot more than he could resist.
Grandpa had been out of touch with things since his death,
and goat boy happily filled him in. I learned all
I needed to know of the history, past and recent,
and it wasn't nice. In addition to the pyramid being
around the beacon, there was a nice little religious war
(15:32):
going on around the pyramid. It all began with the
land bridge. Apparently, the local lizards had been living in
the swamps when the beacon was built, but the builders
didn't think much of them. They were a low type
and confined to a distant continent. The idea that the
race would develop and might reach this continent never occurred
to the beacon mechanics, which is of course what happened.
(15:57):
A little geology turnover, A swampy land bridge bridge formed
in the right spot, and the lizards began to wander
up the Beacon valley and found religion. A shiny metal
temple out of which poured a constant stream of magic water.
The reactor cooling water pumped down from the atmosphere condenser
on the roof. The radioactivity in the water didn't hurt
(16:18):
the natives, it caused mutations that bred true. A city
was built around the temple, and through the centuries the
pyramid was put up around the beacon. A special branch
of the priesthood served the temple. All went well until
one of the priests violated the temple and destroyed the
holy waters. There had been a revolt, strife, murder, and
(16:42):
destruction since then, but still the holy waters would not flow. Now,
armed mobs fought around the temple each day, and a
new band of priests guarded the sacred font, and eye
had to walk into the middle of that mess and
repair the thing. It would have been easy enough if
we were allowed a little mayhem. I could have had
(17:03):
a lizard fry, fixed the beacon and taken off only
native life forms were quite well protected. There were spy
cells on my ship, all of which I hadn't found,
that would cheerfully rat on me. When I got back,
diplomacy was called for. I sighed and dragged out the
plastiflesh equipment. Working from three D snaps of Grandson, I
(17:26):
modeled a passable reptile head over my own features. It
was a little short in the jaw, me not having
one of their toothy mandibles, but it was all right.
I didn't have to look exactly like them, just something
close to soothe the native mind. It's logical if I
were an ignorant aborigine of Earth, and I ran into
(17:48):
a spicken who looks like a two foot gob of
dried shellick. I would immediately leave the scene. However, if
the spicken was wearing a suit of plastiflesh that looked
remotely humanoid, I would at least stay and talk to him.
That is what I was aiming to do with the centurions.
When the head was done, I peeled it off and
attached it to an attractive suit of green plastic, complete
(18:11):
with tail. I was really glad they had tails. Lizards
don't wear clothes, and I wanted to take along a
lot of electronic equipment. I built the tail over a
metal frame that anchored around my waist. Then I filled
the frame with all the equipment I would need and
began to wire the suit. When it was done, I
tried it on in front of a full length mirror.
(18:34):
It was horrible, but effective. The tail dragged me down
in the rear and gave me a duck waddle, but
that only helped the resemblance. That night, I took the
ship down into the hills nearest the pyramid and out
of the way dry spot where the amphibious natives would
never go a little before dawn, the eye hooked onto
my shoulders and we sailed straight up. We hovered above
(18:57):
the temple at about two thousand meters and till it
was light, and then dropped straight down. It must have
been a grand sight. The eye was camouflaged to look
like a flying lizard, sort of a cardboard pterodactyl, and
the slowly flapping wings obviously had nothing to do with
our flight, but it was impressive enough for the natives.
(19:17):
The first one that spotted me screamed and dropped over
on his back. The others came running. They milled and
mobbed and piled on top of one another, and by
that time I had landed in the plaza fronting the temple.
The priesthood arrived. I folded my arms in a regal stance.
Greetings O, noble servers of the Great God, I said,
(19:39):
of course. I didn't say it out loud, just whispered
loud enough for the throat mike to catch. This was
radioed back to the m T and the translation shot
back to a speaker in my jaws. The natives chomped
and rattled, and the translation rolled out almost instantly. I
had the volume turned up and the whole square echoed.
(20:00):
Some of the more credulous natives prostrated themselves, and others
fled screaming. One doubtful type raised a spear, but no
one else tried that after the pterodactyl eye picked him
up and dropped him in the swamp. The priests were
a hard headed lot and weren't buying any lizards in
a poke. They just stood and muttered. I had to
(20:21):
take the offensive again. Begone, O faithful steed, I said
to the eye, and pressed the control in my palm.
At the same time. It took off straight up, a
bit faster than I wanted. Little pieces of wind torn
plastic rained down. While the crowd was ogling this ascent,
I walked through the temple doors. I would talk with you,
(20:41):
o noble priests, I said, Before they could think up
a good answer, I was inside. The temple was a
small one built against the base of the pyramid. I
hoped I wasn't breaking too many taboos by going in.
I wasn't stopped, so it looked all right. The temple
was a single room with a murking looking pool at
one end. Sloshing in the pool was an ancient reptile
(21:05):
who clearly was one of the leaders. I waddled toward him,
and he gave me a cold and fishy eye, then
growled something. The mt whispered in my ear. Just what
in the name of the thirteenth Sin are you and
what are you doing here? I drew up my scaly
figure in a noble gesture and pointed toward the ceiling.
(21:26):
I come from your ancestors to help you. I am
here to restore the holy waters. This raised a buzz
of conversation behind me, but got no rise out of
the chief. He sank slowly into the water until only
his eyes were showing. I could almost hear the wheels
turning behind that moss covered forehead. Then he lunged up
(21:47):
and pointed a dripping finger at me. You are a liar,
You are no ancestor of ours. We will stop, I thundered,
before he got so far in that he couldn't back out.
I said, your ancestors sent me as emissary. I am
not one of your ancestors. Do not try to harm me,
or the wrath of those who have passed on will
(22:08):
turn against you. When I said this, I turned to
jab a claw at the other priests, using the motion
to cover my flicking a coin grenade toward them. It
blew a nice hole in the floor with a great
show of noise and smoke. The first Lizard knew I
was talking since then and immediately called a meeting of
the shamans. It of course, took place in the public bathtub,
(22:31):
and I had to join them there. We jawed and
gurgled for about an hour and settled all the major points.
I found out that they were new priests. The previous
ones had all been boiled for letting the holy waters cease.
They found out I was there only to help them
restore the flow of the waters. They bought this tentatively,
(22:52):
and we all heaved out of the tub and trickled
muddy paths across the floor. There was a bolted and
guarded door that led into the pyramids proper. While it
was being opened, the first Lizard turned to me, Undoubtedly
you know the rule, he said, because the old priest
did pry and peer, it was ruled henceforth that only
(23:12):
the blind could enter the Holy of Holies. I'd swear
he was smiling if thirty teeth peeking out of what
looked like a crack in an old suit case could
be called smiling. He was also signaling to an under
priest who carried a brazier of charcoal, complete with red
hot irons. All I could do was stand and watch
(23:33):
as he stirred up the coals, pulled out the ruddiest iron,
and turned toward me. He was just drawing a bead
on my right eye when my brain got back in gear.
Of course, I said, blinding is only right, but in
my case, you will have to blind me after I
leave the Holy of Holies, not now. I need my
eyes to see and mend the fount of holy waters.
(23:56):
Once the waters flow again, I will laugh as I
hurl myself on the burning iron. He took a good
thirty seconds to think this over and had to agree
with me. The local torturer sniffed a bit and threw
a little more charcoal on the fire. The gate crashed
open and I stalked through. Then it banged behind me,
and I was alone in the dark, but not for long.
(24:19):
There was a shuffling near by, and I took a
chance and turned on my flash. Three priests were groping
towards me, their eye sockets red pits of burned flesh.
They knew what I wanted and led the way without
a word. A crumbling and cracked stairway brought us up
to the solid metal doorway labeled in Arcaic script mark
(24:40):
three beacon authorized personnel Only. The trusting builders counted on
the sign to do the whole job, for there wasn't
a trace of a lock on the door. One lizard
merely turned the handle and we were inside the beacon.
I unzipped the front of my camouflage suit and pulled
out the blue prints. With the faithful priests stumbling around me,
(25:02):
I located the control room and turned on the lights.
There was a residue of charge in the emergency batteries,
just enough to give a dim light. The meters and
indicators looked to be in good shape, if anything unexpectedly
bright from constant polishing. I checked the readings carefully and
found just what I suspected. One of the eager lizards
(25:25):
had managed to open a circuit box and had polished
the switches inside. While doing this, he had thrown one
of the switches, and that had caused the trouble. Rather
that had started the trouble. It wasn't going to be
ended by just reversing the water valve switch. The valve
was supposed to be used only for repairs after the
(25:45):
pile was damped. When the water was cut off with
the pile in operation, it had started to overheat and
the automatic safeties had dumped the charge down the pit.
I could start the water again easily enough, but there
was no fuel left in the reactor. I wasn't going
to play with the fuel problem at all. It would
be far easier to install a new power plant. I
(26:08):
had one in the ship that was about a tenth
the size of the ancient bucket of bolts and produced
at least four times the power. Before I sent for it,
I checked over the rest of the beacon. In two
thousand years, there should be some sign of wear. The
old boys had built well, I'll give them credit for that.
Ninety percent of the machinery had no moving parts and
(26:30):
had suffered nowhere whatever other parts they had beefed up,
figuring they would wear but slowly. The water fed pipe
from the roof, for example, the pipe walls were at
least three meters thick, and the pipe opening itself no
bigger than my head. There were some things I could do, though,
and I made a list of parts. The parts the
(26:51):
new power plant and a few odds and ends were
shooted into a neat pile on the ship. I checked
all the parts by screen before they were loaded in
a metal crate. In the darkest hour before dawn. The
heavy duty eye dropped the crate outside the temple and
darted away without being seen. I watched the priests through
the pry eye while they tried to open it. When
(27:14):
they had given up, I boomed orders at them through
the speaker in the crate. They spent most of the
day sweating the heavy box up through the narrow temple stairs,
and I enjoyed a good sleep. It was resting inside
the beacon door when I woke up. The repairs didn't
take long, though there was plenty of groaning from the
blind lizards when they heard me ripping the wall open
(27:35):
to get at the power leagues. I even hooked a
gadget to the water pipe so their holy waters would
have the usual refreshing radioactivity when they started flowing again.
The moment this was all finished, I did the job
they were waiting for. I threw the switch that started
the water flowing again. There were a few minutes while
the water began to gurgle down through the dry pipe.
(27:57):
Then a roar came from outside the pyramids that must
have shaken its stone walls. Shaking my hands over my head,
I went down for the eye burning ceremony. The blind
lizards were waiting for me by the door and looked
even unhappier than usual. When I tried the door, I
found out why it was bolted and barred from the
other side. It has been decided a lizard said that
(28:21):
you should remain here forever and tend the holy waters.
We will stay with you and serve your every need.
A delightful prospect, an eternity in a locked beacon with
three blind lizards, in spite of their hospitality, I couldn't
accept what you dare interfere with the messenger of your ancestors.
(28:41):
I had the speaker on full volume, and the vibration
almost shook my head off. The lizards cringed, and I
set my solar for narrow beam and ran it around
the door jam. There was a great crunching and banging
from the junk piled against it, and then the door
swung free. I threw it open. Before they could protest,
(29:02):
I had pushed the priests out through it. The rest
of their clan showed up at the foot of the
stairs and made a great rucas while I finished welding
the door shut. Running through the crowd, I faced the
first lizard in his tub. He sank slowly beneath the surface.
What a lack of courtesy, I shouted, He made little
bubbles in the water. The ancestors are annoyed and have
(29:24):
decided to forbid entrance to the Inner Temple forever, though
out of kindness they will let the waters flow. Now
I must return on with the ceremony. The torture master
was too frightened to move, so I grabbed out his
hot iron. A touch on the side of my face
dropped a steel plate over my eyes under the plaster skin.
(29:47):
I jammed the iron hard into my phony eye sockets,
and the plastic gave off an authentic odor. A cry
went up from the crowd as I dropped the iron
and staggered in blind circles. I must admit went off
pretty well. Before they could get any more bright ideas,
I threw the switch and my plastic pterodactyl sailed through
(30:08):
the door. I couldn't see it, of course, but I
knew it had arrived when the grapples in the claws
latched on to the steel plates on my shoulders. I
had got turned around after the eye burning, and my
flying beast hooked onto me backward. I had meant to
sail out bravely, blind eyes facing into the sun set. Instead,
I faced the crowd as I soared away. So I
(30:30):
made the most of a bad situation and threw them
a snappy military salute. Then I was out in the
fresh air and away. When I lifted the plate and
poked holes in the seared plastic, I could see the
pyramid growing smaller behind me, water gushing out of the base,
and a happy crowd of reptiles sporting in its radioactive rush.
(30:50):
I counted off on my talons to see if I
had forgotten anything. One the beacon was repaired. Two the
door was sealed, so the would be no more sabotage,
accidental or deliberate. Three the priests should be satisfied. The
water was running again, my eyes had been duly burned out,
and they were back in business, which added up to four.
(31:15):
The fact that they would probably let another repair man
in under the same conditions. If the beacon conked out again,
at least I had done nothing like butchering a few
of them that would make them antagonistic toward future ancestral messengers.
I stripped off my tattered lizard suit back in the ship,
very glad that it would be some other repairman who'd
(31:36):
get the job end of the repairman by Harry Harrison
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