Raymond F. Jones

Regulations provide

There is nothing that a government can do that a privnts citizen can't do better — except make war and spend money.

That had been the philosophy and firm conviction of Joe, senior, now dead and gone these thirty years. Young Joe Williams was himself pushing sixty, but he had never found occasion to take issue with his father's belief. Rather, with the march of years, he had become more thoroughly convinced of it than ever.

He leaned forward across his desk a moment to look from the window of his second-story office to the vast landing field in front of the building. He confirmed his first glance. The figure he had seen was that of Inspector O'Conners, red tape artist deluxe.

What went wrong with a man's genes, Joe wondered, to make a bureaucrat out of him? A deep inner necessity for dependence on the power of the group? Whatever it was made it impossible for the red tape artists to stand on their own feet, think their own thoughts, and come to their own conclusions. They were afraid to spit without the authority of public law which they could call to mind by paragraph and line.

And Melvin O'Conners was a thoroughbred of his kind, Joe thought sourly. As long as the company had to endure an Inspection Office upon the premises, why did the chief inspector have to be Melvin O'Conners?

His secretary buzzed a moment later and the inspector came in. You could spot one of them a block away, thought Joe. There was something about the cut of their clothes, the shine of their shoes, their air of "You can't push John Law around, Bud."

"They still up there?" asked O'Conners.

"Well, where would they go?" growled Joe. "They'll circle Earth in that orbit until the next ice age at the rate you're unwinding the red tape. For the sake of a comma in some regulation you'd let people in distress hang on a sky hook for" — he glanced at the clock — "eighteen hours since they first asked to come in — while you fumble around to determine whether their ancestoral stock is pure enough to allow them to set foot on our sacred terra firma. It hasn't been six months since nine of them died because of your precious regulations. If I were on the Intergalactic Advisory Mission, I'd tell everybody to steer so clear of Sol that you'd feel like we were in solitary confinement."

"But, fortunately — for your business — you're not." The inspector glanced out at the field lined with tremendous machine shops, laboratories, and hotels — and the more than a hundred intergalactic ships in various stages of repair and disrepair.

"Fortunately, I'm not. The cross I bear is Emergency Inspection. Do they land or don't they? How long are you going to let those people — ?"

"Stop calling them people. They probably have six heads and forty-eight tentacles, and eat their young for breakfast."

"Anybody that has brain enough to transport themselves a hundred thousand light-years across space is people in my book," said Joe. He picked up a thick cigar and chomped heavily on it. "And they're in trouble. Do they land or don't they?"

"We're proceeding according to I.G. Board agreement," said O'Conners. "Regulations provide —"

"That even if a guy is about dead he can go ahead and die as long as he hasn't got a letter of introduction from I.G."

"Regulations provide," continued the inspector patiently, "that in case of first contact between a visiting race and a given planet, the representatives arriving shall present adequate data for identification which shall then be verified through the I.G. Central Operations unit. That is what we are doing."

"Even if it kills the strangers."

"No exceptions were provided or could be provided for emergency cases. You know that very well. You cannot have forgotten the Trojan incident of Malabar Seven. And so we are proceeding according to regulations and agreement. Any of us would get the same treatment from their planet, wherever that might be."

"You mean you haven't even got them pegged, yet? I told you yesterday they were from Nerane IV and I pointed it out on the charts and showed your central operators the encyclopedic data —"

O'Conners waved disparagingly. "Your sorter isn't official. It has to be verified by our official machines."

"'Sfunny," said Joe, "that after all these hundreds of years the word 'official' is still synonymous with inefficiency and general chowder-head-edness. My sorter gets the data in fifteen minutes — yours hasn't got it in more than eighteen hours."

"Official sources require accuracy. We could not afford to be wrong if the landing of this ship involves violation of the I.G.B. regulations, or if these creatures cannot be identified. Your sorter is not concerned with such factors, understandably. You are concerned only with repairing the vessel and making a profit on the operation."