Regulations provide

"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.

It was six-thirty, and the evening crews had come on, when he folded up his papers and decided to call it a day. Many of the customers insisted on continuous attention to their needs, so Joe had long ago gone on a round-the-clock basis. He wondered how they were coming on the Nerane ship.

Even as he thought about it, his phone buzzed and Litchfield, Chief Repair Engineer, spoke:

"Joe? This Nerane IV ship is a screwball setup. We can't find anything wrong with the thing. It's a heavy-water outfit with a type eight drive and a few modifications. As far as we can see it's in perfect working order. The Neranians say it goes all right up to about half cee, but the super-cee won't throw in. We've checked it with the Manson field, and it works perfectly as far as we can see. I don't think these soap-brains know how to run the ship."

"Were there only two of them aboard as Perkins said?"

"That's right."

"How about their mensa? That's the little monkeys that they use to do the heavy work. Telepathic symbiosis."

"Didn't see anything of them. Just these two crabshells."

"Well — it's none of our business if things aren't according to Hoyle with the customers. You're sure they're Neranians?"

"I'm not sure of anything. They look like the pictures in our library books."

"I was thinking maybe they had bought the ship from the Neranians and perhaps had not been instructed properly."

"But look — how could they get clear out here, if the super-cee had never been working. That's about ninety thousand light-years, isn't it?"

"Something like that. Maybe something's conked out that the Manson field doesn't show. There could be a first time. Take the ship up on a run and see what the trouble is. That's about the only way."

"Yeah, but I'd like to get away from that, unless we could dump the gas. If we don't, it means wearing the barrel bottoms, and it's no fun riding in those in a ship that's bucking its super-cee."

"Think of something else then — Oh, let's take it up. I'll go with you. Get things ready. I'll be down in a minute. While you're waiting, try a cerebral analogue on them."

"We tried to. They refused to have anything to do with it. Wouldn't let their brains be tinkered with. A coverup, I suspect, to keep us from finding out how small a quantity of the stuff they've got."

"Maybe I can talk them into it. Hang on."

It wouldn't have been so bad if the business involved merely straight mechanical repair. They could have repaired hulls, replaced reactor piles, counteracted wild radioactivity, rebuilt drives, or anything else in the mechanical or nuclear line, but in nearly every job they had to deal with — usually contend with — the personality and alien thinking of the crew. It was tough enough trying to figure out how to repair a drive manufactured two million light-years away on a planet that no Earthman had yet seen by creatures whose thoughts were only remotely like those of men — but when members of the species, who were ignorant of the principles of their own machines, tried to tell Joe's men how to fix things, then it got complicated.

That's why the biological and psychological departments of his company were nearly as big as the mechanical.