The Repairman | Page 2

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! The beacons must operate!"
I recognized this deathless line as the curtain speech and crawled to my
feet. He threw the Mark III 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. We can
attach that bank account of yours on Algol II long before you could
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 he was figuring a
way to outfigure me.
It was all very depressing, so I stopped for a drink, then went on to the
spaceport.
* * * * *
By the time the ship was serviced, I had a course charted. The nearest
beacon to the broken-down Proxima Centauri Beacon was on one of the

planets of Beta Circinus and I headed there first, a short trip of only
about nine days in hyperspace.
To understand the importance of the beacons, you have to understand
hyperspace. Not that many 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 go--and no way to
even 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.
Triangulation and quadrature of the beacons 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 use as many as seven or eight. So every
beacon is important and every one has to keep operating. That is where
I and the other trouble-shooters came 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 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.
This job didn't turn out to be quite that bad. I zeroed on the Beta
Circinus 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 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 couldn't end up inside a star no matter how hard you tried. I'm
sure there was no humaneness in this decision. They just didn't want to
lose the ship.
* * * * *
It was a twenty-hour jump, ship's time, and I came through in the
middle of nowhere. The robot analyzer chuckled to itself and scanned
all the stars, comparing them to the spectra of Proxima Centauri. It
finally rang a bell and blinked a light. I peeped through the eyepiece.
A fast reading with the photocell gave me the apparent magnitude and a
comparison with its absolute magnitude showed its distance. Not as bad
as I had thought--a six-week run, give or take a few days. After feeding
a course tape into the robot pilot, I strapped into the acceleration 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 in nucleonics. Most
repairmen take these courses. Besides their always coming in handy,
the company grades your pay by the number of