The Repairman | Page 3

specialties you can
handle. All this, with some oil painting and free-fall workouts in the
gym, passed the time. I was asleep when the alarm went off that
announced planetary distance.
Planet two, where the beacon was situated according to the 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 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 toward the
second. There was a nose and 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.
I cut out the radar and cut in the nose orthicon and sat back to watch the
beacon appear on the screen.
[Illustration]
The image blinked, focused--and a great damn pyramid swam 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 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 III
plans--and there it was. The beacon had a precipitating field and a basin
on top of it for water; this was used to cool the reactor 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 even
mentioned by the idiots who constructed the thing, had built a nice
heavy, thick stone pyramid 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 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 handmade stone, but I had managed
to irritate the things who had built the pyramid. A great beginning for a
job and one clearly designed to drive a stronger man than me to the
bottle.
Normally, a repairman stays away from native cultures. They are
poison. Anthropologists may not mind being dissected for their science,
but a repairman wants to make no sacrifices of any kind for his job. For
this reason, most beacons are built on uninhabited planets. If a beacon
has to go on a planet with a culture, it is usually built in some
inaccessible place.
Why this beacon had been built within reach of the local claws, I had
yet to find out. But that would come in time. The first thing to do was
make contact. To make contact, 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 pryeye 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 the pyramid and dropped the
eye. It swished down and landed at night in the bank of the 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 had tagged a few
expressions. This is