"I quit. Don't bother telling me what dirty job you have cooked up, because I have already quit and you do not 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 legal document slid out of the delivery slot onto 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 out quickly, grabbed it and threw it into the air with a single motion. Before it could fall, I had my 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 deducted thirteen credits from your salary for the cost of the duplicate — as well as a 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 document, you can't quit. Ever. I therefore have a little job I know you'll enjoy. Repair job. The Procyon beacon has shut down. It's a Mark Three beacon…"
"What kind of beacon?" I asked him. I have repaired hyperspace beacons from one arm of the galaxy to the other and was sure I had worked on every type or model made. But I had never heard of this kind.
"Mark Three," the Old Man repeated with sly humor. "I never heard of it either until Records dug up the specs. They found them buried in the back of their oldest warehouse. This was the earliest type of beacon ever built — by Earth, no less. Considering its location on one of the Procyon planets, it might very well be the first beacon ever made."
I looked at the blueprints 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 repairman, 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 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.
"This department is officially called Maintenance and Repair, when it really should be called Troubleshooting. Hyperspace beacons are made 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-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 — all of them manned by a bunch of irresponsibles just like you."
I nodded moodily at his pointing finger.
"How I wish I could fire you all! Combination space jockeys, mechanics, engineers, soldiers, conmen, and anything 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! 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 Two 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 at the same time I knew that he was busy 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 Procyon 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 nonspace 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're 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 that is 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 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 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 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 sun 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 the brightest surrounding stars, comparing each to the spectrum of Procyon. It finally rang a bell and blinked a light. I peeped through the eyepiece.
A last 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. Repairmen take these courses. They have a value in themselves, because you never know what bit of odd information will come in handy. Not only that, 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, passed the time. I was asleep when the alarm went off that announced planetary distance.