Arthur Zagat - The Golden Age of Science Fiction Volume IX

“Er—the Captain has asked me to contact you. I’m the navigator. I was just about to call you. We have a small problem that—”

“I’ll speak to the Captain,” Hansen repeated grimly.

“Now see here. I’m perfectly capable of handling this situation. Actually, it’s hardly even an emergency. You were, it seems, signaled automatically when—”

“If you’ll check your emergency procedures,” Hansen said, holding his thumb in the Rule Book, “you’ll note that the Relay Station Attendant contacts the Captain personally during all emergencies. Of course, if you want to violate—”

“Look, old man,” said the navigator, now sounding on the verge of tears, “try to realize the spot I’m in. Fromer has ordered me to handle this thing without his assistance. He seems to feel that you have a grudge of some kind—”

“If you don’t put me in touch with Captain Fromer in five minutes, I’ll put through a call to Sector Headquarters.” Hansen signaled off contact. If he knew nothing else about the situation, he knew that he had the upper hand.

Five minutes later Captain Fromer called him back. “I am calling in accordance with emergency procedures,” Fromer said between clinched teeth. “The situation is this: We are reporting an emergency—”

“What class emergency?” Hansen interrupted.

“Class?” asked Fromer, obviously caught off guard.

“Yes, Captain. There are three classes of emergencies. Major class, which would include death and injury. Mechanical class, including malfunction of Hegler units and such. And General class—”

“Yes, yes, of course, General class by all means,” Fromer said hurriedly. “You see, it’s hardly even an emergency. We—”

“Just what is the nature of the trouble, Captain?”

“Why, uh, well it seems that we were doing a preliminary landing procedure check, and…”

“Yes, go on.”

“Why, er, it seems that we can’t get the door open.”

It was Hansen’s turn to be taken aback. “You’re pulling my leg, sir.”

“I most certainly am not,” Captain Fromer said emphatically.

“You really mean that you can’t open the door?”

“I’m afraid so. Something’s wrong with the mechanism. Our technical staff has never encountered a problem like this, and they advise me that any attempt at repair might possibly result in the opposite situation.”

“You mean not being able to get the door closed?”

“Precisely. In other words, we can’t land.”

“I see. Then I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do except advise Sector Headquarters to send an emergency repair crew.”

Captain Fromer sighed. “I’m afraid so, too. How long will it take for a message to get there with your transmitting equipment?”

“Two days, Captain. At a guess, there’ll be a ship alongside within the week. You’ll be maintaining your present position, I assume?”

“Oh, we’ll be here, all right,” Fromer said bitterly. Then he cut contact.

As the single occupant of a large asteroid with nothing but time and boredom on his hands, Hansen was enjoying the whole situation immensely. He allowed himself the luxury of several dozen fantasies in which his name was mentioned prominently in galaxy-wide reports of the episode. He imagined that Captain Fromer was also creating vivid accounts—of quite another sort—that would soon be amusing several hundred billion news-hungry citizens of the Federation.

When the repair ship arrived, it came, to Hansen’s astonishment, to the asteroid, and not alongside Fromer’s ship. He soon found out that there was someone else who shared the Captain’s embarrassment.

“I’m Bullard,” said a tall, thin, mournful man. “Mind if I sit?”

“Help yourself,” Hansen waved a hand toward the meager accommodations. He had no idea why a Senior Engineer was being so deferential, but he enjoyed the feeling of power.

“You’re probably wondering about a lot of things,” Bullard began sadly. “Frankly, we don’t have any ideas about how we can fix Captain Fromer’s door.” He waited to let that sink in. Then he continued: “It took us three days back at the base to find out that when these ships were built, almost five hundred years ago, nobody bothered to include detail drawings of the door mechanism.”

“But why? You certainly know how to build—”

“We know how to build Star Class ships, sure. We’ve built a few in the past century or two. There’s never been need for replacement, really. These ships are designed to last forever. The original fleet was conceived to fill the System’s needs for a full thousand years.”

“But the doors on the few ships that have been built. How—”

“The ship’s we’ve built were exact duplicates of Captain Fromer’s ship—except for the door.” Bullard’s long face radiated despair. “No one ever questioned why the door mechanism wasn’t included in the original plans. We simply designed another type—a different type—of door.”

“Well, you certainly can find out how this particular door works, can’t you?”

“I hope so,” Bullard said, wringing his hands. “But we have a couple of other problems. Number one, Captain Fromer has an extremely important passenger aboard. None other than His Exalted Excellency, R’thagna Bar. He is—or was—on his way home after concluding a treaty of friendship with the President of the Federation.”

Hansen managed a whistle.

“Furthermore,” Bullard continued, “His Excellency has to be home soon to get there in time for the mating season. This occurs once in a lifetime, I’m told, and this is his only chance to continue the ancestral rule—”

“Wait a minute,” Hansen said. “Are you trying to say that you can’t solve a simple problem like getting him home and getting him out of the ship? You can always cut it in two, can’t you?”

“These ships were made to last forever,” Bullard explained. “The hull is, of course, pseudo-met, but, not the kind of pseudo-met used for other applications. In short, about the only way you’ll get in that ship is to vaporize it.”

“But can’t you simply disassemble the door mechanism? My God, how complicated can it be?”

“We’re going to try to do just that,” Bullard said without a trace of confidence. “As far as the complication goes, let me say just this: it’s full of moving parts.”

“What are you getting at?” Hansen asked.

“Just this. These ships are perfect mechanisms. There is hardly anything in them that could be called a moving part. Now a door has to open and close. Sure, we devised a simple, safe way to do it a few hundred years after the original fleet was built. The men who designed the original door mechanism felt, perhaps, that it was incongruous to include it in the first place. Maybe that is why they threw away the plans. God knows, it is incongruous. Look! Here’s a photo we took of one in a ship back at base.”

Hansen scanned the photograph. It was a meaningless jumble. He handed it back. “Well, make yourself at home. I’m afraid that the only thing I can help with will be radio communication to Captain Fromer’s ship.”

“Good enough,” Bullard said. “I’m expecting someone else tomorrow. After you bring him down, feel free to drop over and see me anytime.”

Bullard went back to his ship, and Hansen went to bed. He dreamed of His Exalted Excellency R’thagna Bar, growing angrier day by day as the time of mating came closer. In his dream he suddenly came upon a magnificent solution to the problem, a solution involving a telepathic system of fertilization. He woke up before he had completely worked out the details.