ey 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 d