ger to move around."

"Well, I know they're automatic, but how do you service them?"

"From the outside. They're only ten feet through, by about twenty in
length, with a fifteen-foot ball at either end, and everything's in
sections, which can be taken out. Our maintenance-gang goes up in a
thing like a small spaceship, and either works on the outside in
spacesuits, or puts in a new section and brings the unserviceable one
down here to the shops."

"Ah, and what sort of a thing is this small spaceship, now?"

"A thing like a pair of fifty-ton lorries, with airlocks between, and
connected at the middle; airtight, of course, and pressurized and
insulated like a spaceship. One side's living quarters for a six-man
crew--sometimes the gang's out for as long as a week at a time--and
the other side's a workshop."

That sounded interesting. With contragravity, of course, terms like
"escape-velocity" and "mass-ratio" were of purely antiquarian
interest.

"How long," he asked Pearson, "would it take to fit that vehicle with
a full set of detection instruments--radar, infrared and ultra-violet
vision, electron-telescope, heat and radiation detectors, the whole
works--and spot it about a hundred to a hundred and fifty miles above
Keegark?"

"That I couldn't say, general," Emmett Pearson replied. "It'd have to
be a shipyard job, and a lot of that stuff's clear outside my
department. Ask Air-Commodore Hargreaves."

"Les!" he called out. "Wake up, Les!"

"Just a second, general." Hargreaves scribbled frantically on his pad.
"Now," he said, raising his head. "What is it, sir?"

"Emmett, here, has a junior-grade spaceship that he uses to service
those orbital telecast-relay stations of his. He'll tell you what it's
like. I want it fitted with every sort of detection device that can be
crammed into or onto it, and spotted above Keegark. It should, of
course, be high enough to cover not only the Keegark area, but
Konkrook, Kankad's, and the lower Hoork and Konk river-valleys."

"Yes, I get it." Hargreaves snatched up a phone, punched out a
combination, and began talking rapidly into it in a low voice. After a
while, he hung up. "All right, Mr. Pearson--Colonel Pearson, I mean.
Have your space-buggy sent around to the shipyard. My boys'll fix it
up." He made a note on another piece of paper. "If we live through
this, I'm going to have a couple of supra-atmosphere ships in service
on this planet.... Now, general, I have a tenta