Crayley rubbed absently at his mustache and plotted murder.
"—be a great deal cheaper, Mr. Crayley?"
Crayley realized he hadn't been listening to what the man beside him was saying. He turned his head to look at the Space Force officer and said quietly, "I'm sorry, major; I didn't quite get you."
"I said that it seems to me that ordinary production machinery would be a great deal cheaper. Why do they use those waldoes?"
Crayley smiled faintly. "Why do you use waldoes to repair a generator on a ship?"
The major looked at Crayley to see if he was kidding, then said, "A man can't live five seconds near an unshielded generator, and you have to take the shielding off to get at the innards. But I don't see how that applies. Each repair job is different. I'll admit that I'm not a drive engineer—I wouldn't know the first thing about repairing one—but I do know that the engineer has to use remote control hands because the work is so delicate.
"But this—" He waved a hand at the screen. "—is recorded. It's routine. Why spend all the money on those tape-controlled robots when much simpler machines can be made to do the job?"
I wonder, Crayley thought to himself, if this blockhead knows which end of his ship to point up when he's taking off? "Two reasons, Major. In the first place, building a sub-nucleonic converter is also a delicate job—as delicate as repairing it. In the second place, we have something here that will save money in the long run. Do you know what re-tooling would cost in this business if we used ordinary bit-by-bit production line methods?"
The major spread his hands. "I have no idea."
"Millions. Every day, some physicist comes up with a new idea on sub-nucleonics. Within a week or so, enough of these ideas have snowballed to produce a slight modification that will improve a spacedrive—increase its speed, improve its efficiency, and so on. Within six or eight months, enough improvements have built up to make it worthwhile to incorporate them into the drive we're building. If North American used production line robots, we'd have to rip out the whole bunch and rebuild 'em to make the new generator. Why? Because the ordinary robotic device is a specialist; it can, at most, do two or three things—usually only one. And if you eliminate the thing that a particular robot does, or change it a little, you have to rebuild the tools and re-arrange them before reprogramming the whole line.