And he rebuilt it. It was a pip, in view of his knowledge and experience he'd gained from his travels. He'd run across an almost identical drive among the Irdians. But he was too broke to do more than take it on a single test run to Mars and back.
That was enough. Somehow the news got around the galaxy faster than the ship itself could have done.
Joe was made.
That was the beginning. The infant FGA sponsored a program of approved service and repair stations at strategic points throughout the galaxy and Joe was automatically for it because by then he knew more than any other Earthman about foreign ships and drives.
It had been a reputation for Young Joe to maintain — and he'd maintained it. If only there were someone to turn it over to —
As usual, the politicians came pounding hard on the heels of the scientists, bent on regulating their betters. Some worlds were more prone to this tendency than others, but Earth was right up front in this respect. There had been a few unfortunate incidents in the meeting of alien cultures — but far fewer than even the most hopeful had supposed. An almost universal fact was that by the time a race had reached the stars it had begun to mature.
Joe turned back to the desk on which lay the data on the strangers from Nerane IV. Their planet was one of the most nonterrestrian so far encountered. Little commerce passed between its peoples and the rest of the galaxy, yet their ships occasionally called on exploratory or cultural missions, though none had been to Earth before.
The creatures had a hard exoskeleton. Stiff, bony appendages supported them on a planet eight times the mass of Earth. They lived in a yellow-brown fog of nitrogen peroxide at a pressure of about one sixth Earth atmosphere.
In an almost symbiotic relationship they lived with another species, a small, remotely monkeylike creature called mensa. These were controlled by telepathic forces and performed, the physical work which the clumsy exoskeletons of the more intelligent creatures did not permit.
Joe read through the data from the massive library his company had accumulated on a hundred thousand planets and cultures. He did not have the slightest conception of what kind of metabolism an atmosphere of nitrogen peroxide could support — or even if it were necessary to the creatures' metabolism. But, at any rate, it was reported that their ships were provided with such an atmosphere.