"I was thinking maybe they had bought the ship from the Neranians and perhaps had not been instructed properly."
"But look — how could they get clear out here, if the super-cee had never been working. That's about ninety thousand light-years, isn't it?"
"Something like that. Maybe something's conked out that the Manson field doesn't show. There could be a first time. Take the ship up on a run and see what the trouble is. That's about the only way."
"Yeah, but I'd like to get away from that, unless we could dump the gas. If we don't, it means wearing the barrel bottoms, and it's no fun riding in those in a ship that's bucking its super-cee."
"Think of something else then — Oh, let's take it up. I'll go with you. Get things ready. I'll be down in a minute. While you're waiting, try a cerebral analogue on them."
"We tried to. They refused to have anything to do with it. Wouldn't let their brains be tinkered with. A coverup, I suspect, to keep us from finding out how small a quantity of the stuff they've got."
"Maybe I can talk them into it. Hang on."
It wouldn't have been so bad if the business involved merely straight mechanical repair. They could have repaired hulls, replaced reactor piles, counteracted wild radioactivity, rebuilt drives, or anything else in the mechanical or nuclear line, but in nearly every job they had to deal with — usually contend with — the personality and alien thinking of the crew. It was tough enough trying to figure out how to repair a drive manufactured two million light-years away on a planet that no Earthman had yet seen by creatures whose thoughts were only remotely like those of men — but when members of the species, who were ignorant of the principles of their own machines, tried to tell Joe's men how to fix things, then it got complicated.
That's why the biological and psychological departments of his company were nearly as big as the mechanical.
He went to the lock in front of the closed hangar and donned one of the coated steel, articulated joint suits which would enable him to enter the atmosphere of the ship. These were the uncomfortable outfits known as "barrel bottoms" in which it was sometimes necessary to work inside the foreign vessels. They would stand anything from a vacuum to a, hundred atmospheres pressure, and were completely noncorrosive in any liquid or gas that anyone had thought about to date.