140
king machinery. They had to have jungle-breaking machinery. They could not imagine wanting anything less than jungle-breaking machinery--
Hoddan raised his head. The mechanics looked dully at him.
"You men do maintenance?" he asked. "You repair things when they wear out on the ships? Have you run out of some materials you need for repairs?"
After a long time a tired-looking man said slowly:
"On the ship I come from, we're having trouble. Our hydroponic garden keeps the air fresh, o'course. But the water-circulation pipes are gone. Rusted through. We haven't got any pipe to fix them with. We have to keep the water moving with buckets."
Hoddan got up. He looked about him. He hadn't brought hydroponic-garden pipe supplies! And there was no raw material. He took a pair of power snips and cut away a section of cargo space wall-lining. He cut it into strips. He asked the diameter of the pipe. Before their eyes he made pipe--spirally wound around a mandril and line-welded to solidity.
"I need some of that on my ship," said another man.
The bearded man said heavily:
"We'll make some and send it to the ships that need it."
"No," said Hoddan. "We'll send the tools to make it. We can make the tools here. There must be other kinds of repairs that can't be made. With the machines I've brought, we'll make the tools to make the repairs. Picture-tape machines have reels that show exactly how to do it."
[Illustration]
It was a new idea. The mechanics had other and immediate problems beside the overall disaster of the fleet. Pumps that did not work. Motors that heated up. They could envision the meeting of those problems, and they could envision the obtaining of jungle-plows. But they could not imagine anything in between. They were capable of learning how to make tools for repairs.
* * * * *
Hoddan taught them. In one day there were five ships being brought into better operating condition--for ultimate futility--because of what he'd brought