aks. I located the peaks easily enough and started the eye out from
the first peak and kept it on a course directly toward the second. There
was a nose and tail radar in the eye and I fed their signals into a
scope as an amplitude curve. When the two peaks coincided, I spun the
eye controls and dived the thing down.

I cut out the radar and cut in the nose orthicon and sat back to watch
the beacon appear on the screen.

[Illustration]

The image blinked, focused--and a great damn pyramid swam into view. I
cursed and wheeled the eye in circles, scanning the surrounding country.
It was flat, marshy bottom land without a bump. The only thing in a
ten-mile circle was this pyramid--and that definitely wasn't my beacon.

Or wasn't it?

I dived the eye lower. The pyramid was a crude-looking thing of
undressed stone, without carvings or decorations. There was a shimmer of
light from the top and I took a closer look at it. On the peak of the
pyramid was a hollow basin filled with water. When I saw that, something
clicked in my mind.

* * * * *

Locking the eye in a circular course, I dug through the Mark III
plans--and there it was. The beacon had a precipitating field and a
basin on top of it for water; this was used to cool the reactor that
powered the monstrosity. If the water was still there, the beacon was
still there--inside the pyramid. The natives, who, of course, weren't
even mentioned by the idiots who constructed the thing, had built a nice
heavy, thick stone pyramid around the beacon.

I took another look at the screen and realized that I had locked the eye
into a circular orbit about twenty feet above the pyramid. The summit of
the stone pile was now covered with lizards of some type, apparently the
local life-form. They had what looked like throwing sticks and arbalasts
and were trying to shoot down the eye, a cloud of arrows and rocks
flying in every direction.

I pulled the eye straight up and away and threw in the control circuit
that would return it automatically to the ship.

Then I went to the galley for a long, strong drink. My beacon was not
only locked inside a mountain of handmade stone, but I had managed to
irritate the things who had built the pyramid. A great beginning for a
job and one clearly designed to drive a stronger man than me to the
bottle.

Normally, a repairman stays away from native cultures. They are poison.
Anthropologists may not mind being di