tanite find is all yours. You're
still a partner in the refinery, remember. And you've still got an
obligation to the rest of us, so you can damn well get in and do your
job."

"Don't worry. I've always done my job."

"More or less," said Hyrst. "For your information, I've seen better
engineers in grade-school. There's Number Three hoist. It's been busted
for a week. Now let's get in there and fix it."

The two figures in Hyrst's memory toiled on, out of the area of roads to
the edge of the landing field, where the ships come to take away the
refined uranium. Number Three hoist rose in a stiff, ugly column from
the ground. It was supposed to fetch the uranium up from the
underground storage bins and load it into a specially-built hot-tank
ship in position at the dock. But Number Three had balked and refused to
perform its task. In this completely automated plant, men were only
important when something went wrong. Now something was wrong, and it was
up to MacDonald, the mechanical engineer, and Hyrst, the electronics
man, to set it right.

Hyrst opened the hatch, and they climbed the metal stairs to the upper
chamber. Number Three's brain was here, its scanners, its tabulating and
recording apparatus, its signal system. A red light pulsated on a panel,
alone in a string of white ones.

"Trouble's in the hoist-mechanism," said Hyrst. "That's your
department." He smiled and sat down on a metal bench in the center of
the room, with his back to the stair. "D Level."

MacDonald grumbled, and went to a skeletal cage built over a round
segment of the floor. Various tools were clipped to the ribs of the
cage. MacDonald pulled an extra rayproof protectall over his vac-suit
and stepped inside the cage, pressing a button. The cage dropped, into a
circular shaft that paralleled the hoist right down to the feeder
mechanism.

Hyrst waited. Inside his helmet he could hear MacDonald breathing and
grumbling as he worked away, repairing a break in the belt. He did not
hear anything else. Then something happened, so swiftly that he had
never had any memory of it, and some time later he came to and looked
for MacDonald. The cage was way down at the bottom of the shaft and
MacDonald was in it, with a very massive pedestal-block on top of him.
The block had been unbolted from the floor and dragged to the edge of
the shaft, and it could not possibly have been an accident that it
tumbled in, between the wide-apart ribs of the cage.