On the other hand Hagen occasionally located a weak spot and pointed it out to them; some of them were grateful, and some impertinent. Of the former, they nodded sagely and mumbled something about beginner's luck or the familiarity that breeds contempt. Of the latter, their acknowledgment of the weak spot came either as something admittedly less than perfect but not really dangerous--or that they knew it was there, but had not reached that spot in their repair routine. Steve could not argue any of these points, so he clamped down on the sharp answers he felt coming up and passed it by with only a scowl. Had he been less certain of himself, Steve would have been ruffled or possibly hurt by this sort of treatment. But Hagen was the kind of man who knew that he was not completely capable in such things--although he was quite capable in other things, which lent the whole proposition some compensation. It is the man who has no particular accomplishment of his own who cannot stand to be pushed around by people who have--or he with the overpowering inferiority complex who _thinks_ he has no particular excellence. Steve had neither inferiority complex nor lack of certain successes; he would study and he would learn, and one day he would speak with authority. And so it went as the days rolled on and on. His time was not entirely uneventful. The ship he drove on these inspections was a scout model, equipped with space alarm recorder; and although it did not have the automatic scale-model of the galactic sector such as in the main office of Commissioner Morehouse, it did have a manual model. When a muttering call came in on the alarm circuit, Steve would take the time to classify it, to fix it, then to calculate and enumerate which of the stations was going out on the call. * * * * * This sort of classifying gave Steve a sort of dull shock. For even though he had known the facts, it took seeing them and calculating them to drive it home. The Guardians were not constantly fighting the great menace; such blowups as Steve had been initiated into almost upon his arrival at Base One were actually few and far between. Most of these were minor calls. A tramper with a vacillating warp generator would call the Guardians to have them come out to clamp down on the space warp before it blew, or long enough for the engineers to make repair or adjustment. Occasionally the spacecraft would try to drop speed before the warp blew out, and almost make it; in which case the resulting eruption took all of the simple technique of a smouldering fire in a wastebasket. There were far more calls for _danger_ than calls for _blowup_. Ships' engineers, mindful of the fact that the life of every man aboard depended upon the efficient working of the warp generator, knowing that the ship would blow and be lost if it failed, were inclined to call for aid and help at the slightest indication of instability; it kept the Guardians busy.