Pearson laughed. "Crew of what, general? White mice, or trained cockroaches? There isn't room inside one of those things for anything bigger to move around." "Well, I know they're automatic, but how do you service them?" "From the outside. They're only ten feet through, by about twenty in length, with a fifteen-foot ball at either end, and everything's in sections, which can be taken out. Our maintenance-gang goes up in a thing like a small spaceship, and either works on the outside in spacesuits, or puts in a new section and brings the unserviceable one down here to the shops." "Ah, and what sort of a thing is this small spaceship, now?" "A thing like a pair of fifty-ton lorries, with airlocks between, and connected at the middle; airtight, of course, and pressurized and insulated, like a spaceship. One side's living' quarters for a six-man crew--sometimes the gang's out for as long as a week at a time--and the other side's a workshop." That sounded interesting. With contragravity, of course, terms like "escape-velocity" and "mass-ratio" were of purely antiquarian interest. "How long," he asked Pearson, "would it take to fit that vehicle with a full set of detection instruments--radar, infrared and ultraviolet vision, electron-telescope, heat and radiation detectors, the whole works--and spot it about a hundred to a hundred and fifty miles above Keegark?" "That I couldn't say, general," Emmett Pearson replied. "It'd have to be a shipyard job, and a lot of that stuff's clear outside my department. Ask Air-Commodore Hargreaves." "Les!" he called out. "Wake up, Les!" "Just a second, general." Hargreaves scribbled frantically on his pad. "Now," he said, raising his head. "What is it, sir?" "Emmett, here, has a junior-grade spaceship that he used to service those orbital telecast-relay stations of his. He'll tell you what it's like. I want it fitted with every sort of detection device that can be crammed into or onto it, and spotted above Keegark. It should, of course, be high enough to cover not only the Keegark area, but Konkrook, Kankad's, and the lower Hoork and Konk river-valleys."