Astounding Science Fiction, October 1950 — page 24: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

REGULATIONS PROVIDE By RAYMOND F. JONES Regulations mean red tape—and red tape can strangle someone as handily as a hangman's rope. Particularly when the someone is an alien desperately in need of a spaceship repair job.... THERE is nothing that a government can do that a private citizen can’t do better— except make war and spend money. That had been the philosophy and firm conviction of Joe, senior, now dead and gone these thirty years. Young Joe Wil- liams was himself pushing sixty, but he had never found occasion to take issue with his father’s belief. Rather, with the march of years, he had become more thoroughly convinced of it than ever. He leaned forward across his desk a moment to look from the window of his second-story office to the vast landing field in front of the building. He confirmed his first glance. The figure he had seen was that of Inspector O’Conners, red tape artist deluxe. What went wrong with a man’s genes, Joe wondered, to make a bureaucrat out of him? A deep inner necessity for de- pendence on the power of the group? Whatever it was made it impossible for the red tape artists to: stand on their own feet, think their own thoughts, and come to their own conclusions. They were afraid to spit without the authority of public law which they could call to mind by paragraph and line. And Melvin O’Conners was a thorough- bred of his kind, Joe thought sourly. As long as the company had to endure an Inspection Office upon the premises, why did the chief inspector have to be Melvin O’Conners? His secretary buzzed a moment later and the inspector came in. You could spot one of them a block away, thought Joe. There was something about the cut of their clothes, the shine of their shoes, their air of “You can’t push John Law around, —— Bud.” “They still up there?” asked O’Conners. “Well, where would they go?” growled Joe. “They ll circle Earth in that orbit until the next ice age at the rate you’re unwinding the red tape. For the sake of a comma in some regulation you'd let people in distress hang on a sky hook for’—he glanced at the clock—‘“eighteen hours since they first asked to come in—while you fumble around to determine whether their ancestoral stock is pure enough to allow them to set foot on our sacred terra firma. It hasn’t been six months since nine of them died because of your precious regulations. If I were on the Intergalactic Advisory Mission, I'd tell everybody to steer so clear of Sol that you'd feel like we were in solitary confinement.” “But, fortunately—for your business— you're not.” The inspector glanced out at the field lined with tremendous machine > shops, laboratories, and hotels—and the more than a hundred intergalactic ships in various stages of repair and disrepair. “Fortunately, I’m not. The cross I bear is Emergency Inspection. Do they land or don’t they? How long are you going to let those people—?” “Stop calling them people. They prob- ably have six heads and forty-eight ten- tacles, and eat their young for breakfast.” “Anybody that has brain enough to transport themselves a hundred thousand light-years across space is people in my book,” said Joe. He picked up a thick cigar and chomped heavily on it. “And they’re a2 Eomichooksnco