Data from another server....

I have a question about what should be fairly simple to accomplish,
however it has not been for some strange reason. I have two servers
running apache and php. One is our public web server running linux
(port 80 is available through the firewall), the second is inside our
firewall running windows2000. The Windows 2000 server is has several
scripts written to extract data from our MS SQL server through an ODBC
connection and everything works great. My challenge has been
displaying data from the SQL server to our customers through the
internet via the Linux box. I thought including a page using
include("http://......") was going to do it, but I have not been
successful in getting it to work. Here are the three files I am
dealing with:

kld.php (on Linux Box)

<?
include("http://10.0.17.6/includes/MsSQL_db.php");
$data_local = include("http://10.0.17.6/get_data.php?userid=1021");
print_r ($data_local);
?>

get_data.php (on Win2000 Box)

<?
include("includes/MsSQL_db.php");
$data = array();
$userid = $_GET['userid'];
$data = $MsSQL->get_pending_list_by_userid($userid);
return $data;
?>

MsSQL_db.php (also on Win2000 box)

<?
include("constants.php");
class MsSQL_DB {
var $connection;
function MsSQL_DB(){
$this->connection =
odbc_connect(MsSQL_DSN,MsSQL_USERNAME,MsSQL_PASSWORD);
}


function get_pending_list_by_userid($userid){
$this->data_array = array();
$q = "SELECT OrderID, BeginTime, Company, Clinic, Item FROM
InSync_Master_View where Interpreterid = ".$userid." and status =
'pending'";
$result=odbc_exec($this->connection, $q) or die ("<pre>Query
Failure: $q </pre>");
while ($row = odbc_fetch_array($result)) {
$this->data_array[] .= $row['OrderID'].", ".$row['BeginTime'].", ".
$row['Company'].", ".$row['Clinic'].", ".$row['Item']."<br>";
}
return $this->data_array;
}
}
$MsSQL = new MsSQL_DB;
?>


My problem is that by the time the array that I started with in the
function call gets back to kld.php it is not a multidimensional array
any more, at this point when print_r($local_data) runs all I get is a
1. If I change "return" to echo on get_data.php it will print my array
on the first page but I would like to receive it back in an array in
kld.php so I can sort it and manipulate the data before printing it.
Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.