Life on other planets -- Fiction; Quarantine -- Fiction; Science fiction; Space medicine -- Fiction
The ship lifted. Calhoun watched with seeming negligence. But he found
occasion for a dozen corrections of procedure. This was presumably a
training voyage of his own suggestion. Therefore when the blueskin pilot
would have flung the Med Ship into undirected overdrive, Calhoun grew
stern. He insisted on a destination. He suggested Weald. The young men
glanced at each other and accepted the suggestion. He made the acting
pilot look up the intrinsic business of its sun and measure its apparent
brightness from just off Dara. He made him estimate the change in
brightness to be expected after so many hours in overdrive, if one broke
out to measure.
The first blueskin student pilot ended a Calhoun-determined tour of duty
with rather more of respect for Calhoun than he'd had at the beginning.
The second was anxious to show up better than the first. Calhoun drilled
him in the use of brightness-charts, by which the changes in apparent
brightness of stars between overdrive hops could be correlated with
angular changes to give a three-dimensional picture of the nearer
heavens. It was a highly necessary art which had not been worked out on
Dara, and the prospective astrogators became absorbed in this and other
fine points of space-piloting. They'd done enough, in a few trips to
Orede, to realize that they needed to know more. Calhoun showed them.
Calhoun did not try to make things easy for them. He was hungry and
easily annoyed. It was sound training tactics to be severe, and to
phrase all suggestions as commands. He put the four young men in command
of the ship in turn, under his direction. He continued to use Weald as a
destination, but he set up problems in which the Med Ship came out of
overdrive pointing in an unknown direction and with a precessory motion.
He made the third of his students identify Weald in the celestial globe
containing hundreds of millions of stars, and get on course in overdrive
toward it. The fourth was suddenly required to compute the distance to
Weald from such data as he could get from observation, without reference
to any records.
By this time the first man was chafing to take a second turn. Calhoun
gave each of them a second gruelling lesson. He gave them, in fact, a
highly condensed but very sound course in the art of travel in space.
His young students took command in four-hour watches, with at least one
breakout from overdrive in each watch. He built up enthusiasm in them.
They ignored the discomfort of being hungry, though there had been no
reason for them to stint on food in Orede--in growing pride in what they
came to know.
When Weald was a first-magnitude star, the four were not highly
qualified astrogators, to be sure, but they were vastly better spacemen
than at the beginning. Inevitably, their attitude toward Calhoun was
respectful. He'd been irritable and right. To the young, the combination
is impressive.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account