Easy watches for everyone but Max--he was placed on watch-and-watch for instruction, four hours on followed by four hours off in which he must eat, keep himself clean, relax, and--if he found time--sleep.
But he thrived on it, arriving early and sometimes having to be ordered out of the Worry Hole. Not until much later did he find out that this stiff regime was Kelly's way of trying to break him, discover his weakness and get rid of him promptly if he failed to measure up.
Not all watches were pleasant. Max's very first watch was under Mr. Simes. He crawled up the hatch into the control room and looked around him in wonderment. On four sides were the wonderfully delicate parallax cameras. Between two of them Lundy sat at the saddle of the main computer; he looked up and nodded but did not speak. Mr. Simes sat at the control console, facing the hatch; he must have seen Max but gave no sign of it.
There were other instruments crowded around the walls, some of which Max recognized from reading and from seeing pictures, some of which were strange-- tell-tales and gauges from each of the ship's compartments, a screen to reproduce the view aft or "below," microphone and controls for the ship's announcing system, the "tank" or vernier stereograph in which plates from the parallax cameras could be compared with charts, spectrostellograph, dopplerscope, multipoint skin temperature recorder, radar repeater for landing, too many things to take in at once.
Overhead through the astrogation dome was the starry universe. He stared at it, mouth agape. Living as he had been, inside a steel cave, he had hardly seen the stars; the firmament had been more with him back home on the farm.
"Hey! You!"
Max shook his head and found Mr. Simes looking at him. "Come here." Max did so, the assistant astrogator went on, "Don't you know enough to report to the watch officer when you come on duty?"
"Uh--sorry, sir."
"Besides that, you're late." Max slid his eyes to the chronometer in the console; it still lacked five minutes of the hour. Simes continued, "A sorry state of affairs when crewmen relieve the watch later than the watch officer. What's your name?"
"Jones, sir."
Mr. Simes sniffed. He was a red-faced young man with thin, carroty hair and a sniff was his usual conversational embellishment, at least with juniors. "Make a fresh pot of coffee."
"Aye aye, sir." Max started to ask where and how, but Mr. Simes had gone back to his reading. Max looked helplessly at Lundy, who indicated a direction with his eyes. Behind the chart safe Max found a coffee maker and under it cups, saucers, sugar, and tins of cream.
He burned himself before getting the hang of the gear's idiosyncrasies. Mr. Simes accepted the brew without looking at him. Max wondered what to do next, decided to offer a cup to Lundy. The computerman thanked him quietly and Max decided to risk having one himself, since it seemed to be accepted. He took it over beside the computer to drink it.
He was still doing so when the watch officer spoke up. "What is this? A tea party? Jones!"
"Yes, sir?"
"Get the place policed up. Looks as if a herd of chucks had been wallowing in it."
The room seemed clean, but Max found a few scraps of paper to pick up and stuff down the chute, after which he wiped already-gleaming brightwork. He had started to go over things a second time when Lundy motioned him over. Max then helped Lundy change plates in the parallax cameras and watched him while he adjusted the electronic timer. Mr. Simes pushed the ready button himself, which seemed to be his sole work during the watch.
Lundy removed the plates and set them up in the tank for chart comparison, took the readings and logged them. Max gave him nominal help and gathered some notion of how it was done, after which he again wiped brightwork.
It was a long watch. He went to his bunk drained of the elation he had felt.
But watches with Dr. Hendrix and with Chief Kelly were quite different. The Worry Hole was a jolly place under Kelly; he ruled as a benevolent tyrant, shouting, cursing, slandering the coffee, slurring his juniors and being sassed back. Max never touched a polish rag when Kelly was at control; he was kept too busy not merely helping but systematically studying everything in the room. "We haven't a condemned thing to do," Kelly shouted at him, "until we hit Carson's Folly. Nothing to do but to ride this groove down until we hit dirt. So you, my laddy buck, are going to do plenty. When we get there you are going to know this condemned hole better than your mother knew your father--or you can spend your time there learning what you've missed while your mates are dirtside getting blind. Get out the instruction manual for the main computer, take off the back plate and get lost in them wires. I don't want to see anything but your ugly behind the rest of this watch."
Within ten minutes Kelly was down on his knees with him, helping him trace the intricate circuits.
Max learned, greatly assisted by his photographic memory and still more by the sound grounding in theory he had gotten from his uncle. Kelly was pleased. "I reckon you exaggerated a mite when you said you hadn't learned anything in the _Thule_."
"Well, not much."
"Johansen have the Worry Hole when you were striking?"
"Uh, yes." Max hoped frantically that Kelly would not ask other names.
"I thought so. That squarehead wouldn't tell his own mother how old he was."
There came a watch when Kelly trusted him to do a dry run for a transition approach on the computer, with Noguchi handling the tables and Kelly substituting for the astrogator by following records of the actual transition the ship had last made. The programming was done orally, as is the case when the astrogator is working under extreme pressure from latest data, just before giving the crucial signal to boost past the speed of light.
Kelly took it much more slowly than would happen in practice, while Noguchi consulted tables and called out figures to Max. He was nervous at first, his fingers trembling so that it was hard to punch the right keys--then he settled down and enjoyed it, feeling as if he and the machine had been born for each other.
Kelly was saying, "--times the binary natural logarithm of zero point eight seven oh nine two." Max heard Noguchi's voice call back the datum while he thumbed for the page--but in his mind Max saw the page in front of his eyes long before Noguchi located it; without conscious thought he depressed the right keys.
"Correction!" sang out Kelly. "Look, meathead, you don't put in them figures; you wait for translation by Noggy here. How many times I have to tell you?"
"But I did--" Max started, then stopped. Thus far he had managed to keep anyone aboard the _Asgard_ from learning of his embarrassingly odd memory.
"You did what?" Kelly started to clear the last datum from the board, then hesitated. "Come to think of it, you can't possibly feed decimal figures into that spaghetti mill. Just what _did_ you do?"
Max knew he was right and hated to appear not to know how to set up a problem. "Why, I put in the figures Noguchi was about to give me."
"How's that again?" Kelly stared at him. "You a mind reader?"
"No. But I put in the right figures."
"Hmm ..." Kelly bent over the keyboard. "Call 'em off, Noggy." The computerman reeled off a string of ones and zeroes, the binary equivalent of the decimal expression Kelly had given him; Kelly checked the depressed keys, his lips moving in concentration. He straightened up. "I once saw a man roll thirteen sevens with honest dice. Was it fool luck, Max?"