"Well--no, sir. I'm not a lightning calculator, that is. I saw one in a sideshow once. He could do things I couldn't."
Hendrix brushed it aside. "Not important. I believe you told me that your uncle taught you some mathematical theory?"
"Just for astrogation, sir."
"What do you think I am talking about? Do you know how to compute a transition approach?"
"Uh, I think so, sir."
"Frankly, I doubt it, no matter how much theoretical drill Brother Jones gave you. But go ahead."
"_Now_, sir?"
"Try it. Pretend you're the officer of the watch. Kelly will be your assistant. I'll just be audience. Work the approach we are on. I realize that we aren't close enough for it to matter--but you are to assume that the safety of the ship depends on it."
Max took a deep breath. "Aye aye, sir." He started to get out fresh plates for the cameras.
Hendrix said, "No!"
"Sir?"
"If you have the watch, where's your crew? Noguchi, help him."
"Aye aye, sir." Noguchi grinned and came over. While they were bending over the first camera, Noguchi whispered, "Don't let him rattle you, pal. We'll give him a good show. Kelly will help you over the humps."
But Kelly did not help; he acted as "numbers boy" and nothing else, with no hint to show whether Max was right, or wildly wrong. After Max had his sights and had taken his comparison data between plates and charts he did not put the problem through the computer himself, but let Noguchi man the machine, with Kelly translating. After a long time and much sweat the lights blinked what he hoped was the answer.
Dr. Hendrix said nothing but took the same plates to the tank and started to work the problem again, with the same crew. Very quickly the lights blinked on again; the Astrogator took the tables from Kelly and looked up the translation himself. "We differ only in the ninth decimal place. Not bad."
"I was wrong only in the ninth place, sir?"
"I didn't say that. Perhaps I was more in error."
Max started to grin, but Dr. Hendrix frowned. "Why didn't you take doppler spectra to check?"
Max felt a cold chill. "I guess I forgot, sir."
"I thought you were the man who never forgot?"
Max thought intuitively--and correctly--that two kinds of memory were involved, but he did not have a psychologist's jargon with which to explain. One sort was like forgetting one's hat in a restaurant, that could happen to anyone; the other was being unable to recall what the mind had once known.
Hendrix went on, "A control room man must not forget things necessary to the safety of the ship. However as an exercise you solved it very well--except that you have no speed. Had we been pushing close to the speed of light, ready to cross, your ship would have been in Hades and crashed in the River Styx before you got the answer. But it was a good first try."
He turned away. Kelly jerked his head toward the hatch and Max went below.
As he was falling asleep Max turned over in his mind the notion that Dr. Hendrix might even be thinking of him for-- Oh no! He put the thought aside. After all, Kelly could have done it; he had seen him do early approaches many times, and faster, too. Probably Noguchi could have done it.
Certainly Noguchi could have done it, he corrected. After all, there weren't any "secrets."
As they approached the first anomaly the easy watch in three for officers and watch in four for the men changed to watch-and-watch, with an astrogator, an assistant, a chartsman, and a computerman on each watch. Max was at last assigned to a regular watch; the first watch was Dr. Hendrix assisted by Chartsman 1/c Kovak, Max as chartsman of the watch and Noguchi on the computer; the other watch was Mr. Simes assisted by Chief Kelly, Smythe as chartsman and Lundy as computerman. Max noticed that Dr. Hendrix had assigned his "first team" to Simes and had taken the less experienced technicians himself. He wondered why, but was pleased not to be working for Simes.
He learned at last why they called it the "Worry Hole." Dr. Hendrix became a frozen-masked automaton, performing approach correction after correction and demanding quick, accurate, and silent service. During the last twenty hours of the approach the Astrogator never left the control room, nor did anyone else other than for short periods when nominally off watch. Simes continued to take his regular watch but Dr. Hendrix hung over him, checking everything that he did. Twice he required the junior astrogator to reperform portions of his work and once elbowed him aside and did it himself. The first time it happened Max stared--then he noticed that the others were careful to be busy doing something else whenever Dr. Hendrix spoke privately to Simes.
The tension grew as the critical instant approached. The approach to an anomalous intraspatial transition can hardly be compared to any other form of piloting ever performed by human beings, though it might be compared to the impossible trick of taking off in an atmosphere plane, flying a thousand miles blind--while performing dead reckoning so perfectly as to fly through a narrow tunnel at the far end, without ever seeing the tunnel. A Horst congruency cannot be seen, it can only be calculated by abstruse mathematics of effects of mass on space; a "gateway" is merely unmarked empty space in vaster emptiness. In approaching a planet an astrogator can see his destination, directly or by radar, and his speed is just a few miles per second. But in making a Horstian approach the ship's speed approaches that of light--and reaches it, at the last instant. The nearest landmarks are many billions of miles away, the landmarks themselves are moving with stellar velocities and appear to be crowding together in the exaggerated parallax effects possible only when the observer is moving almost as fast as is his single clue to location and speed--the wave fronts of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Like searching at midnight in a dark cellar for a black cat that isn't there.
Toward the last Kelly himself was on the computer with Lundy at his ear. Smythe and Kovak were charting, passing new data to Dr. Hendrix, who was programming orally to the computer crew, setting up the problems in his head and feeding them to the electronic brain almost without delay. The power room was under his direct control now; he had a switch led out from the control console in each hand, one to nurse the ship along just below speed of light, the other to give the _Asgard_ the final kick that would cause her to burst through.
Max was pushed aside, no task remained in which there was not someone more experienced. On a different level, Simes too had been pushed aside; there was place for only one astrogator at the moment of truth.
Of all those in the Worry Hole only Captain Blaine seemed to be relaxed. He sat in the chair sacred to him, smoking quietly and watching Hendrix. The Astrogator's face was gray with fatigue, greasy with unwashed sweat. His uniform was open at the collar and looked slept in, though he certainly had not slept. Max looked at him and wondered why he had ever longed to be an astrogator, ever been foolish enough to wish to bear this undivided and unendurable burden.
But the doctor's crisp voice showed no fatigue; the endless procession of numbers marched out, sharp as print, each spoken so that there could be no mistake, no need to repeat, "nine" always sounded as one syllable, "five" always stretched into two. Max listened and learned and wondered.
He glanced up through the dome, out into space itself, space shown distorted by their unthinkable speed. The stars ahead, or above, had been moving closer together for the past several watches, the huge parallax effect displacing them to the eye so that they seemed to be retreating in the very sector of the sky they were approaching. They were seeing by infra-red waves now, ploughing into oncoming wave trains so fast that doppler effect reduced heat wave lengths to visible light.