This wouldn’t make sense anywhere else but in the star-ship service. It barely made sense there, but look:
A starship commander might make two trips in his whole career, that’s all. Eighteen years each round trip, with his passengers in coldpacks and a cargo of serums, refractories, machine tools and food concentrate for the xenologists and mineralogists who were crazy enough to work out there.
Training the commander for such a ship was easy, as far as operating knowledge was concerned, though there was a powerful lot of it. But training him to stay conscious, awake and aware—and alone—for all those years was something else again. Few men like that were born; they had to be made. ’
Most of your recluses, your hermits, all through history, have been guys who had things drastically wrong with them. There couldn’t be anything wrong with a starship commander. He had to be captain and deck crew, and know his black-hole as well (though most of the drive machinery down there was automatic) and stay alert—stay sane—in a black, mad, weightless emptiness God never made him for.
Give him more books and pictures, games and music than even he would have time for and you’d still not be sure he’d stay sane unless he had some very special inner resources.
These (and one other thing) were what a cadet was screened for and what he was trained in. PD packed him full of technical knowledge, psyched him to a fare-thee-well, and when they figured he was machine-finished and carrying a high gloss, they sealed him in a space can and threw it out for the Long Haul.
The course was pre-set, and it might last 14 months, and it might last three years, and after a guy got back (if he got back), he would be fit to take out a starship or he would not. As for the shipmate—well, you’d always assumed that PD was looking for a way to shake down two guys at once so they could be together on a starship.
Maybe, some day, the ships would carry eight, ten at once, and at last natural human gregariousness would have a chance to compete with the pall of black distances. So far, though, psychic disorientation had made everything that was latently mean and murderous in a man explode into action. Putting more than a single human being on those boats to nurse them through was just asking for slaughter. And shipwreck.
The other thing required of you besides technical ability and these inner resources is—youth. You’re only twenty-two, so full of high-intensity training that, as Walkinok once said, you feel your brain convolutions are blown out smooth like a full bladder. And you’ve compacted this knowledge, coded it, used it. You’re so full of it that it’s bound to ooze out onto anyone around you.
You’re twenty-two and you’re sealed up in a can with a thirsty-headed fifteen-year-old who knows nothing, but wants to go to the stars awful bad. And you can forget how stupid he seems to be, too, because you can bet your bulging cortex that the kid has such an enormous I.Q. that he can afford to act stupid and cry.
What a dirty, rotten, lousy deal to put you through all this just to shave seven years off the age of a starship commander! Next thing you know, they’d put a diapered baby in with a work-weary sucker of a fine-honed cadet and get three star trips out of him instead of two!
And what’s to become of you? After you’ve done your generous stint of tutoring, they pin a discharge emblem on your tunic and say, “Well done, Cadet. Now go raise Brussels sprouts.” And you stand at attention and salute the downy-cheeked squirt in all the gold braid and watch him ride the gantry crane to the control cabin you’ve aimed at and sweated for ever since you were weaned!
You sprawl there in that living space, so small that you can’t stand up in it, and you look at that bland belly of a bulkhead with its smooth, round navel of a button, and you think, “Well, there’s a lot of guts back of that.” You heave a deep breath, while still the detached part of your mind looks on. Now it’s saying wonderingly, “Aren’t you the guy who was scared because nothing could get him excited any more?” And you speak and your voice comes out sounding quite different from anything you’ve ever heard from anyone before. Maybe you’ve never been this mad before.
“Who told you to say that?”
You push the button and listen.
“Say what-uh-sir?”
“About me teaching you. Anybody at Base?”
He seems to be thinking. “Why, no, sir. I just thought it would be a good idea.”
You don’t say anything. You just hold the button down.
He says diffidently, “Sort of pass the time?” When you still don’t say anything, he adds wistfully, “I’d try. I’d try awful hard.”
You let go the button and growl, “I just bet you would. You just thought it up all your own little self, huh?”
“Well, yes.
“You’re a bright boy. You’re a real, smart, ambitious little louse!”
You push the button real quick, but all you get is an astonished silence.
You say, real composed, almost gentle, “That ‘louse,’ now, that’s not just a figure of speech, little boy. I mean that. I mean you’re a crummy little crawler looking to suck blood after somebody else has done all the work. You know what you do? You just make like you’re all alone in this can. You don’t talk to me and you don’t listen to me and I’ll do you a favor—I’ll forget all about you, too. I’m not going to bat your eyeballs together just yet, but don’t call me generous, little boy—never that. It’s just that I can’t reach in there just now.”
“No!” That boy can make a real piteous noise when he wants to. “No, no! Wait—please!”
“Well?”
“I don’t under—I mean I’m sorry, Cadet. I’m honest-to-Pete sorry. I never meant—”
But you cut him off. You lie back and close your eyes. You’re thrumming with fury right down to your toenails.
This says your internal observer, is all right. This is living.
So the weeks pass, and so do more weeks. You shoot a star and make some notes, and wait a while and shoot it again, and pretty soon you have enough data to fool around with. You get your stylus and block, and the point darts around the way you want it to, and those old figures sit up and lie down and rush around just the way you want them to. You laugh when you do it; wouldn’t Junior just love to learn some of these tricks?
Anyway, you figure you’re just past the cusp perihelion of your parabola and you’re starting back. You know how far you’ve come and when you’ll get back. You laugh again. The sound of your voice reminds you he can hear you, so you crawl over to the bulkhead and push the button.
“Cadet,” he says. “Please, Cadet. Please.” His voice is hoarse and weak; the syllables come out as if they’re meaningless from repetition. He’s probably been lying in there for weeks bleating “Cadet—please—Cadet—please” every time you clicked the stylus against your teeth or set the quadrant on your Sun gun.
You spend a lot of time looking out the viewport, but you get sick of that and turn to the euphorics. You see a lot of stereo shows. You are always aware of the button in the bulkhead, but you ignore it. You read. You get a lot of use out of the octant; it seems you take a lot more bearings than you have to. And when at last the button starts to be intrusive, you make a real effort and leave it alone; you figure out something else to do instead.
You take a careful survey of your instruments to figure which one you need least, and finally decide on the airspeed indicator. You’ve spent plenty of time in a mockup and you know you can compute your airspeed when you return to Earth by the hull-temperature plus your ground-rise radar.