Chapter 3

In the early dawn, out at the hangar, away from the main E buildings and the endless discussions going on inside them, Thomas R. Lynwood moved methodically through his preflight inspection.

Speculative thinking was none of his concern. His job was to pilot an E wherever he might want to go, and bring him back again--if possible. To Lynwood reality was a physical thing--the feel of controls beneath his broad, square hands; the hum of machinery responsive to his will. He liked mathematics not for its own sake but because it best described the substance of things, the weight, the size, the properties of things, how they behaved. He was too intelligent not to realize mathematics could also communicate speculative unrealities, but he was content to wait until the theorists had turned such equations into machines, controls, forces before he got excited.

He was one who, even in childhood, had never wanted to be an E. He didn’t want to be one now. Somebody had once told him in Personnel that was why he was a favorite pilot of the E’s, but he discounted that. They didn’t try to tell him how to run his ship--well, most of them didn’t--and he didn’t try to tell them how to solve their problems.

The men around the hangar had another version of why the E’s liked him to pilot them around--he was lucky. Somehow he always managed to come back, and bring the E with him. Well, sure. He didn’t want to get stuck somewhere, wind up in a gulio’s gullet, gassed by an atmosphere that turned from oxygen-nitrogen into pure methane without warning or reason, and against all known chemical laws, or whiffed out in the lash of a dead star suddenly gone nova.

But sometimes a pilot couldn’t help himself. These E’s would fiddle around in places where human beings shouldn’t have gone. Most of the time they weren’t allowed even one mistake. He was lucky, sure, but part of it might be because he’d never been sent out with the wrong E.

There could be a first time. Luck ran out if you kept piling your bets higher and higher. But until then...

He was square-jawed, a freckled man with red hair. Contrary to superstition, he didn’t have a fiery temper. He was forty and had already built up a seniority of twenty years in deep space. He was captain of his ship and wanted nothing more. Sure, it was only a three-man crew--himself, a flight engineer, an astronavigator. But it was an E ship, which meant that he outranked even the captains of the great luxury liners.

There was a time when the realization caused him to strut a little, but he’d got over it. He was single, had no ties, wanted none. He had a good job which he took seriously, was doing significant work which he also took seriously, was paid premium wages even for a space captain, which didn’t matter except in terms of recognition. He didn’t mind going anywhere in the known universe, or how long he would be away. He hoped he would get back someday, but he wasn’t fanatic about it.

In a routine so well-practiced that it had become ritual, he checked over the cruiser point by point. Of course the maintenance men had checked each item when they had, after his last trip, dismantled, cleaned, oiled, polished, tested, and reassembled one part after another. Then maintenance supervisors had checked over the ship with a gimlet-eyed attitude of hoping to find some flaw, just one tiny flub, so they could turn some luckless mechanic inside out. The Inspection Department, traditionally an enemy of Maintenance, took over from there and inspected every part as if it had been slapped together by a bunch of army goof-offs who knew that pilots were expendable in peace or war and, unconsciously at least, aided in expending them.

Both departments had certified, with formal preflight papers, that the ship was in readiness for deep space. But Lynwood considered such papers as so much garbage, and went over the entire ship himself. This might have had something to do with his so-called luck.

He wondered if Frank and Louie had checked into the ship this morning. Probably had; last night’s outing wasn’t much to hang over about. A steak at the Eagle Cafe down in Yellow Sands, a couple of drinks at Smitty’s, a game of pool at Smiley’s, a few dances at the Stars and Moons. Big night out for his crew before they left for deep space. Yellow Sands was strictly for young families, where bright-boy hubby worked up on the hill at E.H.Q., and wifey raised super-bright kids who already considered Dad to be behind the times. Their idea of sin in that town was to snub the wrong matron at a cocktail party; or not snub, as the case might be. Not that it mattered much, neither Frank nor Louie was dedicated to hell-raising.

When he at last opened the door to the generator room, he saw his flight engineer, Frank Norton, had a couple of student E’s on his hands.

It was one of the nuisances of being stationed here at E.H.Q. that you’d have swarms of these super-bright youngsters hanging around, asking questions, disputing your answers, arguing with each other, and, if you didn’t watch them carefully, taking things apart and putting them back together in different hookups to see what would happen.

The first thing these kids were taught was to disregard everything everybody had ever said; to start out from scratch as if nobody had ever had the sense to think about the problem before; to doubt most of all the opinions of experts, for, obviously, if the experts were right then there would be no problem. Most of them didn’t have to be taught it, they seemed to have been born with it. Time was you batted a young smart aleck down, told him to go get dry behind the ears before he shot off his mouth. But not these days. These days you looked at him hopefully, and crossed your fingers. He might grow up to be an E.

Tom wondered what it would be like to doubt the realities, the very machinery under his hands, to assume that although it had always worked it might not work this time. He could not conceive that state of mind, or how a man could live in it without going insane. Every time he saw these tortured kids saying, “Well, maybe, but what if...” he was glad to be nothing more than a ship captain who knew his machinery was exactly what it was supposed to be and nothing else.