command, parked in advance of him, but failed to see any vessel. No surprise; they were widely spaced for safety and radio relay. Their names made a litany in his head:
Sierra Nevada,
where he was; ranger
Moshe Peretz,
first vessel he had skippered; scout mother
Isabella,
who bore in her womb ten wasps; workship
Imhotep,
which the fighting craft were here to serve and protect. Yes, he thought, he’d come a long way, spectacularly fast, in two senses. That he had been dispatched here, remote from action, was in truth an honor, a mark of trust.
Nevertheless, since his duties were off him for a while, the control bridge felt like a cell. He rose and left it, in search of what home existed in his cabin. His shoes clacked loudly on empty decks. During the voyage he had had the field generators set for 1.18 g. His men and he must arrive at Ishtar with bodies adapted to its heavier pull. Tired, he felt the fourteen kilos added to his weight as if it were lead hung at shoulders and ankles.
Well, he’d be okay after a nap.
But when he had exchanged high-collared blue tunic and white trousers for pajamas, his hermit’s bed held no attraction. He decided to allow himself a small cognac, and lit a cigarette. For a few minutes he prowled about looking at personal things.
His father’s picture … Why didn’t he keep his mother’s? Their marriage had broken when he was six, their sole child, and she had reared him. She had been conscientious about it, too, as much as a growingly important administrative job in the Peace Control Authority permitted. Their life hadn’t lacked excitement, either – frequent moves to different European cities, vacation trips to the rest of Earth and to Luna, parties where eminent guests discussed matters big in the news. … Yet somehow, maybe because they rarely saw each other, maybe because he was always cheerful, ambitiousfor little more than the enjoyment of life, Pierre Dejerine came through to the son in a way that Marina Borisovna never could … though surely a part of her in that boy had seen him through the Naval Academy even if it was a part of his father that had sparked him to apply. …
The captain shook his head and grinned at the contents. If he must be stuffy-serious, why not put the mood to use and read over what he had on Ishtar? If nothing else, the boredom of this latest repetition might make him sleepy.
He took the best of the books, relaxed in the lounger, sipped brandy and smoked, and began leafing through.
–Babylonian nomenclature. Other Terrestrial mythologies were spent on planetary systems nearer home. But by chance, the Anubelean was among the first visited, so soon after Mach’s Principle led to the cracking of the light-speed barrier that Diego Primavera’s voyage was an epic of daring.
His main goal was the globular cluster NGC 6656 (M 22) in Sagittarius. At three kiloparsecs’ remove, this is comparatively close, and additionally of special interest to astrophysicists for being small and dense: thus a good place to begin research on groups of its kind. Spaceborne instruments had picked out an isolated stellar system much nearer, which happens in this epoch to be on a direct line between Sol and the cluster heart. That background had camouflaged it from Earthside astronomers, and confused the results of observation from orbit. Accordingly, Primavera’s ship was scheduled to visit it enroute.
What he found there was vastly more exciting than what he was bound, for – from a biological and psychological, hence human viewpoint. Bear in mind how new in galactic space man was. He had not hitherto come upon worlds at once so like his home and so remarkably unlike.
Primavera led a second expedition for the specific purpose of exploring those planets. His report caused a sensation. A scholarly dilettante, Winston P. Sanders, proposed the Babylonian names as being appropriate on numerous counts, and the suggestion was soon adopted. …
However, by that time
Sierra Nevada,
where he was; ranger
Moshe Peretz,
first vessel he had skippered; scout mother
Isabella,
who bore in her womb ten wasps; workship
Imhotep,
which the fighting craft were here to serve and protect. Yes, he thought, he’d come a long way, spectacularly fast, in two senses. That he had been dispatched here, remote from action, was in truth an honor, a mark of trust.
Nevertheless, since his duties were off him for a while, the control bridge felt like a cell. He rose and left it, in search of what home existed in his cabin. His shoes clacked loudly on empty decks. During the voyage he had had the field generators set for 1.18 g. His men and he must arrive at Ishtar with bodies adapted to its heavier pull. Tired, he felt the fourteen kilos added to his weight as if it were lead hung at shoulders and ankles.
Well, he’d be okay after a nap.
But when he had exchanged high-collared blue tunic and white trousers for pajamas, his hermit’s bed held no attraction. He decided to allow himself a small cognac, and lit a cigarette. For a few minutes he prowled about looking at personal things.
His father’s picture … Why didn’t he keep his mother’s? Their marriage had broken when he was six, their sole child, and she had reared him. She had been conscientious about it, too, as much as a growingly important administrative job in the Peace Control Authority permitted. Their life hadn’t lacked excitement, either – frequent moves to different European cities, vacation trips to the rest of Earth and to Luna, parties where eminent guests discussed matters big in the news. … Yet somehow, maybe because they rarely saw each other, maybe because he was always cheerful, ambitiousfor little more than the enjoyment of life, Pierre Dejerine came through to the son in a way that Marina Borisovna never could … though surely a part of her in that boy had seen him through the Naval Academy even if it was a part of his father that had sparked him to apply. …
The captain shook his head and grinned at the contents. If he must be stuffy-serious, why not put the mood to use and read over what he had on Ishtar? If nothing else, the boredom of this latest repetition might make him sleepy.
He took the best of the books, relaxed in the lounger, sipped brandy and smoked, and began leafing through.
–Babylonian nomenclature. Other Terrestrial mythologies were spent on planetary systems nearer home. But by chance, the Anubelean was among the first visited, so soon after Mach’s Principle led to the cracking of the light-speed barrier that Diego Primavera’s voyage was an epic of daring.
His main goal was the globular cluster NGC 6656 (M 22) in Sagittarius. At three kiloparsecs’ remove, this is comparatively close, and additionally of special interest to astrophysicists for being small and dense: thus a good place to begin research on groups of its kind. Spaceborne instruments had picked out an isolated stellar system much nearer, which happens in this epoch to be on a direct line between Sol and the cluster heart. That background had camouflaged it from Earthside astronomers, and confused the results of observation from orbit. Accordingly, Primavera’s ship was scheduled to visit it enroute.
What he found there was vastly more exciting than what he was bound, for – from a biological and psychological, hence human viewpoint. Bear in mind how new in galactic space man was. He had not hitherto come upon worlds at once so like his home and so remarkably unlike.
Primavera led a second expedition for the specific purpose of exploring those planets. His report caused a sensation. A scholarly dilettante, Winston P. Sanders, proposed the Babylonian names as being appropriate on numerous counts, and the suggestion was soon adopted. …
However, by that time
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