THE GREEN HILLS OF EARTH

Captain Kelly drifted in and took the other chair as Pemberton was finishing his checking runs on the ballistic tracker. «Have a Camel, Jake.»

«I'll take a rain check.» He continued; Kelly watched him with a slight frown. Like captains and pilots on Mark Twain's Mississippi – and for the same reasons – a spaceship captain bosses his ship, his crew, his cargo, and his passengers, but the pilot is the final, legal, and unquestioned boss of how the ship is handled from blast-off to the end of the trip. A captain may turn down a given pilot – nothing more. Kelly fingered a slip of paper tucked in his pouch and turned over in his mind the words with which the Company psychiatrist on duty had handed it to him.

«I'm giving this pilot clearance, Captain, but you need not accept it.»

«Pemberton's a good man. What's wrong?»

The psychiatrist thought over what he had observed while posing as a silly tourist bothering a stranger at breakfast. «He's a little more anti-social than his past record shows. Something on his mind. Whatever it is, he can tolerate it for the present. We'll keep an eye on him.»

Kelly had answered, «Will you come along with him as pilot?»

«If you wish.»

«Don't bother – I'll take him. No need to lift a deadhead.»

Pemberton fed Weinstein's tape into the robot-pilot, then turned to Kelly. «Control ready, sir.»

«Blast when ready, Pilot.» Kelly felt relieved when he heard himself make the irrevocable decision.

Pemberton signaled the Station to cast loose. The great ship was nudged out by an expanding pneumatic ram until she swam in space a thousand feet away, secured by a single line. He then turned the ship to its blast-off direction by causing a flywheel, mounted on gymbals at the ship's center of gravity, to spin rapidly. The ship spun slowly in the opposite direction, by grace of Newton's Third Law of Motion.

Guided by the tape, the robot-pilot tilted prisms of the pilot's periscope so that Vega, Antares, and Regulus would shine as one image when the ship was headed right; Pemberton nursed the ship to that heading ... fussily; a mistake of one minute of arc here meant two hundred miles at destination.

When the three images made a pinpoint, he stopped the flywheels and locked in the gyros. He then checked the heading of his ship by direct observation of each of the stars, just as a salt-water skipper uses a sextant, but with incomparably more accurate instruments. This told him nothing about the correctness of the course Weinstein had ordered – he had to take that as Gospel – but it assured him that the robot and its tape were behaving as planned. Satisfied, he cast off the last line.

Seven minutes to go – Pemberton flipped the switch permitting the robot-pilot to blast away when its clock told it to. He waited, hands poised over the manual controls, ready to take over if the robot failed, and felt the old, inescapable sick excitement building up inside him.

Even as adrenalin poured into him, stretching his time sense, throbbing in his ears, his mind kept turning back to Phyllis.

He admitted she had a kick coming – spacemen shouldn't marry. Not that she'd starve if he messed up a landing, but a gal doesn't want insurance; she wants a husband – minus six minutes.

If he got a regular run she could live in Space Terminal.

No good – idle women at Space Terminal went bad. Oh, Phyllis wouldn't become a tramp or a rum bum; she'd just go bats.

Five minutes more – he didn't care much for Space Terminal himself. Nor for space! «The Romance of Interplanetary Travel» – it looked well in print, but he knew what it was: A job. Monotony. No scenery. Bursts of work, tedious waits. No home life.

Why didn't he get an honest job and stay home nights?

He knew! Because he was a space jockey and too old to change.

What chance has a thirty-year-old married man, used to important money, to change his racket? (Four minutes.) He'd look good trying to sell helicopters on commission, now, wouldn't he?

Maybe he could buy a piece of irrigated land and – Be your age, chum! You know as much about farming as a cow knows about cube root! No, he had made his bed when he picked rockets during his training hitch. If he had bucked for the electronics branch, or taken a GI scholarship – too late now. Straight from the service into Harriman's Lunar Exploitations, hopping ore on Luna. That had torn it.

«How's it going, Doc?» Kelly's voice was edgy.

«Minus two minutes some seconds.» Damnation – Kelly knew better than to talk to the pilot on minus time.

He caught a last look through the periscope. Antares seemed to have drifted. He unclutched the gyro, tilted and spun the flywheel, braking it savagely to a stop a moment later. The image was again a pinpoint. He could not have explained what he did: it was virtuosity, exact juggling, beyond textbook and classroom.