Any variable can be shaded by human judgment; an intuitive projection by a human operator can save his ship — or lose it. A paralysis beam travels at speed-of-light; torpedoes never have time to get up to more than a few hundred kilometers per second — yet it is possible for a raider to come within beaming range, have his pencil of paralyzing radiation on its way, and the trader to launch a target-seeker before the beam strikes . . . and still be saved when the outlaw flames into atomic mist a little later.
But if the operator is too eager by a few seconds, or overly cautious by the same, he can lose his ship. Too eager, the missile will fail to reach target; too cautious, it will never be launched.
Seasoned oldsters are not good at these jobs. The perfect firecontrolman is an adolescent, or young man or woman, fast in thought and action, confident, with intuitive grasp of mathematical relations beyond rote and rule, and not afraid of death he cannot yet imagine.
The traders must be always alert for such youngsters; Thorby seemed to have the feel for mathematics; he might have the other talents for a job something like chess played under terrific pressure and a fast game of spat ball. His mentor was Jeri Kingsolver, his nephew and roommate. Jeri was junior in family rank but appeared to be older; he called Thorby “Uncle” outside the computer room; on the job Thorby called him “Starboard Senior Firecontrolman” and added “Sir.”
During long weeks of the dive through dark toward Losian, Jeri drilled Thorby. Thorby was supposed to be training for hydroponics and Jeri was the Supercargo’s Senior Clerk, but the ship had plenty of farmers and the Supercargo’s office was never very busy in space; Captain Krausa directed Jeri to keep Thorby hard at it in the computer room.
Since the ship remained at battle stations for half a week while boosting to speed-of-light, each fighting station had two persons assigned watch-and-watch. Jeri’s junior controlman was his younger sister Mata. The computer had twin consoles, either of which could command by means of a selector switch. At General Quarters they sat side by side, with Jeri controlling and Mata ready to take over.
After a stiff course in what the machine could do Jeri put Thorby at one console, Mata at the other and fed them problems from the ship’s control room. Each console recorded; it was possible to see what decisions each operator had made and how these compared with those made in battle, for the data were from records, real or threatened battles in the past.
Shortly Thorby became extremely irked; Mata was enormously better at it than he was.
So he tried harder and got worse. While he sweated, trying to outguess a slave raider which had once been on Sisu’s screens, he was painfully aware of a slender, dark, rather pretty girl beside him, her swift fingers making tiny adjustments among keys and knobs, changing a bias or modifying a vector, herself relaxed and unhurried. It was humiliating afterwards to find that his pacesetter had “saved the ship” while he had failed.
Worse still, he was aware of her as a girl and did not know it — all he knew was that she made him uneasy.
After one run Jeri called from ship’s control, “End of drill. Stand by.” He appeared shortly and examined their tapes, reading marks on sensitized paper as another might read print. He pursed his lips over Thorby’s record. “Trainee, you fired three times . . . and not a one of your beasts got within fifty thousand kilometers of the enemy. We don’t mind expense — it’s merely Grandmother’s blood. But the object is to blast him, not scare him into a fit. You have to wait until you can hit”
“I did my best!”
“Not good enough. Let’s see yours, Sis.”
The nickname irritated Thorby still more. Brother and sister were fond of each other and did not bother with titles. So Thorby had tried using their names . . . and had been snubbed; he was “Trainee,” they were “Senior Controlman” and “Junior Controlman.” There was nothing he could do; at drill he was junior. For a week, Thorby addressed Jeri as “Foster Ortho-Nephew” outside of drills and Jeri had carefully addressed him by family title. Then Thorby decided it was silly and went back to calling him Jeri. But Jeri continued to call him “Trainee” during drill, and so did Mata.