The couches were fancier than the ones the passengers had; they were shaped to the body and they lifted the knees and the head and back, like a hospital bed, and there were arm rests to support their hands over the ship’s controls. An instrument board arched over each couch at the middle, where the man in the couch could see the dials and stuff even when his head was pushed back into the cushions by high g.
The TV screen lighted up and we could see Earth; it filled most of the screen. “That’s ‘View Aft’,” the copilot said, “from a TV camera in the tail. We’ve got ’em pointing in all directions. Now we’ll try ‘View Forward’.” He did, but it didn’t amount to anything, just a few tiny little dots that might have been stars. Hank said you could see more stars out a port.
“You don’t use it to look at stars,” he answered. “When you need to take a star sight, you use the coelostats. Like this.” He lay back on the couch and reached behind his head, pulling an eye piece arrangement over his face until the rubber guard fitted over one eye without lifting his head off the couch. “Coelostat” is just a trick name for a telescope with a periscope built into it. He didn’t offer to let us look through it, so I looked back at the instrument board. It had a couple of radar presentations, much like you’ll find in any atmosphere ship, even in a copter, and a lot of other instruments, most of which I didn’t understand, though some of them were pretty obvious, like approach rate and throat temperature and mass ratio and ejection speed and such.
“Watch this,” said the co-pilot. He did something at his controls; one of the tiny blips on the TV screen lit up very brightly, blinked a few times, then died away. “That was Supra-New-York; I triggered her radar beacon. You are not seeing it by television; it’s radar brought on to the same screen.” He fiddled with the controls again and another light blinked, two longs and a short. “That’s where they’re building the Star Rover.”
“Where’s the Mayflower?” Hank asked.
“Want to see where you’re going, eh?” He touched his controls again; another light came on, way off to one side, flashing in groups of three.
I said it didn’t look much like we were going there. The Captain spoke up. “We’re taking the long way round, past the fair grounds. That’s enough, Sam. Lock your board.”
We all went back where the Captain was still eating. “You an Eagle Scout?” he asked me. I said yes and Hank said he was too.
“How old were you when you made it?” he wanted to know. I said I had been thirteen, so Hank said twelve, whereupon the Captain claimed he had made it at eleven. Personally I didn’t believe either one of them.
The Captain said so now we were going out to Ganymede; he envied both of us. The co-pilot said what was there to envy about that?
The Captain said, “Sam, you’ve got no romance in your soul. You’ll live and die running a ferry boat.”
“Maybe so,” the co-pilot answered, “but I sleep home a lot of nights.”
The Captain said pilots should not marry. “Take me,” he said, “I always wanted to be a deep-space man. I was all set for it, too, when I was captured by pirates and missed my chance. By the time I had the chance again, I was married.”
“You and your pirates,” said the co-pilot.
I kept my face straight. Adults always think anybody younger will swallow anything; I try not to disillusion them.
“Well, all that’s as may be,” said the Captain. “You two young gentlemen run along now. Mr. Mayes and I have got to fake up a few figures, or we’ll be landing this bucket in South Brooklyn.”
So we thanked him and left.
I found Dad and Molly and the Brat in the deck aft of my own. Dad said, “Where have you been, Bill? I’ve been looking all over the ship for you.”
I told them, “Up in the control room with the Captain.”