THE REST WAS WORK.
He had the Yard worker’s familiarity with conventional rocketry, which saved him some study of the fine-maneuvering apparatus of the F-T-L craft—but not much. For a week under Haarland’s merciless drilling he jetted the ship about its remote area of space, far from the commerce lanes, until the old man grudgingly pronounced himself satisfied.
There were skull-busting sessions with the Wesley drive, or rather with a first derivative of it, an insane-looking object which you could vaguely describe as a fan-shaped slide rule taller than a man. There were twenty-seven main tracks, analogues of the twenty-seven main geodesics of Wesley Space—whatever they were and whatever that was. Your cursor settings on the main tracks depended on a thirty-two step computation based on t
