the button. You might call the grid and arrange for us to be lifted."

The young man seated himself at the control board. Very
professionally, he went through the routine of preparing to lift by
landing-grid, which routine has not changed in two hundred years. He
went briskly ahead until the order to lift. Then Calhoun stopped him.

"Hold it!"

He pointed to the airlock. Both doors were open. The young man at the
control board flushed vividly. One of the others closed and dogged the
doors.

The ship lifted. Calhoun watched with seeming negligence. But he found
occasion for a dozen corrections of procedure. This was presumably a
training voyage of his own suggestion. Therefore, when the blueskin
pilot would have flung the Med Ship into undirected overdrive, Calhoun
grew stern. He insisted on a destination. He suggested Weald.

The young men glanced at each other and accepted the suggestion. He
made the acting pilot look up the intrinsic brightness of its sun and
measure its apparent brightness from just off Dara. He made him
estimate the change in brightness to be expected after so many hours
in overdrive, if one broke out to measure.

The first blueskin student pilot ended a Calhoun-determined tour of
duty with more respect for Calhoun then he'd had at the beginning. The
second was anxious to show up better than the first. Calhoun drilled
him in the use of brightness-charts, by which the changes in apparent
brightness of stars between overdrive hops could be correlated with