“What do you think about nuclear drive?” Genka inquired.
“Old hat,” quoth Athos shortly.
“I agree,” the Captain said, and he looked at Athos with interest. “And photon-annihilation drive?”
“So-so,” said Athos, shaking his head sadly.
Genka then put to him the premier question: which system seemed more promising, the gravigen or the gravshield?
“I acknowledge only the D-principle,” Athos declared haughtily.
“Hmm,” said Genka. “Okay, let’s go to Eighteen—I’ll introduce you to the crew.”
“You mean your crummy roommates?” Athos-Sidorov winced, but he went.
A week later, unable to endure intimidation and open violence, and with the teacher’s permission, Walter Saronian fled Room 18; Athos established himself in his place. After that the D-principle and the idea of intergalactic travel reigned in the minds and hearts of Room 18 firmly and to all appearances for good. Thus was formed the crew of the superstarship Galaktion: Genka, captain; Athos-Sidorov, navigator and cyberneticist; Lieber Polly, computerman; Sashka Lin, engineer and hunter. The crew moved forward with bright hopes and extremely specific plans. The master blueprints of the superstarship Galaktion were drawn up; regulations were worked out; and a top-secret sign (a special way of holding the fingers of the right hand) by which the crew members might recognize one another was put into effect. The threat of imminent invasion hung over the galaxies Andromeda, Messier 33, and others. So went the year.
Lin, engineer and hunter, delivered the first blow. With his characteristic thoughtlessness, he had asked his father (on leave from an orbital weightless casting factory) how old you had to be to be a spaceman. The answer was so horrifying that Room 18 refused to believe him. The resourceful Polly induced his kid brother to ask the same question of one of the teachers. The answer was identical. The conquest of galaxies must be put off for an essentially infinite period—about ten years. A short era of disarray ensued, for the news brought to naught the carefully elaborated Operation Flowering Lilac, according to which the full complement of Room 18 would stow away on an interplanetary tanker bound for Pluto. The Captain had counted on revealing himself a week after takeoff and thus automatically merging his crew with that of the tanker.
The next blow was less unexpected, but much heavier for all of that. During this era of confusion the crew of the Galaktion somehow all at once became conscious of the fact—which they had been taught much earlier—that, strange as it might seem, the most honored professionals in the world were not spacemen, not undersea workers, and not even those mysterious subduers of monsters, the zoopsychologists, but doctors and teachers. In particular, it turned out that the World Council was sixty percent composed of teachers and doctors. That there were never enough teachers, while the world was rolling in spacemen. That without doctors, deep-sea workers would be in real trouble, but not vice versa. These devastating facts, as well as many others of the same ilk, were brought home to the consciousness of the crew in a horrifyingly prosaic fashion: on the most ordinary televised economics lesson; and, most frightful of all, the allegations were not disputed in the least degree by their teacher.
The third and final blow brought on genuine doubts. Engineer Lin was apprehended by the Captain in the act of reading Childhood Catarrhal Diseases, and in response to a sharp attack he insolently declared that in future he planned on bringing some concrete benefit to people, not merely the dubious data resultant from a life spent in outer space. The Captain and the navigator were obliged to bring to bear the most extreme measures of persuasion, under the pressure of which the recreant acknowledged that he would never make a children’s doctor anyhow, while in the capacity of ship’s engineer or, in a pinch, of hunter, he had a chance of winning himself eternal glory. Lieber Polly sat in the corner and kept silent for the duration of the inquiry, but from that time on he made it a rule, when under the least pressure, to blackmail the crew with venomous but incoherent threats such as, “I’ll go be a laryngologist” or “Ask Teacher who’s right.” Lin, on hearing these challenges, breathed heavily with envy. Doubt was dividing the crew of the Galaktion. Doubt assailed the soul even of the Captain.
Help arrived from the Outside World. A group of scientists who had been working on Venus completed, and proposed for the consideration of the World Council, a practical plan to precipitate out the atmospheric cover of Venus, with the aim of the eventual colonization of the planet. The World Council examined the plan and approved it. Now the turn had come of the wastes of Venus—the great fearsome planet was to be made into a second Earth. The adult world set to work. They built new machines and accumulated energy; the population of Venus skyrocketed. And in Room 18 of the Anyudin School, the captain of the Galaktion, under the curious gaze of his crew, worked feverishly on the plan of Operation October, which promised an unprecedented sweep of ideas, and a way out of the current serious crisis.
The plan was finished three hours after the publication of the World Council’s appeal, and was presented for the crew’s inspection. The October plan was striking in its brevity and in its information density:
Within six weeks, master the industrial and technological specifications of standard atmospherogenic assemblies.
Upon expiry of the above-mentioned period, early in the morning—so as not to disturb the housefather—run away from school and proceed to the Anyudin rocket station, and in the inevitable confusion attendant upon a landing, sneak into the cargo hold of some vessel on a near-Earth run and hide until touchdown;
Then see.
The plan was greeted with exclamations of “Zow-zow-zow!” and approved, with three votes for and one abstention. The abstention was the noble Athos-Sidorov. Gazing at the far horizon, he spoke with unusual scorn of “crummy atmosphere plants” and of “wild goose chases,” and averred that only the feelings of comradeship and mutual assistance prevented him from subjecting the plan to sharp criticism. However, he was prepared to withhold all objections, and he even undertook to think out certain aspects of their departure, provided than no one should look upon this as consent to the abandonment of the D-principle for the sake of a bunch of cruddy-smelling precipitators. The Captain made no comment but gave the order to set to work. The crew set to work.
In Room 18 of the Anyudin School, a geography lesson was in progress. On the screen of the teaching stereovision, a scorching cloud over Paricutin blazed with lightning, hissing lapilli flashed past, and the red tongue of a lava stream, like an arrowhead, thrust out of the crater. The topic was the science of volcanology, volcanoes in general and unsubdued volcanoes in particular. The tidy domes of the Chipo-Chipo volcanological station showed white through the gray magma that was piling up and that would harden only God knew when. In front of the stereovision sat Lin, his eyes glued to the screen and feverishly biting the nails of his right and left hands by turns. He was running late. He had spent the morning and half the afternoon on the playground, verifying a proposition expressed by his teacher the day before: that the ratio of the maximum height of a jump to the maximum length of a jump is approximately one to four. Lin had high-jumped and broad-jumped until he started seeing spots before his eyes. Then he obliged some little kids to concern themselves with the matter, and he tired them out completely, but the resultant data indicated that the teacher’s proposition was close to the truth. Now Lin was making up for what he had missed, and was watching the lessons the rest of the crew had already learned that morning.