Colonel Barrett was young for eagles. My fellow volunteers-designate and I, all twenty-eight of us, were gathered in the lounge of English Hall, creaking and wheezing in our sterility-suits, looking very ready for hard space.
The colonel wore crisp blues. His tunic was decorated by a triple row of medals-for-merit. It was not his fault that he wore no battle-stars. Barrett had graduated from the Air Academy into our seemingly endless Pax Desperandum. He'd never had a chance to see a roentgen radiated in anger. The Marsman Badge at the center of his left breast pocket was one rarely seen: the circle-with-arrow symbol of Mars had within it a "III," signifying that its wearer had been a member of the Third Mars Expedition, back in the days when a flight to Mars had been something more than a teamster's run. The Marsman Badge was balanced by the star-topped, laurel-wreathed—and anachronistic—silver wings of a Command Pilot.
As I shook hands with Colonel Barrett I found it difficult to conceal the envy that writhed in me. He'd seen the continents spread cloud-flecked on the receding, curving earth, the stars shining beside the sun against the black sky. He'd splashed across the dust-carpet of the moon, tasted water melted from the polar cap of Mars. As a member of Expedition Three, he'd been with the crew of the Orion Gamma when Immermann discovered the twenty-thousand-year-old skull at the base of Roosevelt Ridge.
Colonel Barrett addressed his remarks to me. "Central University," he said, "will lose the results of an eighty-million-dollar investment if you people leave. They'll be getting off cheap, compared to us. The Defense Department has been requested to turn over to you twenty-eight untrained grounds-men the greatest spaceship yet built, the first of the interstellar ships. The Zeta cost the taxpayers four dollars a pound to build. She weighs five hundred thousand tons, Dr. Bogardus."
"You're mistaken, Colonel, when you say that the University's investments in gnotobiotic research over the past eighty years will be lost if we Lapins end our part of the experiment. That's not true. That investment has been repaid many times over. More has been learned of human physiology, nutrition, and disease processes in the twenty-six years' study of germ-free humans than was learned concerning these subjects during any similar period in medical history.
"And, Colonel," I went on, "we're not untrained. Bud Dorsey, to your right, is an astrophysicist who worked with the Agassiz Observatory team in mapping the interstellar anti-matter dust clouds. Dr. Keto Hannamuri is a pediatrician. Dorothy Damien, our Firebird, is a dietitian. Fizz Ewell is a nuclear engineer. Karl Fyrmeister's degree is in chem engineering, as is Janie Bohrman's. Gloria Moss is working on her doctorate in sociology. Her thesis, Colonel, deals with the social dynamics of small human groups such as ours. Alfred MacCoy, standing behind you, has written three symphonies and an oratorio so far; and R.C.A. Victor has threaded them all with the New York Philharmonic. Lucy Cashdollar has had her works of sculpture displayed in the National Gallery and at London's Tate. There are some few resources here, Colonel."
"I didn't intend to belittle your intellectual accomplishments, Dr. Bogardus," the Colonel said. "I've read your dossiers. They're impressive. When I called you untrained, what I really meant was that you're totally unskilled in terms of my own specialty. I meant that none of you knows anything of the skills of simple chemical rocketry, much less the techniques required to lift half a million tons on a nuclear-pulse thrust."
"We can learn," I said.
"I hope so," Colonel Barrett said, "because I've been ordered to teach you."