Thinking of Kane, Jubil remembered also Schoenbirk, the erratic genius whose mathematical theorizing was used in the design of the Schoenbirk-Halsted De-Fouling Gear. Had it been years, or lifetimes ago, when the three of them had been undergraduates together at the Academy?
Schoenbirk, working with the high electrostatic potentials necessary to insure the exhaust of opposite-sign waste from the complex guts of the atomic drive had been blown to pieces by the accumulation of the very thing his device was designed to prevent. Random electrical forces gathering around the discharge ring until their workable mass became great enough to enter and initiate a chain reaction in the fuel storage tank. Along with Schoenbirk had gone even the tremendously heavy concrete walls of the laboratory. All that, however, had been after Jubil had washed out of the Academy and gone into the space-freighters as a Drive-Engineer. In the intervening years, Jubil had become thoroughly familiar with the perfected Schoenbirk-Halsted....
Kane! There was a man who had made the Academy his own playground. Kane had passed with the greatest of ease, worked his way through astro-navigation, the Allen Drives, space-time computations....
Jubil grimaced wryly. It had been the latter with its advanced mathematics that had been his own downfall. So Kane had gone on to the first officer berth in a gilded passenger liner while Jubil developed radiation scars on his hands from "in the hole" engineering on decrepit freighters.
And the great leveller had met and conquered them all....
Schoenbirk, even in the explosion that took his life had accomplished a great thing: the discovery of the final flaw in the De-Fouling Gear that had lived after him. For without proper removal of the ionized waste from its drive engines, the largest freighter became an ever-accumulating and treacherously unstable fissionable pile.
Kane—one of the legendary figures of the history of astro-navigation. Kane with his Academy background and his proud but personable air had become one of the most talked-of Space captains who had ever lived. Jubil could still, in memory, see Kane, standing spread-kneed on the bridge of the Comet, one of the first; later the Wanderer, the first of the luxury space liners. The Mercury, and the Mercury II, the super-ships that made week-end excursion flights that spanned from galaxy to galaxy.
A misplaced decimal point and a misplaced trust and the greatness of Schoenbirk and Kane lay behind them. Even as his drifting body, cumbersome in the space-suit, touched the asteroid, Jubil was aware of a strange weariness that invaded every part of him except his mind. At least, the waning oxygen would leave him his thoughts.
He rested, conserving his strength. For what reason? The thing that was to happen was as certain as Fate and as unavoidable by the machinations of man. Was it, after all, because Jubil was prey to anger? No. He was now too near death for anger to seem important.