The only ones who cared.
"It's bigger than the others," said Joshua. "We are closer to it."
That was what was wrong!
That was what had rung the alarm within his mind. The star was far too close!
It shouldn't be that close!
He wrenched his eyes from space and looked down at the control board and all he saw was a meaningless mass of trips and levers, banks of buttons, rows of dials.
He watched the board and slowly his mind began to sort it out, to make some sense of it, the knowledge the machine had pounded into him beginning to take over.
He read the dials and he got some knowledge from them. He located certain controls that he had to know about.
Mathematics rose unbidden in his brain and did a nightmare dance.
It was useless, he told himself. It had been a good idea, but it hadn't worked. You couldn't educate a man by a machine.