B-Haaq was bending over the gleaming unit, his face expressionless. "No one is to pilot the craft, Master Kane," he said without looking up. "We of the ITA still know something of remote radio control, I assure you. You will work from Navigation Information Center, at controls already set up there for the purpose."
Kane kept his silence, and tried to keep his disappointment from showing in his face.
"Tell me, Master Kane—" and the Section Overseer had straightened and was now facing him squarely again, "—have you ever been told why you were picked—I believe a better word is rescued—from that hell planet of yours in Procyon for the ITA?"
"Yes, sire, I was, during basic indoctrination," Kane answered.
"That is fortunate, then. You know, at least, that we thought we could make a technician out of you! Report to the NIC room in one hour, Master Kane! Your little show will be all ready by then. You're dismissed!"
Director Gentech Starn himself, flanked by three of his closest aides, entered the NIC room.
They took standing positions behind Kane. And behind them, at the prescribed distance of respect, were grouped the ship's full complement of Section Overseers and instructors. Kane stood before the central nav-screen and its compact banks of controls.
Suddenly a red blinker flashed, dully reflected from the myriad tiers of sensitive mechanism which lined the room's curving bulkheads. He pressed a stud, and the screen before him came alive. Blackness, studded with the tiny white-hot sparks that were the suns of the Milky Way. And then suddenly a larger one which moved swiftly.
And then he was no longer aware of the electric silence that engulfed him, and there was no sensation, no thought but the singular sensation and thought which co-ordinated nerve and sensitively disciplined muscle; which directed his fingers unerringly across the studded control-banks and guided the streaking spacetender as surely as though they reached into Space and touched it, holding it by their own strength to its wide, curving course.