"Why not switch over and join a man's outfit? You're a likely lad and educated-in a year I'd be saluting you. Ever thought about it?"
"Why, no, I can't say that I have."
"Then do so. You don't belong with the Professors-you
didn't know that was what we call the Patrol, did you?- the 'Professors.' "
"I'd heard it."
"You had? Well, we work for the Professors, but we aren't of them. We're . . . well, you've seen. Think it over."
Matt did think it over, so much so that he took the Mars-to-Venus problem back with him, still unsolved.
It was no easier to solve for the delay, nor were other and more complicated problems made any simpler by virtue of the idea, buzzing in the back of his mind, that he need not belabour himself with higher mathematics in order to be a spaceman. He began to see himself decked out in the gaudy, cock-pheasant colors of the space marines.
At last he took it up with Lieutenant Wong. "You want to transfer to the marines?"
"Yes. I think so."