V INTO SPACE
The PATROL ACADEMY may lack ivy-covered buildings and tree-shaded walks; it does not lack room. There are cadets in every reach of the Federation, from ships circling Venus, or mapping the scorched earth of Mercury, to ships patrolling the Jovian moons.
Even on years-long exploration flights to the frozen fringes of the Solar System cadets go along-and are brevetted as officers when their captains think them ready, without waiting to return.
The public thinks of the Academy as the school ship P.R.S. James Randolph, but every cadet mess in every ship of the Patrol is part of the Academy. A youngster cadet is ordered to the Randolph as soon as he is sworn in and he remains attached to that ship until he is ready to go to a regular Patrol vessel as a passed cadet. His schooling continues; in time he is ordered back to where he started, Hayworth Hall, to receive Ms final polish.
An oldster, attached to Hayworth Hall, will not necessarily be there. He may be at the radiation laboratories of Oxford University, or studying interplanetary law at the Sorbonne, or he may even be as far away as Venus, at the Institute for System Studies. Whatever his route-and no two cadets pursue exactly the same course of training-the Academy is still in charge of him, until, and if, he is commissioned.
How long it takes depends on the cadet. Brilliant young Hartstone, who died on the first expedition to Pluto, was brevetted less than a year after he reported to Hayworth Hall as a groundhog candidate. But it is not unusual to find oldsters at Terra Base who have been cadets for five years or more.
Cadet Matthew Dodson admired himself in the mirror of the 'fresher. The oyster-white uniform he had found waiting when he returned from First Muster the evening before, and with it a small book of regulations embossed with his name and clipped to a new assignment schedule. The schedule had started out: "1.. Your first duty as a cadet is to read the regulation book herewith, at once. Hereafter you are responsible for the contents."
He had read it before taps, until his mind was a jumble of undigested rules: "A cadet is an officer in a limited sense-" "-behave with decorum and sobriety appropriate to the occasion-" "-in accordance with local custom rather than Patrol custom unless in conflict with an invariant law of the Federation or regulation of the Patrol." "-but the responsibility of determining the legality of the order rests on the person ordered as well as on the person giving the order." "-circumstances not covered by law or regulation must be decided by the individual in the light of the living tradition of the Patrol." "Cadets will at all times be smooth-shaven and will not wear their hair longer than two inches."
He felt that he understood the last mentioned.
He got up before reveille the next morning and dived into the 'fresher, shaved hastily and rather unnecessarily and got into uniform.