The American pilot turned to mutter something to his Russian co-pilot, seated next to him at the front of the ship. The Russian nodded and adjusted a dial. By formal agreement the crew spoke in French between themselves. But the pilot's accent was bad, and Duport would have preferred to talk to him in English. He could not help smiling to himself whenever the American said something. Frowning, Duport moved his headphone slightly and changed the frequency of his receiver. The Azores tracking station had begun to fade with the rotation of the Earth, but he had no trouble picking up Hawaii. He wrote down the latest fix and passed the slip of paper forward to the navigator. He switched on his transmitter to give Hawaii an acknowledgement.
Forward, the American pilot heard Duport speaking to Hawaii. This is the moonship Prospero acknowledging transmission.... The American pilot did not like using French either. He would have preferred speaking English or Russian. There was something poetic about French. The phrase bateau du lune, moonship, always gave him a quiver. It made him think of some kind of ghost ship, with a moss-covered hull and gossamer sails, floating silently in a midnight sky. There was something—fragile about the language, especially as Duport spoke it in his smooth, pure accents.
The American glanced into a mirror that gave him a view of the cabin behind him. Duport sat by himself at the extreme rear of the cabin, the radio console hiding most of his body. The headphones and mike covered most of his face, so that only his nose and eyes were visible. His eyes were light blue and seemed to glisten, unnaturally bright, as if the boy had been taking some kind of drug. He was only nineteen years old. The pilot had had misgivings about Duport from the beginning when the crew was first formed. It wasn't only his youth, he didn't quite know what it was. There was something about Duport, something deep in his personality that he did not trust. But he did not know how to name it.
Still, Duport had functioned all right so far. And the Selection Board should know its business. The crew had been chosen, as usual, by competitive examination, and if there was any flaw in Duport's character it would have turned up sometime during the six-month training period. Probably Duport was as good as any of them. He had been a child prodigy, he'd taken his Master's in physics at the age of seventeen. He knew as much as any of them, and he had made no mistakes so far.
Still, the American remembered the first time he had seen Duport. It had been right after the Selection Board published the crew list. Out of the two hundred who finished the training program, the Board had given Duport highest rating. He was not only the youngest ever to enter space, he was the only crew-member of the Prospero who had never been in space before, except of course for the ballistic shoots which were part of training. The American himself had been aboard the Quixote on the first moonshot directed by the U.N. Space Corps. Then they had built the Prospero, and he had piloted it on its shakedown cruise in orbit. And the Board had chosen him to fly the ship on its first trip to the Moon. Altogether, it was the fourth shot of the U.N. Space Corps, and the second time he had been on the Moon. He, the American, was the veteran, he had spent more hours in space than any other human being alive.
And he remembered the first time he had seen Duport. The veteran and the kid. He had met him in the briefing room at the launching site at Christmas Island. The veteran had been studying a thrust table, and the kid had come into the room, half an hour early for the first briefing. The American did not hear him come in. He looked up from his desk, and there he was, Duport, standing at attention in his blue Corps uniform with the silver sunburst in his lapel, indicating active commission.
"Christ!" the American had burst out, forgetting himself and speaking in English. "Are you Duport? They told me you were young...." He already knew each of the other crewmen.
"Yes sir," Duport answered in English. "I'm afraid I am rather young. Corpsman Duport reports for briefing, sir. I just arrived on the island an hour ago."
The American recovered himself. He leaned back in his chair to study the boy. He was blond and had light blue eyes that glittered, and he looked like a high school kid.