“Orede, yes.  I think we were shooting at each other there,” said Calhoun pleasantly.  “Weren’t we?”

“Yes,” said the young man.

He was neither cordial nor antagonistic.  He was impassive.  Calhoun shrugged.

“Then we can take off immediately.  Here’s the communicator and there’s the button.  You might call the grid and arrange for us to be lifted.”

The young man seated himself at the control board.  Very professionally, he went through the routine of preparing to lift by landing-grid, which routine has not changed in two hundred years.  He went briskly ahead until the order to lift.  Then Calhoun stopped him.

“Hold it!”

He pointed to the airlock.  Both doors were open.  The young man at the control board flushed vividly.  One of the others closed and dogged the doors.

The ship lifted.  Calhoun watched with seeming negligence.  But he found occasion for a dozen corrections of procedure.  This was presumably a training voyage of his own suggestion.  Therefore, when the blueskin pilot would have flung the Med Ship into undirected overdrive, Calhoun grew stern.  He insisted on a destination.  He suggested Weald.

The young men glanced at each other and accepted the suggestion.  He made the acting pilot look up the intrinsic brightness of its sun and measure its apparent brightness from just off Dara.  He made him estimate the change in brightness to be expected after so many hours in overdrive, if one broke out to measure.

The first blueskin student pilot ended a Calhoun-determined tour of duty with more respect for Calhoun then he’d had at the beginning.  The second was anxious to show up better than the first.  Calhoun drilled him in the use of brightness-charts, by which the changes in apparent brightness of stars between overdrive hops could be correlated with angular changes to give a three-dimensional picture of the nearer heavens.

It was a highly necessary art which had not been worked out on Dara, and the prospective astrogators became absorbed in this and other fine points of space-piloting.  They’d done enough, in a few trips to Orede, to realize that they needed to know more.  Calhoun showed them.

Calhoun did not try to make things easy for them.  He was hungry and easily annoyed.  It was sound training tactics to be severe, and to phrase all suggestions as commands.  He put the four young men in command of the ship in turn, under his direction.  He continued to use Weald as a destination, but he set up problems in which the Med Ship came out of overdrive pointing in an unknown direction and with a precessory motion.

He made the third of his students identify Weald in the celestial globe containing hundreds of millions of stars, and get on course in overdrive toward it.  The fourth was suddenly required to compute the distance to Weald from such data as he could get from observation, without reference to any records.