 According to the narrator, who is the most important figure onboard a spacecraft?
] This was the endless problem of all spaceship cooks: He had to feed the men tomorrow on what they had eaten today! Unable to get out to the ballgame and a long way off from the girls, men on ships think about, talk about, bitch about their food. Food, on the other hand, is a challenge shipmen face three times a day, so central to their thoughts that a history of sea-faring can be read from a commissary list. Should any groundsman dispute the importance of belly-furniture in history—whether it be exterminating whales, or introducing syphilis to the Fiji Islanders, or settling the Australian littoral with cross-coves from Middlesex and Hampshire—he is referred to the hundred-and-first chapter of Moby Dick , a book spooled in the amusement tanks of all but the smallest spacers. The Triton made her underwater periplus of Earth with a galley stocked with frozen pizza and concentrated apple-juice. Long before I was a boy in Med School, itching to look at black sky through a view-port, galley science had fulfilled the disgusting exordium of Isaiah 36:12, to feed the Slimeheads for breakfast today what was day-before-yesterday's table-scraps and jakes-water. The Ship's Cook, the man who accomplishes the daily miracle of turning offal into eatables, is in many ways the most vital man aboard a spacer. In no special hurry, we were taking the low-energy route to Mars, a pathway about as long in time as the human period of gestation. Ship's Surgeon was myself, Paul Vilanova. Cooking aboard a spacer is a job combining the more frustrating tensions of biochemistry, applied mycology, high-speed farming, dietetics and sewage engineering. It's the Cook's responsibility to see that each man aboard gets each day no less than five pounds of water, two pounds of oxygen, and one-and-a-half pounds of dry food. Twelve tons of water, oxygen, and food would have filled the cargo compartments to bursting, and left a small ship like the C. P. Sale no reason to reach for Mars. Each molecule of oxygen would be conversant with the alveoli of every man aboard by the end of our trip. Though I'm signed aboard as Ship's Surgeon, I seldom lift a knife in space. Generally the man aboard who'd serve as the most popular murder-victim is the Cook. This trip, the-man-you-love-to-hate was our Captain.
 the chef
 the Captain  the chef  the waste manager  the 'doctor'