 What does it mean to be a navigator?
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, January 1963. Whatever it was, he had no business in it; for five minutes before he had been spaceborne, on the Long Jump from Earth to the thriving colonies circling Betelgeuse Nine. McCray was ship's navigator, plotting course corrections—not that there were any, ever; but the reason there were none was that the check-sightings were made every hour of the long flight. He had read off the azimuth angles from the computer sights, automatically locked on their beacon stars, and found them correct; then out of long habit confirmed the locking mechanism visually. There simply was no way for him to get from a warm, bright navigator's cubicle on Starship Jodrell Bank to this damned, dark, dismal hole of a place where everything was out to hurt him and nothing explained what was going on. A spacesuit, yes; he knew that he could construct a logical explanation for that with no trouble—maybe a subspace meteorite striking the Jodrell Bank , an explosion, himself knocked out, brought here in a suit ... well, it was an explanation with more holes than fabric, like a fisherman's net, but at least it was rational. Item, a short time ago—subjectively it seemed to be minutes—he had been aboard the Jodrell Bank with nothing more on his mind than completing his check-sighting and meeting one of the female passengers for coffee. The thought had somehow refreshed him, like icewater between rounds, and with a clearing head he remembered what a spacesuit was good for. This was ultrawave radio, something more than a million times faster than light, with a range measured, at least, in hundreds of light-years. Someone was watching Herrell McCray, with the clinical fascination of a biochemist observing the wigglings of paramecia in a new antibiotic—and with the prayerful emotions of a starving, shipwrecked, sailor, watching the inward bobbing drift of a wave-born cask that may contain food. Hatcher, like McCray, was an adventurous soul, young, able, well-learned in the technical sciences of his culture. Indeed, they worked as well a yard or a quarter-mile away as they did when, rarely, they rested in the crevices they had been formed from in his "skin." At greater distances they worked less well, for reasons irrelevant to the Law of Inverse Squares. After observing him do this for a time we concluded he might be unable to see and so we illuminated his field of vision for him.
 To trust mathematics and instrument readings more than common sense.
 To trust mathematics and instrument readings for the greater good of exploring the cosmos.  To have a quick wit sharp enough to parse the problem of becoming a captive.  To trust mathematics and instrument readings more than common sense.  To have a quick wit fast enough to escape the deadly trials of Hatcher’s Stage Two.