 What does it mean to be a navigator?
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. well, it was an explanation with more holes than fabric, like a fisherman's net, but at least it was rational. 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." 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. His chemistry is not ours, his processes of thought are not ours, his entire organism is closer to the inanimate rocks of a sea-bottom than to ourselves." The council room was like a tableau in a museum until the councillor spoke again, each council member poised over his locus-point, his members drifting about him. It was just like the council to put the screws on; they had a reputation for demanding results at any cost—even at the cost of destroying the only thing you had that would make results possible.
 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.