Testing

The patriarch had the strength and courage of a young man. But only the wisdom of the very old could prevent a terrible war.


Excerpt
A terrestrial journalist once described the plight of a space pilot on a solo interstellar trip as being similar to that of a flea on one of the great stone dogs of Planet VI, Betelgeuse. All that vast expanse to plunder and no way of getting at it.
To Echelon Leader Hannibal Pryor, the simile was apt. It was aggravated by the fact that he was an unwilling flea. If his chief and sponsor, Star Marshal Stefan Lopez, had not backed the losing side in the last Sirius IX plebescite, Pryor would have been piloting the immense star-battleship Erebus, from which the planet-buster was to be dropped. Instead, he had been assigned this miserable chore of checking Rigel IV, the planet scheduled for blasting.
It was a job that should have gone to a mere ensign, not a veteran echelon leader with, three comets on his breast there was nothing to do. His survey route had been plotted in advance by the calculators that crammed the deck below and precision instruments did all the checking. If Rigel IV were habitable or inhabited, it would not have been selected for the test.
The flying laboratory in which he sat would circle it twice, then return under automatic control to the dot in space, 3,000,000 kilometers away, five o'clock vector, where ships of half the inhabited planets were gathering to watch the test.
Wellington Smith, the new chief star marshal, had his own pet pilot for the big job. Hannibal Pryor, as one of Lopez' top men, was out of the big picture.
Flying the preliminary milk run! It made acid flow in his veins. And he was getting fat from punching out weird gastronomic combinations on the food-board. There was nothing to do but eat — and swill up the non-intoxicating drinks available through the dispenser.
The way things stood, Pryor knew he'd be lucky if he made wing chief in ten years Earth time. Once you were out of the big picture, it took a miracle to pull you back into focus.