Not excluding cribsheets, of course. Pirx had already exhausted a dozen or so hiding places—in his shoes, between his stocking legs, in the inner pocket of his space suit, in the mini-atlas the cadets were allowed to take aboard… An eyeglass case… now that would have done the trick, he thought, but, first of all, it would have had to be a fair-sized one, and secondly—he didn’t wear glasses. A few seconds later it occurred to him that if he had worn glasses he never would have been admitted to the Institute.

So Pirx stood on the metal catwalk and waited for the CO to show up in the company of both instructors. What was keeping them? he wondered. Lift-off was scheduled for 1940 hours, and it was already 1927. Then it dawned on him that he might have taped the cribsheet under his arm, the way little Yerkes did. The story went that as soon as the flight instructor went to frisk him, Yerkes started squealing he was ticklish, and got away with it. But Pirx had no illusions; he didn’t look like the ticklish type. And so, not having any adhesive tape with him, he went on holding the pony in his right hand, in the most casual way possible, and only when he realized that he would have to shake hands with all three did he switch, shifting the pony from his right to his left hand and the navigation book from left to right. While he was juggling things around, he managed to make the catwalk sway up and down like a diving board. Suddenly he heard footsteps approaching from the other end, but in the dark under the hangar ceiling it took him a while to make out who it was.

All three were looking very spiffy—as was customary on such occasions, they were decked out in full uniform—especially the CO. Even uninflated, however, Pirx’s space suit looked as graceful as twenty football uniforms stuck together, not to mention the long intercom and radiophone terminals dangling from either side of his neck ring disconnect, the respirator hose bobbing up and down in the region of his throat, and the reserve oxygen bottle strapped tightly to his back—so tightly that it pinched.