n't be spared
from anything here," Jacquemont added. "We don't want to have to chase
you halfway around the world to bring back the only specialist in
something yesterday at the latest."

"Are you going to come along, Conn?" Rivas asked.

"Oh, Lord, no! I'm going to be doing fifteen things at once here."

All the computer work. Finding materials to make astrogational
equipment and robo-pilots. Studying hyperspace theory--fortunately,
there was an excellent library here--and setting up classes, and
teaching school. And keeping in touch with his father, on Poictesme.
It was making him nervous not to know what sort of foolishness the
older and wiser heads might be getting into.

The next morning, they began organizing work-gangs and setting up
committees. Three men, two girls and about twenty robots got an
open-pit iron mine started; as soon as the steel mill was ready, ore
started coming in. Anse Dawes had a gang looking for something they
could build a 350-foot interplanetary ship out of; Jacquemont and Mack
Vibart were getting plans and specifications and making lists of
needed materials. Conn gathered a dozen men and women and started
classes in computer theory and practice; at the same time, he and
Charley Gatworth were teaching themselves and each other hyperspatial
astrogation, which was the art of tossing a ship into some
everythingless noplace outside normal space-time, and then pulling her
out again by her bootstraps at some other place in the normal
continuum, light-years away.

Roughly, it compared to shooting hummingbirds on the wing,
blindfolded, with a not particularly accurate pistol, from a
mile-a-minute merry-go-round.

That was something you could only do with a computer. A human, with a
slide rule, a pencil and pad, could figure it out, of course--if he
had fifty-odd thousand years to do it. A good computer did it in
thirty seconds. That was one difference between people and computers.
The other difference was that the desirability of making a hyperspace
jump would never occur to a computer, unless somebody pushed a button
and taped in instructions.

They found a three-hundred-foot globular skeleton, probably the
nucleus of a big hyperspace ship, and decided that was big enough for
what they wanted. The entire colony got to work on it. Photoprinted
plans and specifications poured out as Jacquemont and a couple of
draftsmen got them up. Steel came out of the steel mill at one end
while ore came