Then the connection was relayed to one of the secondary control officers
at the monitoring boards.
"That's Captain Stefens," said Scott in a whisper. "Toughest officer on
the station. He has to be. From five hundred to a thousand ships arrive
and depart daily. It's his job to see that every arriving ship is
properly taken into the landing ports. Besides that, everything you've
seen, except the meteor and weather observation rooms, are under his
command. If he thinks a ship is overloaded, he won't allow it to enter
and disrupt the balance of the station. Instead, he'll order its skipper
to dump part of his cargo out in space to be picked up later. He makes
hundreds of decisions a day--some of them really hair-raising. Once,
when a rocket scout crew was threatened with exploding reactant mass, he
calmly told them to blast off into a desolate spot in space and blow up.
The crew could have abandoned ship, but they chose to remain with it and
were blown to atoms. It could have happened to the station. That night
he got a three-day pass from the station and went to Venusport."
Scott shook his head.
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