Peter Fox
Pioneer(s) of History
"Rumbottom! Haven't you mended those goggles yet! I'll have ‘e whipped round the ship if you don't look lively. How can I land at planet Alphacent-176-VII without my goggles you surreptitious gangling!" Captain Richard T Burke was proud of those last two words. "Scurvy knave!" gets a bit tiresome after a week. Now after 10,062 hours on a space cutter Captain His Lordship the High-Transept of Stonké-Hoté would be welcomed into The Supers and the tiresome-ghastly-indigent-noble-professional-quality assured (all of these adjectives were used for varying periods, sometimes in combination) voyage would be over.
It had been recognised for a long time that a man needs to know his place. There are many examples that can be cited to support this. For example in the days of families and households there was a saying :"A man's place is in the wrong." Which perhaps explains why we have moved on. However when confronted with the infinity of space a few centimeterstm beyond a viewport a man needs to know there is more to life than whizzing about between the stars in a bit of tin with an ounce of silicontm playing the flippers.
Rumbottom pushed his quality-control trolley with its banks of lever-arch files along the companionway. Thank goodness this would be for the LAST TIME. One way or another - huh! If his lord-de-dahness could press the button marked "STOP! LAND NOW! GO ON!! WE HAVE ARRIVED" then they'd be landing at planet-seven....
...And if not then Rumbottom would administer an enema to the captain which would give one of them great pleasure and enable the other to invent a whole new thesaurus based on "surprise","ungrateful-after-all-I've-done-for-him" and "bastard". Still, there were mundane matters to be checked: Gosh yes! You can't treat genetic material like blocks of wood. Just this one hold had the seeds of a veritable rainforest. What would happen if the balance built up over millions of years on Earth was wrecked by a bag of seeds going haywire?
The spacecraft landed just fine. The Combined Order of Supernumerary Star Pilots and Retainers welcomed Richard as its third member, and as it happened Richard Rumbottom was soon to become the first president of the schizocracy we now enjoy.