Read Online The Unscheduled Mission by Jonathan Edward Feinstein - Free Book Online

general and specific understanding of the germs of Earth now.”
    “Sartena, I thought you were a navigator,” Marisea commented.
    “I am,” Sartena admitted. “It doesn’t keep me from learning other things. Navigation is pretty straight forward you know. You note your current position, pick a destination, allow for galactic and solar system rotations, aim and then see if your course agrees with the one the computer came up with. If it doesn’t you run through your figures again and see which got it wrong. Usually it’s the navigator, of course, but every so often the computer bollixes a course so we always double check. In between though, there’s a lot of free time especially on interstellar trips. I read all sorts of books, fiction and non-fiction. I like reading about the sciences in particular.”
    “Me too!” Marisea agreed, “actually, I like reading almost everything.”
    “So what are you going to study in University?” Sartena asked.
    “Can’t I study everything?” Marisea asked.
    Iris laughed, “You can try, but the University will try to get you to specialize and a degree always looks better when it’s actually in something, but that doesn’t mean you can’t choose a subject that is fairly general in itself.”
    “It also doesn’t mean that you have to get your second degree in the same field as your first,” Park advised her. “I have several academic degrees and none of them in the same field as the others. Besides in your first degree you won’t really be specializing. I’ve seen the degree requirements you have and they don’t look all that different from what I had when I was your age. The primary degree – we used to call it a bachelor’s – is just advanced education on a general scale. You’ll have a chance to emphasize a single field or two, but it is still not specialization. Later on, in the secondary, tertiary and doctorates you will specialize, and then not if you keep changing your field.”
    “Besides,” Dannet added. “You have to start somewhere, even if you do want to learn everything.”
    “Yeah, that’s right,” Marisea agreed with all of them. “Thanks.”

Eight
     
     
    Two days later, Sartena was the first one to notice the change in vegetation as they flew over one of the inner valleys of the Atlantic Mountains . “There,” she said as she pointed northward. “I think the trees on the mountains to the east are darker.”
    Park looked where she was pointing and squinted. “Yeah, I think you’re right. The change starts on that side of the valley. It’s subtle, but definitely different.”
    “I don’t see it,” Marisea remarked.
    “You’re probably looking too closely for a definite line of division,” Park told her. “Try unfocusing your eyes as you look. Just try to view it all at once. Don’t worry about details.”
    Marisea tried again and a moment later remarked, “Oh yeah. Now I see it.”
    “I learned that trick from an archaeologist,” Park explained. “He was near-sighted and had to wear glasses most of the time, but when out in the field and looking for things like crop marks and other subtle color differences, he could just take off his glasses and could see lines like this one effortlessly.”
    “Glasses?” Sartena asked just ahead of Dannet.
    “Corrective lenses in frames,” Marisea explained. “It’s a Human thing.”
    “The Mer all have perfect vision,” Park commented, “and from your reactions I guess your people do too. Makes sense. If you’re going to juggle your genes for perfect adaptation to an environment, it would be silly to not improve everyone’s eyesight at the same time. Well, back before we went into stasis there was an old saying, ‘Nobody’s perfect.’ That included how well our eyes worked, but we were able to correct that with glass lenses to bend light just right to make up for various deficiencies in the natural lenses inside our eyes.”
    “Some of the humans at Van Winkle wear