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the intervening space.  To an unaccustomed observer it must seem little short of miraculous that so much traffic could negotiate the racetrack and the shaft without causing mortal injury.  Accidents did happen, of course, but even in the shaft, it was possible by a slight shift of the body to alter the trajectory sufficiently to make collisions rare events.
    Mikael could still remember the first time he had seen the shaft; as one of a group of young cadets on a month's temporary posting to Runnymede.  He had gazed at the scene with a mixture of awe and admiration until a word from the officer who was showing them round brought him back to reality.  It had taken him most of that month to summon up enough courage to launch himself across the shaft.  Now he did not hesitate as he swung off the end of the moving walkway, seized his moment to dash across the racetrack and kicked himself upwards across the shaft.
    The Space Admiral's office, he knew, was on the second level from the top of the shaft.  Although the gravitational pull within the shaft was virtually nil there was still some drag caused by air resistance and so it was not possible to travel the whole length of the shaft with one kick.  Mikael crossed backwards and forwards across the shaft several times to reach the Second Level.  Down the passageway he stopped outside the door to the outer office to check his uniform and to set his cap at the correct angle.  Then he pressed the stud, waited while the door slid aside, and went in.
    "Lieutenant Commander Boronin, reporting as ordered, sir."
    He addressed himself to the Captain sitting behind the big desk directly opposite the door.  In the room with the Captain were two computer technicians, fiddling with a bank of consoles in the corner, a clerk sitting disconsolately watching them, and the blonde and very shapely lieutenant whose interest he had been unsuccessfully trying to attract in the wardroom for several weeks now.  He smiled at her and was ignored for his pains.
    The Captain finished speaking into the intercom.  "The Admiral is expecting you, Commander.  Go straight in."
    Mikael knocked on the door and waited for the summons to enter.  When the door slid open the old Admiral was standing by a Stellar Display Tank watching with apparent fascination, the twinkling points of light.
    "Lieutenant Commander Boronin, reporting..."
    "Yes, yes.  I know who you are: dammit I sent for you.  Now come over here and tell me what you make of this."
    As he crossed the huge office towards the tank, Mikael anxiously reviewed in his mind the patterns of the major stellar systems and wondered what sort of a test he was in for.  It was with a sense of great relief that he recognised the region around Rigel and concentrated his attention instead on making sense of the movements of the ships.
    The objects identified in the tank were colour coded on a very simple basis: naturally occurring stellar objects (stars, planets, even asteroids if the resolution was sufficient) were white; artificial satellites and fixed navigational beacons were yellow; identifiably friendly spacecraft were green; identifiably hostile spacecraft were red; and all other spacecraft were orange.  All of the dots representing spacecraft were flashing and additional information about the type and status of these vessels could be displayed by varying the periodicity of the flashes, always providing that there was an appropriate source to supply such information.  Normal commercial information providers would not be able to report on the status of Naval warships but the data for the display at which Mikael was looking, was being taken directly from the Fleet Command Ship at Rigel.
    The resolution of the tank could be increased if required so that any small cube of space could be expanded to fill the whole tank.  At the moment the tank was showing the region for about 100 light years around Rigel and so included most of the rebel bases.  Circling