Hiding Place

In Poul Anderson's "Hiding Place," the viewpoint character, Captain Bahadur Torrance, is a Lodgemaster in the Federated Brotherhood of Spacemen whereas, in Anderson's earlier story, "Margin of Profit" (see here), Captain Rafael Torrens was a Lodgemaster in the Federated Brotherhood of Spacefarers. However, no doubt "spaceman," "spacefarer" and "astronaut" are interchangeable English translations of a comparable Anglic word (or words). By the time of the Mirkheim crisis, the Brotherhood will have been merged or amalgamated into the United Technicians.

Torrance wears "...the Ship-and-Sunburst of the Polesotechnic League." (The Van Rijn Method, p. 558) I do not have a relevant passage to hand right now but it sounds as if the Terran Empire is going to adopt the symbol of the League?

Torrance is from Ramanujan as, in a later period, is Dominic Flandry's friend, Chunderban Desai. Ramanujan is one of the planetary battlefields in the Solar Commonwealth's first civil war. Torrance is captain of Nicholas van Rijn (see here and here)'s space yacht, the Hebe G.B. The next few posts might focus on some aspects of their singular journey which has already been partly discussed here and here.

For example, in the Technic History version of hyperspace, astronauts attached to the hull of a ship are enclosed in its force-field and therefore are carried along through hyperspace although:

"Without compensating electronic viewscreens, the sky was weirdly distorted by aberration and Doppler effect, as if the men were already dead and beating through the other existence toward Judgment." (p. 571)

If there is a postmortem Judgment (which I doubt), then we are beating toward it right now, even before entering "...the other existence..." I think that Anderson's words imply this. He writes "...as if..." (this is hard sf) but leaves us with the image of men under a strange sky bound for their final Judgment. To read a fantasy in which a magician entering the City of Dis comments that he and his colleagues have been making this journey all their lives, see James Blish's The Day After Judgment.