Rochefort And The Milky Way

The People Of The Wind.

Philippe Rochefort starts out like Dominic Flandry. Hooting Star is his first command:

"...he having recently been promoted from ensign for audacity in a rescue operation..." (IV, p. 478)

Like Flandry, he loses his first command and must read a funeral service. Unlike Flandry, he:

loses his crew;
does not remain on the winning side;
is duped into carrying disastrous disinformation to his Fleet Admiral.

The following passage places Rochefort in Anderson's familiar cosmic setting but also displays two sides of his character, his capacity for awe and his conscientiousness:

"...space lay around the viewports in a glory of stars, diamond-keen, unwinking, many-colored, crowding an infinitely clear blackness till they merged in the argent torrent of the Milky Way or the dim mysterious cloudlets which were sister galaxies. Rochefort wanted to sit, look, let soul follow gaze outward into God's temple the universe. He could have done so, too; the boat was running on full automatic. But better demonstrate to the others that he was a conscientious as well as an easy-going officer. He turned the viewer back on which he had been using when the message came." (p. 479)

This is when we get the canned lecture on Ythrian evolution.