Reading "Hiding Place"

If "Hiding Place" is our first Nicholas van Rijn story, then we do not yet know about van Rijn so we might expect that the viewpoint character of the opening paragraph will turn out to be the central character of this story: Captain Bahadur Torrance, Lodgemaster in the Federated Brotherhood of Spacemen. Or, if we have previously read "Margin of Profit," then we have already met another spaceship captain who was also a Lodgemaster and will remember that that one was employed by a flamboyant Master Merchant called Nicholas van Rijn.

Torrance prefers blue tunic, white cape and culottes and gold braid (in space?) to a gray coverall so which two other Poul Anderson characters does he sound like? He even also wears a turban because he is a citizen of the planet, Ramanujan. (Much later, Dominic Flandry will wear a Ramanujan turban to conceal a thought screen but that is a long way in the future.)

Our old friend, the Milky Way, appears on the opening page but this has already been noted here. Norse mythological names, a city or port called "Valhalla" on a planet called "Freya," remind us that Anderson wrote "Viking" heroic fantasies as well as hard sf - and sometimes they do not feel very different.