How Spacemen Walk, The Wind And More

The Peregrine, CHAPTER II.

"A dim path wound up from the valley and [Joachim] took it, moving with a slightly rolling, bearlike gait. The sky was utterly blue overhead; sunlight spilled on the wide green sweep of land; wind brought him the faint crystal laughter of a bellbird. No doubt of it, man wasn't built to sit in a metal shell and hurry from star to star. It wasn't strange that so many had dropped out of Nomad life. Who had that girl been - Sean's girl from Nerthus -?" (pp. 4-5)

This passage contains five points of interest.

(i) How a spaceman walks.

(ii) As ever in Poul Anderson's works, the wind bears a specific message, in this case a life-enhancing one.

(iii) The perennial contradiction between the freedom of interstellar travel and enclosure in a metal shell.

(iv) The disclosure that many drop out of Nomadism.

(v) The reference to Nerthus fits The Peregrine into the Psychotechnic History.

Further Remarks

(i) "...feet sliding softly along the floor, as if it were deck plates, weight carried forward and balanced from the hips, hands a trifle forward and clear of the body, ready to grasp."

-Robert Heinlein, Double Star (New York, 1957), 1, p. 6.

I looked through James Blish's Cities In Flight for any descriptions of how spacemen walk and didn't find any but did find some other points of interest.

(ii) In other works, the wind threatens, whines, shrieks - whatever is appropriate.

(iii) Interstellar craft and other space habitats need to be spacious, not enclosed.

(iv) "I want off was the traditional formula by which a starman renounced the stars. The Okie who spoke them cut himself off forever from the cities, and from the long swooping lines of the ingeodesics that the city followed through space-time. The Okie who spoke them became planet-bound."

-James Blish, Earthman, Come Home IN Blish, Cities In Flight (London, 1981), pp. 235-465 AT CHAPTER SIX, p. 387.

The traditional alternatives are on the nearest planet or at the next port of call.

(v) Nerthus is a common point of reference in six of the twenty two instalments of the Technic History.

Also in Cities In Flight:

"The end of time was certainly sizable enough as a problem; he would never find a bigger and he was grateful for that; but it provided him with nobody with whom to negotiate and, if possible, swindle a little."

-James Blish, The Triumph Of Time IN Cities In Flight, pp. 467-596 AT CHAPTER FIVE, p. 541.

Thus, the Mayor of an Okie city sounds exactly like Nicholas van Rijn.