Word: brattkus
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...Plus 2=What? Now that Pilot Brett had the feel of it, we tried some experiments. With the plane refueled, we headed back to the acrobatic area. Brett's usual rear-seat man, ist Lieut. Arthur Brattkus, had prepared a mental-alertness test for me during our coffee break. On the back pages of a scratch pad he had written three elementary problems in arithmetic. These represented a mild foretaste of what a space pilot might have to do in the weightless state. Would my gravity-free brain be clear enough to solve them...
...flipped over the thigh pad to tackle the first problem: multiply 13 by .9. The reaction was surprising. Squinting over the oxygen mask, I could not be sure whether there was a decimal point in the multiplier or just a speck in the paper. Irrationally, I felt hostile to Brattkus for not having been more careful. Just as irrationally, the decision I had to make (was it a decimal point or wasn't it?) seemed momentously important. I got off this dilemma by doing the multiplication, writing the answers for both possibilities. The problem for the next parabola...
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