spacehand n.

In ship No. Fifty-one, half-way from Moon to Mars, four stubbled faces turned to a common, grinning regard as the pounding roar of the rockets died away at last. The skipper, the rocketman, the navigator, the spacehand.

Here in the Olech, squat Jovian spacehands rub shoulders with languid Venusian traders; dark Mercurians drink with the dak-men of Neptune; and tall Terrestrials swagger contemptuously through the crowds of ‘reddies,’ copper-skinned sons of Mars. Above the babel of a hundred polyglot tongues one can hear the sibilant hissing of the Martian dialects. Like flitting shadows the little reddies, clad in their long, loose dust-robes, glide along the crooked streets, mysterious, inscrutable.

She’s a woman of the world, and it’s utterly impossible to expect her to live with a man who’s going to be a mere pilot or space hand or something on a Martian spaceship.

I might add there was no excess baggage as far as grimy space hands and swearing officers are concerned.

It was the beefy space hand told off to observation duty, which also meant guard duty at the brig.

Why do I have to dodge out of the path of every idiotic spacehand who comes tearing back here as though the planet was full of devils?

Now I heard the anxious stirring among the tough space-hands and miners as they waited for the first wonder of the Saturnian System—Hyperion’s Dancing Girls.

A spacehand, a stocky slant-eyed nomad from Altai uncoiled a lariat.

She turned up on Samarra about half an hour after I talked to her here. Times, I’m tempted to throw up this job and turn spacehand.

Aboard it were five brave men—Thomas Delvaney, the expedition’s leader; Jerry Cooper, the red-thatched navigator; Andy Smith, the world’s ace cameraman, and two space-hands, Jimmy Watson and Elmer Paine, grim old veterans of the Earth-Moon run

Maybe, not being a spacehand, she won’t obey my order and stay at the boat.

There wasn’t a stitch of clothing among the hundreds of people he saw soaking in the pools or standing beside them—a delightful sight even for a veteran spacehand who had seen similar situations many times before.

‘There was—a note,’ she said. ‘And Carlton—Jubal’s father—is an old spacehand. This is where he would come. It took me awhile to catch a ride with one of the neighbors who was coming here. I need them to search the station and find my boy. If he didn’t get on board the ship with the cat, he could still be here.’