They start recruiting others to build a settlement for long term survival and Rod becomes the de facto leader of a community that eventually grows to around 75 people. Eventually he teams up with a student from another class who tells him that more than ten days have elapsed without contact, he realizes that something has gone wrong with the portal that was supposed to recover them, and they are stranded. In his desperate concentration on survival, he loses track of time. When he wakes up, all he has left is a spare knife hidden under a bandage. On the second day, Rod is ambushed and knocked unconscious by a thief. The last advice the students receive is to “watch out for stobor.” Rod, acting on his older sister’s advice, takes hunting knives and basic survival gear rather than high-tech weaponry, on the grounds that the latter could make him over-confident.

On test day, each student walks through the Ramsbotham portal and finds him or herself alone on a strange planet, though reasonably close to the pickup point. They are told only that the challenges are neither insurmountable nor unreasonable. Students may team up and equip themselves with whatever gear they can carry, but are otherwise completely on their own. The final test of his Advanced Survival class is to stay alive on an unfamiliar planet for between two and ten days. THE STORY: Rod Walker is a high school student who dreams of becoming a professional colonist. Because colonizing requires practical infrastructure, the colonists employ “technology” from the frontier era, such as horses instead of tractors. However, the costs of operating the device mean that the colonies are isolated from Earth until they can produce goods to justify two-way trade. Juvenile novel # 9 Published in both hardcover and paperback that year by Scribner’s as part of the Heinlein juvenile series.īACKGROUND: The novel is set in the future, when overpopulation on Earth has been lessened after the invention of teleportation, called the “Ramsbotham jump”, which is used to send Earth’s excess population to colonize other planets.

Heinlein tunnel in the sky