The stars were closed to Potential Jones. To find yourself in space you either required connections, a membership in the arcane Guild, or much more money than Max, the son of a widowed, poor mom, was ever likely to possess. What Max does have choosing him are his uncle’s prized astrogation manuals-books on star navigation that Maximum actually commits to memory space word after word, formula for formula. When Max’s mom decides to remarry a bullying oaf, Potential takes to the street, only to find that his uncle about Starman Jones Chet’s guides, and Max’s near comprehensive memorization of them, is a ticket to the stars. But serving on the spaceship is normally no easy task. Duty is everything, and a blunder often means you and all aboard are dropped forever. Max adores every minute of his new lease of life, and he progressively grows in the trust of his superior officers. He seems to be on program for a command word track position-but then disaster strikes, and it’s likely to consider every trick Potential ever discovered from his challenging existence and his uncle’s manuals to save himself and the dispatch from a doom beyond extinction itself.

Through the First Golden Age of Heinlein, this is the so-called juvenile (written, Heinlein always claims, just as much for adults) that started all of them and made Heinlein a tale for multiple generations of readers.