Eventually he teams up with Jacqueline 'Jack' Daudet, a student from another class whom he initially mistakes for a male. 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. Rod Walker is a high school student who dreams of becoming a professional colonist. Because modern technology requires a supporting infrastructure, more primitive methods are employed - for example, horses instead of tractors.

However, the costs of operating the device mean that the colonies are isolated from Earth until they can produce something to justify two-way trade. The themes of the work include the difficulties of growing up and the nature of man as a social animal.Ī Malthusian catastrophe on Earth has been averted by the invention of teleportation, called the ' Ramsbotham jump', which is used to send Earth's excess population to colonize other planets. The story describes a group of students sent on a survival test to an uninhabited planet, who soon realise they are stranded there. Heinlein and published in 1955 by Scribner's as one of the Heinlein juveniles.

Tunnel in the Sky is a science fiction novel written by Robert A.

Heinlein tunnel in the sky