Greetings:

Found a couple of references to slide rules in one of
Stephen Baxter's "alternate history" SF stories.

The complete text of the story ("First to the Moon!"),
written by Baxter and Simon Bradshaw can be found
here:

<http://www.cix.co.uk/~sjbradshaw/baxterium/firstmoon.html>

(...and hopefully Yahoo will not screw up that link!)

Here's some of the relevant text. I recommend the full
story, it was pretty good, I thought.

FPK3

==CLIPPINGS BELOW==

Marsh could feel the reassuring mass of his slide rule
at his belt. That battered old instrument, the slider
carefully greased at least once a week, had been with
him since his first day in the shipyards of his native
North-East as a technical apprentice and every step of
his long journey, all the way to the threshold of the
moon. In his mid-20s he had been lured down to London
to take an engineering degree at Imperial College.
Despite his sour relations with the other students -
mostly southern-based, fashionably quoting German - he
had had little trouble graduating with distinction,
and had moved on to the Royal Aircraft Establishment
in Farnborough, where he had become an expert in the
new field of space engineering.

As the great lunar programme had been assembled, Marsh
had battled to become one of the King's 'new Brunels'.
He had survived a long and fraught selection process,
where his obvious technical superiority had overcome
the handicap of his background, his accent and his
'sullen attitude'. And now here he was, on his way to
the moon.

He did wonder, though, if Von Braun's mighty rockets
required slide rules to guide themselves into space
and back.

...

Marsh's key role during the four-day lunar flight was
navigation: to figure out where the ship was and where
it was headed. With his small telescopes and sextants
he took fixes on stars and on features on the earth -
notably flares sent up from the planet's night side,
with pinpoint timing and placement, by a small fleet
of Royal Navy vessels scattered around the globe.

The observations made, he got on with his analysis,
using log tables and a hand-cranked calculator. His
calculations were basically data reduction to convert
his sightings into a form compact enough for easy
Morse transmission. The big computers at Manchester
and Bletchley would do the real number-crunching,
factoring his data in with that from the
micrometer-measured photographic plates that charted
their celestial progress.

It took an hour's intense labour. Marsh finished by
cross-checking the result against his rough slide-rule
estimate, then summarized it on a message form. In
little over two hours, back would come any required
course correction. It was satisfying, stretching,
absorbing work.

...

Without a cable of the kind Forbes had carried, they
couldn't communicate. Marsh went back to the wreck. It
turned out to be easy to push aside huge sections of
the crumpled life-container. Marsh was clumsy in his
suit, but he was strong as a giant on this little
world. The life-container's lower compartment held
equipment for the exploration of the lunar surface:
seismographs, magnetometers, spring balances for
measuring the moon's gravity, geology hammers and
sample cases, even a couple of cine cameras. None of
it a blind bit of use now, of course. He did find his
slide rule. But the lubricant had evaporated, and the
slider was jammed.

....

Good story!

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