Kid wants to pilot space liner, is too ugly

Question

This is a story from sometime in or before the early 1980s. The gist is that there's a kid who spends his whole life dreaming about being the pilot of a space-going passenger craft. However he can't because all the pilots are tall, handsome, square-jawed and so on, and he's a complete six-stone weakling and ugly as sin, albeit very skilled.

However he triumphs in the end because it turns out that these ships are actually piloted by guys like him, hidden in the bowels of the ship and plumbed in to the computers, and the good-looking fly-boy types are actually all as dumb as rocks and just there for show, and to make the passengers feel comfortable.

I have a feeling that this might have been a one-off strip in 2000AD comic, although it could also have been in an SF anthology of some kind. Ringing any bells ?

Answer 1

This is the story "The Volunteer" from the 1982 2000AD Annual.

Byron Z. Gymp was a poor example of a man, barely touching 5 feet tall with thick socks, a misshapen nose, a limp and a very bad pair of lazy eyes, yet all he wanted to do was pilot a starliner. But star liner pilots were handsome, 6 foot tall men with chiseled chins.

His repeated attempts to fool the star liner recruitment office are always foiled, and in his desperation he finally breaks into the ship yard, intending to steal a star liner, but in doing so he discovers the real secret...

A few quotations from the story:

"There's future for you in Laker Spacelines", It proudly blared, showing a picture of a tall, handsome Starliner Captain welcoming his passengers on board. The scene switched to the liner's flight deck The immaculate Captain opened the warp-drive controls to maximum and the ship surged forward. If you are over six feet tall, of a pleasant appearance and feel that a liner pilot is the job for YOU, call at ou recruiting centre TODAY!" The man on the screen turned a sickeningly bright and even smile to the camera and the advert faded out.

and later on, after Byron has attempted to steal a starliner and discovered the flight deck was a fake:

Byron was still recovering from the shock as Knowles led him back outside the ship and under her nose. There was a bigger shock waiting for him there: he thought at first that the figure standing there was a robot--it was about his height and he had never seen anything SO ugly, there were wires and tubes and connectors coming out all over it. But underneath all the metal and plastic there was flesh. Flesh bonded directly to metal and plastic. It was half man, half machine cyborg. The creature walked under the nose to the circular bulged dome that Byron had always thought was a radar scanner.

The Annual should be available second hand from Ebay or comic book dealers, or can be found online.

Answer 2

Sounds a lot like the Brain & Brawn series from Anne McCaffrey et alii (Wiki link)

The premise is that children who are deformed but with otherwise healthy brains can be transplanted into "shells" (a reinforced life support cylinder for the brain only), they become the "brains" of the ships. They are partnered with "brawns" who provide the physical part of the deal.