Anne McCaffrey 
Get Off The Unicorn 

From the lady who taught dragons to fly and rockets to sing…The Smallest Dragon Boy. The only thing Keevan wanted in his life was to be a dragonrider just like his father. Surely nothing could be as thrilling as soaring through the air between the powerful wings of a dragon…But Keevan was small and there were always more boys than there were dragons — someone must be disappointed. Keevan wasn’t exactly the foremost candidate but dragons have their own standards, especially the bronzes, the most jighly-prized dragons of all…This and thirteen other superb stories are collected for the first time here, in Get Off the Unicorn.