This theory was supported by the faster reflexes of Adams, who was also the larger man of the two.
On a hunch, I put Adams’s index card back into the machine and punched “Student Infractions.”
The platen ball whirred and I read, “Midshipman Adams placed on indefinite probation, spring semester, 2227, for assault with bodily harm intent on three-man Shore Patrol during altercation after raid on Madame Chacaud’s, a Mandan pleasure parlor.”
Kevin O’Hara’s card turned up the same tidbit, with one significant difference: O’Hara had been punished for evading arrest.
To Harkness, my next act might have seemed a fanciful waste of time, but we Platonists are trained to ask questions. I inserted the indices of both men into a Mark VII computer and engaged them in a boxing match. Adams knocked out O’Hara in the third round, but it was a slugging match.
Adams beat O’Hara two chess games out of three, but O’Hara cleaned Adams out in a poker game. Adams had intelligence but O’Hara was shrewd.
This deduction prompted me to engage them again in a rough-and-tumble brawl specifying that the fight must end in a fatality.
O’Hara killed Adams.
I extended the period of conflict to three months and the result was the same, O’Hara killed Adams. After one year, a longer time than the actual voyage, O’Hara killed Adams.
What the machine was telling me was this: Since stalker’s fever is indigenous to space ships and since these voyages are scheduled for six months outbound and six months for the return, there had been no stalker’s fever aboard. There had been no galactic touchdown since all the time was taken up by the inflight period. Harkness to the contrary notwithstanding, if stalker’s fever had broken out aboard, Ensign Kevin O’Hara would be up there orbiting Earth and not the probe commander, Ensign John Adams.
As a space facility, the Mandan Naval Academy ranks among the best-equipped in the world. Forty feet below the landing pad where Adams was touching down, the decontamination chamber is divided from the debriefing room and the witnesses’ gallery above by a wall of resonant glass. The incoming spacemen arrive at decontamination by a sliding chute which extends from a snorkel nozzle that automatically clamps onto the exit lock of the ship above. Recording and medical monitoring equipment is as good as any in the world and no known microbe, terrestrial or extraterrestrial, can survive the light-irradiated atmosphere of the chamber.
In twenty-degree weather with three feet of snow on the ground, I took the underground dolly to the landing site, reading the Operations Data Card as I rode.
The Adams-O’Hara Probe had been sent to scout the 320-330-degree segment of a galaxy beyond the star Lynx. Object of the probe was to chart the area and explore it for habitable planets. Ten degrees of arc might seem a thin slice of galactic pie, but the area covers a large bite of parsecs even when measured along the perimeter of the circle.
However, I’m not paid to think along astronomical lines. My job, or so I thought at the moment, was to interview a returnee to determine his mental and physical condition and welcome him back to Earth on a human-to-human basis. We medical men are chosen to be the greeters not merely because of our professional qualifications but because of the mystique attached to us as healers.
In the old days, chaplains welcomed the star rovers home. But men of the cloth have an aura of funerals around them and some of the scouts, their senses wracked by time and warped with radiation, felt so strongly that they were about to receive extreme unction that their blood pressure soared.
Later, the cross or crescent became even less potent as a symbol because the traits that make a religious mind were weeded out of space men. An undue sense of awe can drive a man mad amid the naked glory of stars and once an astronaut succumbs to the raptures of the deep, his voyage is forever outward-bound.
UNASA wants stimulus-response mechanisms for those trips and stimulus-response experts to check them when they return, but UNASA is not faultless. Mendelian laws do not conform to precise patterns. Genes will out. Some ancestral tendency compressed beneath Adams’ and O’Hara’s behavior erupted like a volcano to alter forever the topography of their computer-matched personalities. Their fight in the Mandan house started a fall of dominoes which, after they had passed all selection boards and undergone their final analysis, triggered alterations in their psyches only vaguely apprehended by the two who strapped themselves into a starship cockpit.
Given power to look upon one moment in the past, I might well choose that January night, in 2228, when the Adams-O’Hara Mission lifted off the Mandan Pad. In the glow from their instrument panel, I would study and commit to memory the faces of the two astronauts, young, fearless and superbly skilled, who would guide the pulse of a laser beam through the voids and time. I would treasure as unique in history the moment when their starship, propelled by its thundering light, set course for a far galactic swirl bearing the first Southern evangelist and the first Irish rebel to sail the seas of space.
But this is the revery of hindsight. At the moment, I was rolling toward an interview with John Adams and a meeting, no less real, with the ghost of Red O’Hara.
Doctor Harkness was waiting at the debriefing desk before the decontamination chamber wearing an officious frown.
“Doctor, I’m sorry to impose on your inexperience in this matter, but this is an unscheduled touchdown and there’s no senior psychiatrist aboard. I’ll be observing from the gallery with Admiral Bradshaw and other officers, and I’ve prepared you a list of questions you can use as guidelines.”
I took the sheet of paper, a little miffed by his gratuitous reference to my inexperience in the presence of the Academy superintendent.
“Adams is stern down and making his approach,” Harkness advised me, despite the fact that earth around us was already shaking with the blasts from the retro-jets of the starship above us and the dial marker on the bulkhead behind him was recording the ship’s position above the pad.
“Introduce yourself to Adams and keep your voice warm and relaxed. Don’t put your lips too close to the glass. Get him into the telemetering jumper as soon as possible. Don’t stare at him as if he were a specimen of wildlife. Usually they’re unshaven and out of uniform when they land and they stagger a bit until they adjust to Earth’s gravity. Welcome him, get him to relax and make him feel wanted. That’s your specialty—making one feel wanted.”
Above us the thunder of the ship’s descent was dying to a rustle. I heard the click and wheeze of the decon nozzle as it unshipped itself from the base of the landing pad.
“Don’t worry about taking notes,” Harkness continued, “but keep your eyes and ears open for any aberrant behavior.”
Harkness was carrying out the monologue to impress his superiors in the gallery above. I was perfectly willing for him to share the limelight from the decon chamber, but he was not giving me a chance to read the guidelines he had written out for me.
“Above all, keep him talking,” Harkness said. “There may be a violation of Navy Regulations, here, more grave than aborting a mission—looks that way, in fact—and anything he says can be used against him.”
On the bulkhead, the ship’s altitude marker had fallen to zero. The starship was down.
“Usually, they’re bursting to spill a gut, particularly if they build up hostilities on their voyage. Use your empathy on Adams. Get him to hang himself if he’s gallows material.”
Above, I heard the snorkel clunk onto the airlock of the vessel. In minutes, Adams would be sliding down