“Aye, aye, sir,” I answered with a reflex action, as Harkness turned and vanished up the stairs to the gloom of the witnesses’ balcony. All the delicate tools of my trade, insight, empathy, interrogation, were to be used on John Adams not to help him re-relate to a human environment but to entrap him for violation of Navy Regulations.
Through the exit tube across the chamber, I could hear the sough of an opening airlock as I glanced down at the guidelines Harkness had handed me.
1. Ask him why he aborted his mission.
2. Ask him where in hell is O’Hara.
Commander Harkness had been playing to the gallery when he handed me the note and I replied in kind as I heard the swish-swish of Adams spiraling down the chute. With a contemptuous smile, I crumpled the note and tossed it into a wastebasket. Then I turned to look through three inches of polarized glass as Adams shot from the chute, breech foremost, to land on a canvas mat.
“Nice landing, sailor,” I called out, and to identify myself as a medical man, added, “a breech delivery.”
Adams seemed to spring from the pad and stood upright for a moment, tottering. He was over six feet with long hair and the beginnings of a beard. He was barefoot and wore a sleeveless tunic embroidered over the left breast with a strange device. The tunic barely reached below his jockstrap and his skin was so pale it seemed whitewashed. His legs were as muscular as a ballet dancer’s but his ankles were swollen and both of his arms bore identical purple welts above the elbows. Remembering his Alabama background, I compared him to a Confederate general aloud, “Ensign Adams, you look like General J. E. B. Stuart going drag.”
Despite an expression of intense anxiety on his face, his mouth broke into a wide grin as he looked at me. It was almost a stage grin, but it had enough sincerity to indicate he had understood and appreciated my wit. Gingerly, he started toward me.
“I’d like to introduce myself, Adams,” I began, but he ignored my remark.
“What day is it, Doctor?”
“Wednesday, December 28,” I told him. He had recognized the caduceus on my lapel, which attested to the normalcy of his power of observation.
“Thank God!” The relief that flooded his features seemed to steady his walk. “Forget the debriefing, Doctor. Call Operations and tell them to scratch the Adams-O’Hara Probe.”
He was pointing at a telephone on the bulkhead on my side of the glass and behaving in such a normal manner that I blurted out a normal rejoinder.
“You are the Adams-O’Hara Probe, or what’s left of it.”
“What year is it?” he asked.
“2228.”
Adams reacted like a man struck in the stomach. His body crumpled backward and agony contorted his face. Dazed, he walked over and collapsed in the chair across the panel from me. His eyes focused on some private hell as he half-mumbled to himself, “It didn’t work. It didn’t work.”
“What didn’t work, Adams?” I asked, seating myself at the desk.
“I was trying to invert the dilatation factor and reverse my reference frame.”
Whether his answer was rational or irrational, I couldn’t tell. Spacemen operate in a relativistic universe and I use classical logic. But I remembered the midshipman’s remarks outside Personnel Records.
“Are you referring to a non-Christian frame?”
“Non-Christian frame?” Adams looked at me in puzzlement, and then a broad smile covered his features, a manic-depressive reaction, I decided, in view of his depressed state. “I reckon you mean a non-Galilean frame,” he drawled.
“Well, I’m only a psychiatrist,” I said, “and the only Galilean I know is Christ.”
“The name honors Galileo, Doctor,” he chuckled, “but maybe you hit on the right answer for the wrong reason. Maybe I didn’t pray hard enough.”
Adams was not only sane but sharp. He had detected my confusion of the word “Galilean” with Christ, which indicated a much higher verbal facility than his profile had revealed. But he had forgotten me in some vast inner struggle. Horror and disbelief in his eyes were shifting to resignation. His features were so facile I could read emotions on his face.
Remembering Harkness, I asked, “Why did you abort your mission a year ahead of time, Adams?”
“I didn’t, Doctor. I aborted it by three weeks, from necessity.”
Counting his six-month voyage out, six months in, plus eleven months on the mission, his figures came to twenty-three months. “But you’ve only been gone eleven months,” I pointed out.
“That’s the story of my life, Doctor—too little and too late. I needed to get back two years and I couldn’t gain but one.”
Suddenly, I got a vague glimmering of what he was talking about. “Adams, are you telling me that you were trying to get back here before you left?
“Reckon you can bring out your straitjacket, Doctor, but that’s what I was trying. I know the theory says one solid can’t occupy two places, but theories don’t grow cotton. The Good Book says ‘Ask and you shall receive.’ Lord knows, I asked. I strewed prayers from Cassiopeia to Orion. After that, I was too busy gearing down that whaleboat, topside, to do much praying.”
Here I wanted to take a breather myself but Harkness was observing from the shadows. I quoted my second guideline verbatim. “What in the hell happened to O’Hara?”
“He has joined the immortals,” Adams intoned.
“How did he join them?”
“By the words that issued from my mouth, much as anything. I joshed a university dean who didn’t have a sense of humor. It never pays, Doc, to joke with a man with a literal mind.”
Psychiatrists weigh answers on all levels. Adams’s answer confused me superficially and in depth. There were no known universities on any planet other than Earth, and his answer implied a distaste for a literal mind, the sine qua non of spacemen. Moreover, the laser jockey’s concept of comedy is a double-take followed by a prat fall. Adams was an astronaut complaining about a university dean’s lack of a sense of humor.
Stimuli were piling in so fast that my own response faltered, and I made an ambiguous statement. “Tell me about O’Hara.”
“O’Hara? That old boy was the original kisser of the Blarney Stone. . . . No, I’ll take that back. Whenever old Red kissed anything, he made love to it.”
“I mean, how did he die?” I corrected myself.
“You might say he was trapped in a non-Galilean frame. . . . Your kind, not Galileo’s. . . . If he’d just kept his hands off my woman. . . . He knew I was a forgiving person, but he knew I’d hit first and forgive later.”
Adams was rambling, following a flow of ideas, and I remembered Harkness. “Before you tell me about O’Hara, would you take off your clothes and get into that jumper-suit?”
I pointed to the medical monitor suit hanging from the bulkhead on his side of the panel.
Adams almost leaped to his feet, and he grinned at his own reaction. “After hoisting 800 pounds,” he said, “I feel like a bag full of helium.”
After his initial leap to his feet, Adams moved freely, slipping out of his tunic and jockstrap with a down and up movement of his arms and wobbling only slightly as he walked over to the stretch jumper. An eleven-month tour of duty on a planet with four times the pull of Earth’s gravity