Читать книгу The Rakehells of Heaven - John Boyd - Страница 6

Astronauts hold few charms for psychiatrists.

With Their “Rogers” and their “Wilcos” and their “A-Okays,” the eagle scouts of the Space Navy are all typical American boys who like girls and would rather go bowling than read a book. No matter if the astronaut comes from Basutoland, black and fuzzy-haired, he’s still an all-American boy.

Malfunctions of the ego are as rare among the breed as roses on Mars, or so I thought when I came to Mandan. And so I continued to think until I debriefed Ensign John Adams after his unscheduled touchdown at the Mandan Pad. In John Adams, I found the psychiatric equivalent of an orchid blooming on Jupiter.

As a psychiatrist of Plato’s school, I would have never volunteered for duty at the Mandan Naval Academy. Platonists are sculptors of the psyche who hold that sanity is innate in man’s mind. Our tools are rhetoric, insight, empathy and, above all, the question, for wise interrogation is the better part of therapy. Our marble is mined from the loony bins of Earth. Yet, with Bellevue Hospital but a few blocks from where I was graduated, the bureaucracy ordered me to intern at the North Dakota space complex “to broaden my technical knowledge.”

I got to Mandan in late September, a week before school opened, during the point of impact called autumn when winter kicks summer off the Northern Plains. I reported to Space Surgeon Commander Harkness, USN (MC), commandant of the infirmary staff. Doctor Harkness, or Commander, as he preferred to be called, was a neurosurgeon, which is a fancy name for a brain mechanic who uses laser drills and saws.

Harkness made no attempt to suppress his hostility toward interns in general and psychiatrists in particular. He assigned me to interview incoming midshipmen who had already been Rorschached from Johannesburg to Juneau. It was salt-mine work. Any behavioral psychologist could have handled it, but it implemented Harkness’s policy of making interns sweat.

In my first three weeks, I interviewed over two hundred yearlings and found only one whose behavior was suspect, an earlobe-puller from Shanghai. His ear-pulling suggested a compulsion neurosis that can be dangerous in space—such boys start counting stars when they should be tending the helm. I offered my Chinese ear-puller to Harkness to demonstrate my application to duty. Harkness felt the lad’s earlobe, found a pimple which had irritated it and gave me a dressing down. “One thing we don’t do at Mandan, Doctor, is stumble over facts to get at a theory.”

Actually, Harkness’s ridicule was my high point at Mandan until Adams touched down in late December. Curse me for a masochist, but any emotion that colored that wasteland of psychiatrists was welcome. I chewed my hostility like a betel nut.

It was 5:45 P.M., Wednesday, December 28. I had the medical watch in the infirmary when Harkness called. “Doctor, are you the only psychiatrist aboard?”

“Yes, sir,” I answered, “and will be during the holidays.”

“Then you’ll have to do. . . . We’ve got a space scout, Ensign John Adams, in orbit. His E.T.A. at the northwest pad is 20:10. He’s requested immediate debriefing in the decontamination chamber beneath the landing pad, which tells us something. He’s the only man on a two-seater scouting craft, which tells us more. Moreover, he lifted off last January with a running mate, Ensign Kevin O’Hara. Not only is Adams coming back alone, he’s better than a year ahead of schedule. You’re our question-and-answer expert, Doctor, and you’ve been yearning for variety. Here’s your chance. Get cracking on the personnel files of Adams and O’Hara, Probe 2813. Keep in mind, Doctor, the indices point to stalker’s fever.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“Another thing, Doctor: either Adams has aborted the mission or he’s coming out of a non-Galilean frame. In either event, he’s violating Navy Regulations.”

“Yes, sir.” I hung up, slightly addled.

Generally it took three days to prepare for the debriefing of a returning probe. I knew this from department scuttlebutt since there had been no debriefings during my tenure. Usually, the job was assigned to a senior psychiatrist, but I was more pleased than nervous. By sneering at me as a “question-and-answer expert,” Harkness was subconsciously admitting that the debriefing of Adams was a task above and beyond the skills of a lobotomist, and Harkness would trepan a man for a headache.

I sprinted down the hall to the personnel-files locker, guarded by a midshipman, and took the psychological-profile cards of John Adams and Kevin O’Hara from the class of ’27, last year’s graduating class. On my way out, I paused long enough to ask the sentry, “What’s a non-Galilean frame?”

He braced himself and looked straight ahead. “An inertial frame of reference, sir, in a constantly accelerating free fall, sir, which exceeds the speed of light at its apex velocity, sir.”

“At ease, sailor,” I said. “What does all that mean in plain language?”

“That is plain language, sir. Mathematically, it’s stated like this, sir: if the square root of one, minus V squared, C squared . . .”

“Never mind,” I said. “If light is a constant, how do you exceed the speed of light?”

“You don’t, sir. Under the New Special Theory, sir, the speed of light is constant in reference to any inertial frame—that’s the observer’s point of view, sir—even when the frame is thinned to a Minkowski one-space, sir.”

I nodded, “But how does the frame get thin?”

“The Lorentz-Fitzgerald Contraction, sir.”

“Thank you,” I said, and went back to the office to insert Adams’ profile into the typewriter.

Reading the machine almost as fast as it converted the card into typewriting, I found what I expected in John Adams, the same well-adjusted, nontraumatized stimulus and response mechanism I would have gotten from any other card in the Academy files. Adams went a little above the norm in aggressiveness, an understandable deviation when related to the speed of his motor reflexes, which were also faster than the norm. He had probably won a lot of fistfights as a schoolboy—in Alabama, I noted.

Genealogically, too, there was nothing unusual in Adams’ background except a great-grandmother who had been a female journeyman preacher, a traveling evangelist for one of those off-beat Protestant sects that still crop up in the South.

Before I read Keven O’Hara’s card, I knew something about him from reading Adams’s profile. It’s Academy policy to match the personalities of running mates on space flight on a basis of compatible differences—the separate-but-equal theory—in order to diminish boredom on long flights by permitting an active interreaction of personalities without arousing antagonisms. Boredom mixed with antagonism gives a breeding ground for stalker’s fever, that ailment indigenous to space flights wherein spacemen stalk each other through the confines of their ship as animals intent on their prey. It is a peculiar ailment; usually fatal, since the spaceman who suffers it least on a flight is the one most apt to succumb.

O’Hara, too, stood high on the chart for aggressiveness, but he was smaller than Adams and his reflexes were adjudged slower. His genealogy also offered an anomaly, a grandfather who had been a Catholic priest and an underground colonel in the Irish Republican Army who had been slain in the Rebellion of 2160. O’Hara was from County Meath, in Ireland.

First, I had to consider the possibility of murder based on the index of aggressiveness in the profiles of the two. Aggressiveness is hostility under restraint. Weaken the restraint and you have violence, a principle long ago recognized by the Law and Order Statutes of Imperial Earth. With two such men confined in a space shell, without law and custodians of their own order, a chance remark might have stirred old religious antagonisms into a flare of anger. Then, after a sudden blow, a corpse might be shoved through an airlock to tumble forever through infinity.

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 the chute, but the imminent arrival of my patient concerned me now only peripherally. The intent behind Harkness’ words stunned me.

“Remember Plato’s injunction,” the lobotomist had the gall to tell me, “that the better part of a prosecution rests on a faculty for wise interrogation, so get him to incriminate himself. One of his monitoring systems has been programmed with a copy of Navy Regulations, and it will be checking for violations as he talks. So, keep him talking, Doctor.”

“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 explained his swollen ankles but there was one condition of his body revealed by his nakedness which it did not explain: encompassing his torso above his navel was a livid welt that matched the bruises on his arms.

“Looks like you’ve been manhandled around your belly,” I remarked.

“Little old girl hugged me,” he said, and the sadness that came to his eyes told me that his relationship with the “little old girl” had not been as casual as his words suggested.

When he slipped into the suit and came over to resume his seat, I glanced down at the telemetering chart. Both lower ribs on each side of his ribcage were broken. On Earth, a contusion of such nature could only have been inflicted by the coils of an anaconda.

When I glanced up, the glaze was descending over his eyes. To draw him out of himself, I said, “You were saying O’Hara had the gift of gab.”

Adams straightened. His voice came stronger, more resonant, and a strange light glittered in his eyes. “It was more than the gift of gab, Doctor—in the beginning there were words, and the words were O’Hara’s, but O’Hara was the Word.”

With that remark, he knocked my stimulus-response tactics awry with the joy that surpasses understanding by any save a psychiatrist at Mandan. I recognized the original of his paraphrase. Those words had been uttered 2,200 years ago by another John, Saint John the Apostle.

At that moment, I lost whatever interest I might have had in the entrapment of John Adams for alleged violations of Navy Regulations. Sex and religion are the two best-paved lanes to lunacy and Adams was driving in both lanes with a load of guilt. Inwardly I laid out my sculptor’s implements, insight, empathy, interrogation, for the chunk of marble before me was pure Carrara—a loony who used Einstein’s Revised General Theory as a tool of his trade.

“How did you meet old Red, John?” I let my voice snuggle close to him. “Tell me from the beginning.”