The Rakehells of Heaven. John Boyd

      All rights reserved. Copyright © 1969 by John Boyd.

      Dedicated to Louise the Light Bender Baldwin

      A Knight of ghosts and shadows

      I summoned am to tourney

      Ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end.

      Methinks, it is no journey.

      —Tom o’Bedlam

       CHAPTER ONE

      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