The gangly young man slumped limply on the white metal stool in the Strahorn's sick bay. His mind was working frantically and repetitiously:
My name is Dalton Mirni, and I am a . . . My profession is . . . I have finished my special training and am now a competent . . .
He could not remember the missing word. Gone with it was all the knowledge of the subject of . . . acquired during twenty years of schooling. The loss was too shattering to accept.
He was dimly aware that someone had joined him and the medic in the sick bay, and glanced up long enough to identify the man as the ship's captain. He heard their conversation with scant attention.
"When did he get like this?" The captain's voice was hard and cold.
"Just before I called you, sir. I was getting his history, and he told me he had been in a special kind of school since he was four. A very strange place, the way he described it. I asked him what he had studied there and he started to answer. Then he laughed and started to answer again, but didn't. He seemed to be trying to remember. When I repeated the question I got no reply. He was almost catatonic when I called you, sir, but I noticed him raise his eyes when you came in."
"Mirni!" the captain barked sharply. Dalton Mirni heard but did not try to respond. His brain captured and echoed the sound "Mirni!" complete with the commanding tone of the captain's voice, and tried to use it to arouse his lost memories. "Mirni!" he shouted silently. "Mirni! . . . ! Mirni! . . . !" But the blank remained blank.
When he again noticed the conversation, the captain was saying impatiently, "Let me review for your benefit, Bolinski. First, we're out in the Periphery, where the friends of Earth are few and questionable. Second, we receive a distress call and home in on a survival capsule containing this whoever-he-is Mirni. Instead of a sick, scared castaway, he comes aboard as assured and beamish as a Vegan princeling—yet he claims to have been separated from 'real' humanity (whatever that means!) since he was four. And he says he can't identify his home planet, so we have to send out the standard identification-query call, meaning we inform the universe at large that we have picked up a man named Dalton Mirni whose description is such-and-such.
"Now, after all this, our assured young princeling abruptly displays a lapse of memory and goes zombie on us. You can offer what explanation you like, Bolinski, but one alone sticks in my mind: We're being had! Somebody's playing a tricky game with us, and with no friendly intent. So why not use your investigatory drugs on this jerk and get to the bottom of it?"
"If you'll make that an order, Captain Devista, O.K.," the medic replied stubbornly. "But you know the restrictions on those drugs. Besides, if somebody is trying to sucker us, maybe they expect us to shoot the kid with a quizzer. But, if you'll give me a direct order—"
"You're getting close to insubordination, Bolinski!" the captain flared.
"I'm ready to obey orders, sir," the medic returned tightly.
Dalton Mirni struggled part way out of the depths to say: "The drugs . . . may help."
His speaking startled the two men. "You'll volunteer to take them?" the captain demanded.
"Yes."
"Get his authorization on a sealed tape, Bolinski, and proceed," the captain snapped.
The medic led Mirni across the room to a small, seamless metal box. "Hold this grip," he said, "and answer this question: Do you, Dalton Mirni, voluntarily agree to submit to interrogation under medication?"
"Yes."
"All right, you can turn loose, and sign your name through this slot."
Mirni accepted the pencil and signed. Captain Devista was watching over his shoulder.
"You speak and write Anglo-Ruski like an adult," the captain remarked. "That must have been part of your training."
"No. I was taught language by the play-people. Language, history, the arts, physical sciences, planetography . . . I remember all those."
"Who are the play-people?"
"They were the . . . the projections I lived among outside of school hours." Having started talking, Mirni found the conversation a comforting distraction from his mental turmoil. He continued as Bolinski placed an applicator against his bare arm and squeezed the trigger. "I don't know the mechanics of the play-people projections—how the teachers made them. They seemed like real people, like you or me, and I was supposed to treat them as real, even though they weren't."
"How do you know they weren't?" asked Devista.
"Because when I was fourteen, going through a goofy stage, I got angry one day and told the play-people they were nothings, that I was the only real person and they should do as I told them. They became statues! Their bodies turned slick and hard, and I couldn't budge any of them, not even my baby cousin. It was spooky! That lasted all day and night, but everything was back to normal when I came home from school the next morning."
"You had a cousin there?"
"A play-cousin, of course, and an aunt and uncle I lived with. You see, the teachers didn't want me to become alienated from humanity, so they supplied a normal play-home and community for me to live in." Talking grew increasingly easier for Mirni as the drugs took effect, and the thought of his loss was less disturbing.
"Then your teachers were not human?" the captain asked.
"Oh no! Nor any of the other students, either."
"What were the teachers like?"
"I don't know. They never showed me. Sometimes a teacher would appear as a human, sometimes like one of the other students, and sometimes we wouldn't see him at all. We would just know he was there talking to us."
"Talking about what?"
There was no hint of an answer in Mirni's memory. "I don't know. That's gone."
"Why did you stop talking when Bolinski asked you a similar question?"
"Because I didn't realize until I tried to answer him that I had forgotten. It was a shock to learn that."
"Is it still a shock?"
"Yes, but the drug seems to help."
The ship's intercom buzzed and the captain answered, "Yes?"
"Mirni identified, sir," the speaker said. "He's a citizen of Earth and the only located survivor of the CES Gorman which was lost beyond Antares in 2709. He was on board with his parents."
"Acknowledged," growled Devista.
"That fits with what I remember," said Mirni, "and what the teachers told me. They said the ship blew up, and I was the only one they rescued."
Bolinski remarked to the captain with evident enjoyment, "It's hard to see how anybody could embarrass an Earth ship by planting an Earth citizen aboard, sir."
The captain ignored the jibe. "Does that drug ever fail to elicit the truth?" he demanded.
"Not when handled properly, sir. Mirni's telling you the truth as he knows it."
"As he knows it," the captain grunted. "He could have been fed a cock-and-bull story under hypnosis. Would that fool your drug?"
"Captain, I'm no psychographer," retorted Bolinski. "I can't answer that."
Devista paced the room, fuming. "Men have been knocking about interstellar space for over five hundred years," he barked, "without seeing a sign of intelligent extraterrestrial life! Then this boy comes drifting along in a surcap with his tale of a race of super-teachers, along with several student races—implying that we're among the latter. And very conveniently, he goes amnesiac on the one subject that might prove his story! Do you expect me to believe him?"
Bolinski shrugged. "I'm not saying I believe him myself, sir. I'm simply reserving judgment on his story."
Devista grunted. "Well, keep him confined under observation. I want a private word with him, so I'll see him to his cubicle."
"Yes, sir. He can go in Number Three."
Mirni followed the captain through a hallway off sick bay and into an eight-foot cube room. "Sit down," said the captain. Mirni sat on the bed and looked up at Devista, who was studying him with an annoyed frown.
"This is no luxury liner, Mirni," the captain said harshly. "We're a Commercial Earth Spacer, as the Gorman was, but freight's our business and we have a minimal crew. We're not prepared to baby you all the way back to Earth. So no more of that deep-ending, understand?"
Mirni nodded. "I'm under control now, captain, and I think I can stay that way. I realize you have plenty of problems without me, so—"
"Problems?" snapped Devista. "Why do you think I've got problems, and what business of yours is it if I have?"
"I'm sorry, sir," Mirni answered contritely. "I don't mean to butt in. But I couldn't help noticing the way you spoke to Bolinski, and the way he spoke to you. It was easy to see there's trouble between you and your crew."
The captain stared at him. "For a kid who claims to have spent almost his whole life away from people," he grated, "you see a hell of a lot."
"Being with the play-people accounts for that."
"That's no answer," the captain replied. "People live together for years without knowing each other's problems."
"But I was supposed to work at understanding the play-people," Mirni explained. "That was so that, when I learned my . . . my profession and came home, I would know how to stay on good terms with everyone, and my work would be accepted. It's important to be liked, no matter what job you're doing."
The captain nodded jerkily. "That's the truth. And that's the trouble on this ship! This is probably my last trip as a commanding officer." He flopped tiredly on the bed and stared at the floor.
"What happened?" asked Mirni.
"A case of insubordination—Spaceman First Ferris. He's the guy who brought in your capsule."
"Oh, the big red-headed fellow," recalled Mirni.
The captain nodded. "A week ago he gave me some back talk. The words got hotter until he made a remark no ship commander can afford to tolerate. I threw the book at him. He's to stand trial before the adjutant of the next planetary base we reach. That's on Fingal, four days from now."
"This sounds more like trouble for Spaceman Ferris than for you," Mirni observed. The tranquilizing effect of the drugs was wearing off, and he had to make an effort to attend the captain's words.
"Except for one thing. Ferris intends to call half the crew as witnesses. There's a rule in the Merchant Spaceman's Code that a crew member who has given unfriendly testimony about a superior officer cannot be required to serve under him any longer. After that trial the Strahorn won't have enough crew left to lift off of Fingal—unless I resign then and there. And there's no recruiting on Fingal. It's unfriendly to Earth. So I've been mouse-trapped!"
Mirni nodded soberly. After a pause he asked, "Captain, would it be impossible for you to drop the charges against Ferris? I can understand your moral objections to that idea, but if that's the only way out for you—"
"Oh, I've thought of that. It's out. Not so much on moral grounds, because . . . well, I am a hard man to get along with. The fault wasn't all Ferris's. But a captain can't humiliate himself that way."
"I don't see why anybody can't admit a mistake, or even apologize for one. Everybody makes them."
"Well . . . if it would do any good, maybe. But it wouldn't. If I withdrew the charges, and even apologized to Ferris, next trip out I'd run into the same thing with Chief Engineer Thorns, or Zaffuto the cook, or somebody. Why postpone it?"
"Gosh, Captain, I hate to see this happen to you," said Mirni. "I imagine that, except for this problem with subordinates, you're an unusually capable ship commander."
"I have to be that or I wouldn't have lasted as long as I have!" Devista chuckled ruefully.
"It would be such a waste," Mirni nodded. "There ought to be a more lasting solution of some kind. Don't ships have executive officers to handle most business with the crews in place of the captains?"
"That's right," said Devista, "but in practice on a ship this size and type the captain acts as his own exec. If he turned the job over to someone else, ten percent of his pay would go with it. It just isn't done."
"Is the money that important?"
"Well . . . no, but it isn't done. But—" The captain hesitated. "If I apologized to Ferris and dropped the charges, and named somebody like Warrant Officer Soklov as exec . . . the men seem to like him—"
"That way you could concentrate on the things you do best," Mirni said.
The captain stood up, frowning thoughtfully. "Maybe it's worth thinking over. Now, son, as I said, this is no luxury liner, but we ought to be able to make you comfortable. Ask Bolinski for anything you need, and if he can't provide it tell him to call me. Or to call Soklov and he can call me."
"Thanks, Captain. I'll be O.K., I'm sure. One thing I'd appreciate. I want to thank Spaceman Ferris for hauling me in. So, if you or Soklov would ask him to drop by some time tomorrow—"
"Certainly. And, son, when you see him, I wonder if you would try to talk some reason into that mule head of his?"