Breaking Point Part 10

"Yes, told," said Paresi angrily. "Look, this is supposed to be restricted information, but the Exploration Service doesn't rely on individual apt.i.tude tests alone to make up a crew. There's another factor--call it an inapt.i.tude factor. In its simplest terms, it comes to this: that a crew can't work together only if each member is the most efficient at his job. He has to _need_ the others, each one of the others. And the word _need_ predicates _lack_. In other words, none of us is a balanced individual. And the imbalances are chosen to match and blend, so that we will react as a balanced unit. Sure I know Johnny's bugaboos, and Hoskins', and yours. They were all in my indoctrination treatments. I know all your case histories, all your psychic push-b.u.t.tons."

"And yours?" demanded the Captain.

"Hoskins, for example," said Paresi. "Happily married, no children.

Physically inferior all his life. Repressed desire for pure science which produced more than a smattering of a great many sciences and made him a h.e.l.l of an engineer. High idealistic quotient; self sacrifice.

Look at him playing chess, making of this very real situation a theoretical abstraction ... like leaving a marriage for deep s.p.a.ce.

"Johnny we know about. Brought up with never failing machines. Still plays with them as if they were toys, and like any imaginative child, turns to his toys for rea.s.surance. He needs to be a hero, hence the stars....

"Ives ... always fat. Learned to be easy-going, learned to laugh _with_ when others were laughing _at_, and bottling up pressures every time it happened. A large appet.i.te. He's here to satisfy it; he's with us so he can eat up the galaxies...."

There was a long pause. "Go on," said the Captain. "Who's next? You?"

"You," said the doctor shortly. "You grew up with a burning curiosity about the nature of things. But it wasn't a scientist's curiosity; it was an aesthete's. You're one of the few people alive who refused a subsidized education and worked your way through advanced studies as a crewman on commercial s.p.a.ce-liners. You became one of the youngest professors of philosophy in recent history. You made a romantic marriage and your wife died in childbirth. Since then--almost a hundred missions with E.A.S., refusing numerous offers of advancement. Do I have to tell you what your bugaboo is now?"

"No," said Anderson hoa.r.s.ely. "But I'm ... not afraid of it. I had no idea your ..." He swallowed. "... information was that complete."

"I wish it wasn't. I wish I had some things to--wonder about," said Paresi with surprising bitterness.

The Captain looked at him shrewdly. "Go on with your case histories."

"I've finished."

"No you haven't." When Paresi did not answer, the Captain nudged him.

"Johnny, Ives, Hoskins, me. Haven't you forgotten someone?"

"No I haven't," snarled Paresi, "and if you expect me to tell you why a psychologist buries himself in the stars, I'm not going to do it."

"I don't want to be told anything so general," said the Captain. "I just want to know why _you_ came out here."

Paresi scowled. The Captain looked away from him and hazarded, "Big frog in a small pond, Nick?"

Paresi snorted.

Anderson asked, "Women don't like you, do they, Nick?"

Almost inaudibly, Paresi said, "Better cut it out, skipper."

Anderson said, "Closest thing to being a mother--is that it?"

Paresi went white.

The Captain closed his eyes, frowned, and at last said, "Or maybe you just want to play G.o.d."

"I'm going to make it tough for you," said Paresi between his teeth.

"There are several ways you can break, just as there are several ways to break a log--explode it, crush it, saw it, burn it.... One of the ways is to fight me until you win. Me, because there's no one else left to fight you. So--I won't fight with you. And you're too rational to attack me unless I do. _That_ is the thing that will make it tough. If you must break, it'll have to be some other way."

"Is that what I'm doing?" the Captain asked with sudden mildness. "I didn't know that. I thought I was trying to get your own case history out of you, that's all. What are you staring at?"

"Nothing."

There was nothing. Where there had been forward viewports, there was nothing. Where there had been controls, the communication station, the forward acceleration panels and storage lockers; the charts and computers and radar gear--there was nothing. Blackness; featureless, silent, impenetrable. They sat on one couch by one wall, to which was fixed one table. Around them was empty floor and a blackness. The chess-player faced into it, and perhaps he was partly within it; it was difficult to see.

The Captain and the medical officer stared at one another. There seemed to be nothing to say.

VI

_For man's sense is falsely a.s.serted to be the standard of things: on the contrary, all the perceptions, both of the senses and the mind, bear reference to man and not to the universe; and the human mind resembles those uneven mirrors which impart their own properties to different objects ... and distorts and disfigures them ... For every one ... has a cave or den of his own which refracts and discolors the light of nature._ --Sir Francis Bacon (1561--1626)

It was the Captain who moved first. He went to the remaining bulkhead, spun a dog, and opened a cabinet. From it he took a rack of spare radar parts and three thick coils of wire. Paresi, startled, turned and saw Hoskins peering owlishly at the Captain.

Anderson withdrew some tools, reached far back in the cabinet, and took out a large bottle.

"Oh," said Paresi. "That.... I thought you were doing something constructive."

In the far shadows, Hoskins turned silently back to his game. The Captain gazed down at the bottle, tossed it, caught it. "I am," he said.

"I am."

He came and sat beside the doctor. He thumbed off the stopper and drank ferociously. Paresi watched, his eyes as featureless as the imprisoning dark.

"Well?" said the Captain pugnaciously.

Paresi's hands rose and fell, once. "Just wondering why."

"Why I'm going to get loopin', stoopin' drunk? I'll tell you why, head-shrinker. Because I want to, that's why. Because I like it. I'm doing something I like because I like it. I'm not doing it because of the inversion of this concealed repression as expressed in the involuted feelings my childhood developed in my att.i.tude toward the s.e.x-life of beavers, see, couch-catechizer old boy? I like it and that's why."

"I knew a man who went to bed with old shoes because he liked it," said Paresi coldly.

The Captain drank again and laughed harshly. "Nothing can change you, can it, Nick?"

Paresi looked around him almost fearfully. "I can change," he whispered.

"Ives is gone. Give me the bottle."

Something clattered to the deck at the hem of the black curtain.

"'S another hallucination," said the Captain. "Go pick up the hallucination, Nicky-boy."

"Not my hallucination," said Paresi. "Pick it up yourself."

"Sure," said the Captain good-naturedly. He waited while Paresi drank, took back the bottle, tilted it sharply over his mouth. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand, exhaled heavily, and went to the blackness across the cabin.

"Well, what do you know," he breathed.