Chapter XV

It was a dank fog-shrouded morning. Sometime during the night the quill of the dead reckoner had traced its fine red line over the 30th meridian. Roughly half-way, Charles Orsino thought, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. But the line was straight as a string for the last four hours of their run. The damn girl must have fallen asleep on watch. He glared at her in the bow and broke open a ration. Blandly oblivious to the glare, she said: “Good morning.”

Charles swallowed a mouthful of chocolate, half-chewed, and choked on it. He reached hastily for water and found the tall plastic column of the ion-exchange apparatus empty. “Damn it,” he snarled, “why didn’t you refill this thing when you emptied it? And why didn’t you zig-zag overnight? You’re utterly irresponsible.” He hurled the bucket overside, hauled it up and slopped seawater into the apparatus. Now there’d be a good twenty minutes before a man-sized drink accumulated.

“Just a minute,” she told him steadily. “Let’s straighten this out. I haven’t had any water on the night watch so I didn’t have any occasion to refill the tube. You must have taken the last of the water with your dinner. And as for the zig-zag, you said we should run a straightaway now and then to mix it up. I decided that last night was as good a time as any.”

He took a minute drink from the reservoir, stalling. There was something--yes; he had meant to refill the apparatus after his dinner ration. And he had told her to give it a few hours of straightaway some night...

He said formally: “You’re quite right on both counts. I apologize.” He bit into a ration.

“That’s not good enough,” she said. “I’m not going to have you tell me you’re sorry and then go scowling and sulking about the boat. In fact I don’t like your behavior at all.”

He said, enormously angry: “Oh, you don’t do you?“ and hated her, the world and himself for the stupid inadequacy of the comeback.

“No. I don’t. I’m seriously worried. I’m afraid the conditioning you got didn’t fall away completely when they swore you in. You’ve been acting irrationally and inconsistently.”

“What about you?” he snapped. “You got conditioned too.”

“That’s right,” she said. “That’s another reason why you’re worrying me. I find impulses in myself that have no business there. I simply seem to do a better job of controlling them than you’re doing. For instance: we’ve been quarreling and at cross-purposes ever since you and Martha picked me up. That couldn’t be unless I were contributing to the friction.”

The wheel was fixed; she took a step or two aft and said professorially: “I’ve never had trouble getting along with people. I’ve had differences, of course, and at times I’ve allowed myself displays of temper when it was necessary to assert myself. But I find that you upset me; that for some reason or other your opinion on a matter is important to me, that if it differs with mine there should be a reconciliation.”

He put down the ration and said wonderingly: “Do you know, that’s the way I feel about you? And you think it’s the conditioning or--or something?” He took a couple of steps forward, hesitantly.

“Yes,” she said in a rather tremulous voice. “The conditioning or something. For instance, you’re inhibited. You haven’t made an indecent proposition to me, not even as a matter of courtesy. Not that I care, of course, but--” In stepping aft, she tripped over the water bucket and went down to the deck with a faint scream.

He said: “Here, let me help you.” He picked her up and didn’t let go.

“Thanks,” she said faintly. “The conditioning technique can’t be called faulty, but it has inherent limitations...” She trailed off and he kissed her. She kissed back and said more faintly still: “Or it might be the drugs we used ... Oh, Charles, what took you so long?”

He said, brooding: “You’re way out of my class, you know. I’m just a bagman for the New York police. I wouldn’t even be that if it weren’t for Uncle Frank, and you’re a Falcaro. It’s just barely thinkable that I could make a pass at you. I guess that held me off and I didn’t want to admit it so I got mad at you instead. Hell, I could have swum back to the base and made a damned fool of myself trying to find Grinnel, but down inside I knew better. The kid’s gone.”

“We’ll make a psychologist of you yet,” she said.

“Psychologist? Why? You’re joking.”

“No. It’s not a joke. You’ll like psychology, darling. You can’t go on playing polo forever, you know.”

Darling! What was he getting into? Old man Gilby was four-goal at sixty, wasn’t he? Good God, was he hooked into marriage at twenty-three? Was she married already? Did she know or care whether he was? Had she been promiscuous? Would she continue to be? He’d never know; that was the one thing you never asked; your only comfort, if you needed comfort, was that she could never dream of asking you. What went on here? Let me out!

It went through his mind in a single panicky flash and then he said: “The hell with it,” and kissed her again.

She wanted to know: “The hell with what, darling?”

“Everything. Tell me about psychology. I can’t go on playing polo forever.”

It was an hour before she got around to telling him about psychology: “The neglect has been criminal--and inexplicable. For about a century it’s been assumed that psychology is a dead fallacy. Why?”

“All right,” he said amiably, playing with a lock of her hair. “Why?”

“Lieberman,” she said. “Lieberman of Johns-Hopkins. He was one of the old-line topological psychology men--don’t let the lingo throw you, Charles; it’s just the name of a system. He wrote an attack on the mengenlehre psychology school--point-sets of emotions, class-inclusions of reactions and so on. He blasted them to bits by proving that their constructs didn’t correspond to the emotions and reactions of random-sampled populations. And then came the pay-off: he tried the same acid test on his own school’s constructs and found out that they didn’t correspond either. It didn’t frighten him; he was a scientist. He published, and then the jig was up. Everybody, from full professors to undergraduate students went down the roster of the schools of psychology and wrecked them so comprehensively that the field was as dead as palmistry in twenty years. The miracle is that it hadn’t happened before. The flaws were so glaring! Textbooks of the older kind solemnly described syndromes, psychoses, neuroses that simply couldn’t be found in the real world! And that’s the way it was all the way down the line.”