Stone had caught it now. “I never married,” he was saying, “so in a sense I don’t have much to go home to. Not that there wasn’t a girl, but it didn’t work out, and—well, it doesn’t matter. I don’t want to rot for the rest of my life on some strange planet half the universe away from Earth. To die unmourned, alone, forgotten…”
“It would be the will of God, wouldn’t it?” Dominici asked. “Everything’s the will of God. You just sit back and let God pour trouble all over you, and you shrug your shoulders stoically because it’s His will and therefore there’s just no use complaining.” Dominici’s voice had taken on a shrill, flippant edge. “Isn’t that so, Havig? You’re our expert on God. How come you haven’t been spouting your usual stuff to console us? We— Havig!”
Bernard swung around.
It was a startling sight. Sitting by himself, as usual, in his corner bunk, taking no part in the conversation, the lanky Neopuritan was very quietly having what looked like a fit of hysterics.
Like every other aspect of the man, even his very hysteria was subdued, repressed. His body was being racked with great whooping sobs, but Bernard realized that he was choking them back with an almost demonic intensity of concentration. His eyes were wet with tears; his jaws were tightly clenched, his white-knuckled hands gripped the edge of the bunk. The sobs rippled up through him, and grimly he forced them back, not letting a sound escape from his mouth. The conflict between discipline and collapse was evident. The effect was totally astonishing.
The three other men were frozen in surprise a moment. Then Dominici snapped curtly, “Havig! Havig, what’s the matter with you? Are you sick, man?”
“No—not sick,” Havig said, in a low, dark, hollow voice.
“What’s wrong, then? Is there anything we can get for you? Do for you?”
“Leave me alone,” Havig muttered.
Bernard stared at the Neopuritan in consternation. For once, the sociologist felt that he had penetrated Havig’s mask and understood.
“Can’t you see what he’s thinking?” Bernard said quietly to Dominici and Stone. “He’s thinking that all his life he was a good man, kept the ways of God as he saw them, worked hard, prayed. Worshipped Him as he thought He must be worshipped. And—and then this. Lost here, billions and billions of miles from home, church, family. Wife. Children. Gone, and why? He’s breaking up under that. He doesn’t know why.”
The big man rose and took two tottering steps forward, eyes fixed, jaws flecked with spittle.
“Grab him!” Dominici shouted in panic. “He’s cracking up! Grab him or he’ll run wild!”
Without wasting another second, all three sprang toward him. Bernard and Stone each grabbed one enormously long, spidery arm; Dominici reached up, straining practically on tiptoes, and clamped his hands to the linguist’s thin shoulders. Together, by sheer force, they pressed him down onto his bunk and held him there.
Havig’s eyes blazed with indignant fury. “Let go of me! Get your hands away from me! I forbid you to touch me, do you hear?”
“Just lie there until you’re calm,” Bernard told him. “Relax, Havig. Don’t snap now.”
“Watch him,” Dominici murmured.
But Havig was not resisting now. He glowered at the floor and muttered in a broodingly introspective voice, “I have committed some sin—I must have—otherwise why would this have happened? Why has He forsaken me—forsaken all of us?”
“You’re not the first to ask that question,” Dominici said. “At least you’re in good company there.”
A blasphemous quip at a time like this infuriated Bernard for reasons he did not fully understand. “Shut up, you idiot,” he whispered harshly. “You want to drive him out of his mind? Get me a sedative for him.”
“In some way I have offended Him unknowingly,” Havig went on. “And He has taken his light from me. My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken us?”
Bernard felt a wave of pity and compassion so intense that it startled him. This was a man he had once despised for mysticism and fanaticism, a man he had once attacked in print in terms that he now saw had been vicious and petty— and, now that Havig’s shell of faith seemed about to shatter, Bernard felt deep pity.
Bending over Havig, he said sharply, “You’re wrong, Havig. You haven’t been forsaken. This is a trial—a trial of your faith. God is sending tribulations upon you. Remember Job, Havig. He never lost faith.”
Havig’s eyes brightened, and a faint smile broke through the despair. “Yes, perhaps,” he said softly. “A trial of my faith—of my faith and yours, too. As Job, yes. But how can we stand it? Lost out here—perhaps God has turned his face from us—perhaps…” He fell silent, and tears rolled down the gaunt cheeks. Havig looked up imploringly at Bernard, all the old self-willed strength seemingly gone, and began to shake.
Reaching behind him, Bernard deftly took the sonic spray-tube from Dominici and jammed it against a vein in Havig’s thin arm.
He flipped the release, injecting the fluid instantly. Havig muttered something unintelligible and shivered; his eyes glazed; within moments, he had relaxed and was on his way to sleep.
Rising, Bernard mopped the beds of sweat from his forehead. “Whew! I wasn’t expecting that to happen. And it came on so suddenly…”
“Crazy. Absolutely crazy,” Stone said. “How could someone so unstable get sent aboard on this mission?”
Bernard shook his head. “Havig’s not unstable, despite the performance we just saw.”
“What is he if not unstable, then?”
“All this was perfectly understandable. He’s a man who’s built his entire life around one solid set of beliefs. And he’s lived those beliefs, not just talked about them. Call him a fanatic, if you want; I certainly called him enough names. Well, he had the rug yanked out from under him. I guess this was one time he couldn’t write every trial and tribulation off to God’s will and endure it stoically. He ran out of explanations. So he snapped.”
“Will he be okay when he wakes?” asked Dominici. “Or will he take up where he left off?”
“I think he’ll be all right. I hope so. I gave him enough of that stuff to keep him out for hours. Maybe he’ll be calmer when the drug wears off.”
“If he goes on ranting like that,” said Stone, “we’ll just have to gag him. Or keep him drugged, for his good and ours. He’ll drive us all nuts otherwise.”
“I think he’ll get his balance back,” Bernard said. “He’s too fundamentally solid to go off the deep end.”
“I thought you called him a crackpot,” Dominici objected. “Are you going off the deep end too?”
“Maybe I understand Havig and his beliefs a little better now,” Bernard said quietly. “Well, whatever. We just have to sell him on the Job theme when he wakes up. If we can get that idea across to him, he’ll be a tower of strength from now on, and there won’t be any more crackups.”
“Job? What’s that?” Stone asked.
“Figure from the Judaeo-Christian religious books,” Bernard said. “It’s a very good poem, really. It tells how the Devil made a bet with God that this man Job would lose his faith under stress, and so the Devil was permitted to visit all manner of plagues and calamities on Job. Things that make getting lost in space look perfectly mild. But Job stood his ground all the same, never weakening in his faith even when things looked blackest. And eventually…”