The Rakehells of Heaven. John Boyd

      “Looks like you’ve been manhandled around your belly,” I remarked.

      “Little old girl hugged me,” he said, and the sadness that came to his eyes told me that his relationship with the “little old girl” had not been as casual as his words suggested.

      When he slipped into the suit and came over to resume his seat, I glanced down at the telemetering chart. Both lower ribs on each side of his ribcage were broken. On Earth, a contusion of such nature could only have been inflicted by the coils of an anaconda.

      When I glanced up, the glaze was descending over his eyes. To draw him out of himself, I said, “You were saying O’Hara had the gift of gab.”

      Adams straightened. His voice came stronger, more resonant, and a strange light glittered in his eyes. “It was more than the gift of gab, Doctor—in the beginning there were words, and the words were O’Hara’s, but O’Hara was the Word.”

      With that remark, he knocked my stimulus-response tactics awry with the joy that surpasses understanding by any save a psychiatrist at Mandan. I recognized the original of his paraphrase. Those words had been uttered 2,200 years ago by another John, Saint John the Apostle.

      At that moment, I lost whatever interest I might have had in the entrapment of John Adams for alleged violations of Navy Regulations. Sex and religion are the two best-paved lanes to lunacy and Adams was driving in both lanes with a load of guilt. Inwardly I laid out my sculptor’s implements, insight, empathy, interrogation, for the chunk of marble before me was pure Carrara—a loony who used Einstein’s Revised General Theory as a tool of his trade.

      “How did you meet old Red, John?” I let my voice snuggle close to him. “Tell me from the beginning.”

       CHAPTER TWO

      In the Academy yearbook (Adams began), O’Hara’s official nickname is King Con. He was the first man I met at Mandan, and within five minutes of our introduction I became the victim of his first confidence trick. I had tossed my bag on the lower bunk of the room assigned to me when an upperclassman ushered him in. “Midshipman Adams, your roommate, Midshipman O’Hara.”

      Right then I should have been wary, for O’Hara was carrying his gear in a carpet bag, but the calluses on his hand were as horny as mine and the smile that cracked his freckles beguiled me. “From your friendly face and honest eyes,” he said, “I gather you’re an American.”

      “Right,” I answered.

      “And from your accent—I have a fine ear for dialects—that most hospitable of all Americans, a Southerner.”

      “Jacksons Gap, Alabama,” I said, astonished because I had spoken only one word.

      His accent was neutral English, that hybrid of Midwestern U.S.A. and Oxonian which television actors affect, but all the rest of him was Irish, red hair, freckles, a nose pinched out of his face, protruding cheekbones and a deft in his chin.

      “I’m shanty Irish,” he said, “from County Meath. We Irish are so poor and cramped on our little isle that we cannot afford the open-handed generosity of you Americans. . . . Ah, I see you have taken the lower bunk. No matter, the climbing will do me good.”

      “O’Hara,” I said, “if you want the lower bunk, you’re welcome to it.”

      “Now, doesn’t that bear out all that I’ve said. . . . What is your first name.”

      “John. My friends generally call me Jack.”

      “Jack! A lovely, no-nonsense name. Kevin’s mine, but I prefer Red. . . . No, Jack. I’ll not take advantage of your generosity. Rather I’ll risk my neck in a fall, for I’ll confess: I imbibe a bit on Saturday nights.”

      “She’s all yours, Red,” I said. “I could never bear the death of a drinking man on my conscience.”

      Suiting action to words, I hoisted my bag to the top bunk when I noticed a Delta Airlines waybill dangling from the handle, stamped large with the code “Montgom-Mandex,” meaning “Montgomery to Mandan.”

      O’Hara was as honest as his talents permitted. He spoke a fractional truth when he said he imbibed a “bit” on Saturday nights. In the following three and a half years, the only sober Saturday night we spent together was on our junior training cruise three parsecs out into the Milky Way, where he demonstrated that his skills as a space jockey were equal to his skills as a tippler. He could turn a starship in the solar system and give you back Pluto and Uranus for change. Ashore and aloft, he was fearless, for he truly believed in the luck of the Irish. He wore green polka-dot drawers at all times and dangled a green leprechaun from the abort throttle of his cockpit. Now, I carried a rabbit’s foot in my pocket, but I didn’t depend on it.

      Our Saturday sorties into the wilds of Mandan sometimes resembled forays. Red chose the “off-limit” houses guarded by military police on the theory that such places catered to officers who did not wish to be recognized by midshipmen. He might have been right about Madame Chacaud’s—Dirty Mary’s to the midshipmen. Her girls were refined enough not to stick their gum behind their ears and she kept a bottle of Jamiesons on tap for Red. Each girl had a television set in her room and Red would lounge around on a Sunday morning indulging in another of his passions—soap operas.

      Until our senior year, Red and I came and went freely because we kept civilian clothes in the bus-station locker and the military police never questioned civilians.

      One February night in our senior year, Red and I were enjoying a few social drinks preliminary to the festivities at Madame Chacaud’s when Red took affront at a Swede who preferred aquavit to Irish whisky. Red argued that his travels in space qualified him as an expert on drinks. His adversary pointed out that space travel did not qualify a man to be a judge of whiskies. Red resented the intrusion of logic into the argument and decided on other methods of persuasion.

      Unluckily, Red was too small and too drunk to persuade the man who was about to sum up his case in defense of aquavit when I interposed a few arguments in favor of bourbon and branch water. Bourbon was about to be crowned king of drinks in Mandan when the crash of furniture, the squeal of females and the quivering of the building drew the M.P.s in from outside.

      My opponent pointed at O’Hara. “That space cadet started it, and this dehorn jumped in.”

      “Space cadet?” The M.P. sergeant turned to O’Hara. “Show me your I.D., mister.”

      “I was rolled, Major, so my wallet is missing, but that gentleman,” Red nodded toward me, “is a farmer from Dubuque and I am his hired man. He will vouch for me.”

      The sergeant turned to me. “Show me your palms, mister.”

      As I extended my palms, I realized I had been tricked by a soldier with only slightly less brains than brawn. In my three years as a midshipman, my calluses had navigated around my hands from my palms to my knuckles.

      “You’re a liar, too,” the sergeant said.

      “Are you letting that dogface call a midshipman a liar, Adams?” O’Hara bellowed in anger from between two restraining M.P.s.

      Suddenly the honor of the Navy was mine to uphold and defend. When my fist slammed into the sergeant’s belly, his “whoof” drew the attention of his comrades, who dropped O’Hara and turned on me.

      Treason and betrayal!

      Through a picket fence of billy clubs flailing before my eyes, I glimpsed my comrade slinking out of the door when he should have been attacking the exposed flank and rear. The red rat was deserting me. Anguish slowed my defenses and an M.P. slipped around me and cold-cocked me from the rear.

      But justice triumphed. Too drunk to negotiate the icy steps, O’Hara slipped and fell to the sidewalk. When the M.P.s dragged me out, Red was asleep and snoring, in easy tossing distance of the arriving paddywagon.

      Before noon Sunday I awakened