Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
PERFECT CONTROL
By RICHARD STOCKHAM
Illustrated by MEL HUNTER
Why can't you go home again after years in space? There hadto be an answer ... could he find it in time, though?
itting at his desk, Colonel Halter brought the images on thetelescreen into focus. Four booster tugs were fastening, likesky-barnacles, onto the hull of the ancient derelict, Alpha.
He watched as they swung her around, stern down, and sank with herthrough the blackness, toward the bluish-white, moon-lighted arc ofEarth a thousand miles below.
He pressed a button. The image of tugs and hull faded and the controlroom of the old ship swam onto the screen.
Colonel Halter saw the crew, sitting in a half circle, before thecontrol panel.
The telescreen in the control room of old Alpha was yet dark. Thefaces watching it held no care lines or laugh lines, only a vagueexpression of kindness. They could be faces of wax or those of peopledying pleasantly.
Colonel Halter shook his head. Brilliant—the finest space people inthe field seventy-five years back—and now he was to get them to comeout of that old hull. God almighty, how could you pull people out ofan environment they were perfectly adjusted to? Logic? Force? Reason?Humoring? How could you know?
Talk to them, he told himself. He dreaded it, but the problem had tobe faced.
He flipped a switch on his desk; saw light jump into their screen andhis own face take shape there; saw their faces on his own screen, setnow, like the faces of stone idols.
He turned another dial. The picture swung around so that he waslooking into their eyes and they into his.
Halter said, "Captain McClelland?"
One of the old men nodded. "Yes."
McClelland was clean-shaven. His uniform, treated againstdeterioration, was immaculate, but his body showed frail and bonythrough it. His face was long and hollow-cheeked, the eyes deep-setand bright. The head was like a skull, the nose an eagle's beak.
"I'm Colonel Halter. I'm a psychotherapist."
one of them answered. There was only the faint thrumming of therockets lowering the old ship to Earth.
"Let me be sure I have your identities right," went on Colonel Halter.
He then looked at the man on the captain's right. "You, I believe, areLieutenant James Brady."
Brady nodded, his pale, eroded face expressionless.
Colonel Halter saw the neat black uniform, identical with thecaptain's; saw the cropped gray hair and meticulously trimmed goatee.
"And you," he said to the woman sitting beside the lieutenant, "areDr. Anna Mueller."
The same nod and thin, expressionless face. The same paleness. Fadedh