"Silence!" Linder had turned at the door of Stern's cabin and was glaring at him. "I don't want to hear a word from you the rest of this voyage."
Stern sighed and calmly sat down at his desk to make some preliminary calculations. It would probably work out all right; after a few days in hyperspace Linder would come to him, more or less his old congenial self, and this prohibition would be quickly forgotten.
But it did not work out that way. Every time Stern started a conversation with the Commander or Barnes they stared unresponsively at him and even Crawford sometimes backed away, trying to exchange as few words as possible.
One day Linder approached the permaquartz window to find Stern, deep in thought, muttering to himself some ancient rhyme about Patty cake, patty cake, baker man. Oblivious to everything else about him, Stern was holding his right hand above his head and his left close to his stomach. The right hand, palm downward was moving in a clockwise direction while the other went anti-clockwise, but at the words Baker man the movement of both hands was abruptly reversed. For a while Linder watched these reversals, sometimes inaccurately changed into both clockwise or both anti-clockwise movements. Finally he said "Hmmph!" and strode away, leaving Stern standing there in confusion at discovering he had been observed.
Following this embarrassing episode, Stern tried several times to explain what he had been doing but was perfunctorily rejected in each attempt. The days hung heavily as more and more crew members, deciding to play it safe, imitated their chief and treated him like a pariah. Most even refused to exchange brief comments about the Probe's navigational progress across the Galaxy, the spaceman's polite equivalent of the landman's time-killing rehashes of the weather. Eventually Crawford alone was left among those indifferent to Linder's wrath and Barnes' prying.
"It's an utterly ridiculous situation," Stern protested one day when Crawford came by.
"I know it."
"What's he going to accuse me of when we reach Terra—secret communication with the enemy?"
"Practically. You'll be tried on suspicion of that possibility."