"While our keepers were sending Lapins through every major discipline offered on the campus," he said, "it seems they'd have done well to have trained one of us in psychiatry."
"For what?" I demanded. "So we could have someone right here in the Tank to spoon out our soothing-syrups? Man, we've got a right to be stir-crazy. We're life prisoners and we've committed no crime." I stopped to get my calm back. "Bud," I asked, "do you know what I want more than anything else, next to Anne?"
"Of course I do," Dorsey said. "Like you've pointed out, John, we've got no secrets from each other. Your big itch is to step aboard one of the Orion ships. You want to join up for the chase after interplanetary white whales."
"It's only natural," I said. "When we were kids, Bud, we saw the same TV programs, the same space-adventure movies, as the kids who are now the men in space. Every boy in America was conditioned to long for a space-suit. I'm one of the ones who could have made it, Bud. I love medicine, and I think I'm going to be a damned fine pathologist; but I'd turn in my M.D. for an Ordinary Spaceman's ticket without a second's hesitation. When I read, two years ago, that Immermann had discovered that human skull in the oxide rubble below Roosevelt Ridge in Syrtis Major, I cried for the first time since I was six years old. Twenty thousand years ago there was man on Mars. And I'm confined to Earth for life."
"How much do you know about the Immermann skull, John?" Dorsey asked me.
"What I've said. Is there more?"
"One point," Dorsey said. "My field, radio astronomy, is a deep-space sort of specialty; but I do from time to time condescend to read the Journal of Aerology and the other parochial, solar-system publications. Somewhere I read that there's something odd about that skull Colonel Immermann dug up."
"If you're suggesting that it was a second Piltdown hoax, planted in that Martian talus to jar larger Air Force appropriations from Congress, keep it from me," I said. "I cherish the illusion that the Immermann is genuine, and a mystery."
"It isn't phony, and it's sure as hell a mystery," Dorsey said. "Colonel Immermann's initial report of the skull's discovery was verified by every member of the Orion Gamma's crew, a gang recruited mostly from Service-Academy grads and other high moral types. The peculiarity I'm talking about isn't forensic. It's functional. If you were to mix in the Immermann skull with an assortment of skulls of modern western men, age forty or thereabouts, only one characteristic would allow you to pick it out from the mixture again. 'Look, Mom—No Cavities!' Like us Lapins, Immermann Man had acarious teeth."