"Perhaps if you thought of a few more incidents, we might figure it out. It's the little things you don't forget that can be most helpful."
What nonsense, thought Carol, although she kept the thought to herself. The little things can be most harmful. They keep the pain, and the memory of pain, alive and vivid. She remembered little things about John all too well—the careless way he wore his clothes, and the way he combed his hair, the cigarettes he smoked, and the foods he liked to eat. And the stupid way she had let herself fall in love with him.
She hadn't even had the excuse of its happening suddenly, as it had happened now. She had begun to love John as she had come to know him, disregarding all the evidence of his selfishness, of his genuine inability to care for any one else than John Burr.
Unaware of what was going on in her mind, Callendar was saying, with somewhat more animation than he had previously shown, "I think you're right, Mr. Marsh. I've kept my troubles too much to myself. Maybe you can't actually do anything for me, but it wouldn't hurt me to talk. I should have done my talking long ago. When they found me."
"Where did they find you?" asked her father. "And what did you mean before, when you said you're not sure of anything?"
"They picked me up in a lifeboat, drifting some place between Mars and Jupiter. The motor was off, but the power pile was working, and the air-purifying equipment was on. I was apparently hibernating. I might have been that way for six months or a year."
"And you don't remember—" said Carol.
"There's plenty I don't remember, but as I've said, my memory isn't a complete blank. My wife and I and the kids had settled down in a new colony—exactly where it was is one of the things I forget. I believe now that it wasn't Ganymede. Maybe it was some other moon of Jupiter's.
"Anyway, I seem to recall having some trouble with my health, and being taken onto an inter-planetary hospital ship for treatment—L-treatment, they called it. That's where they put me to sleep. What happened after that, I can only guess. The ship must have been involved in some accident. I must have been transferred to the lifeboat."