"Possibly," Ernest said. "It begins to look as if the people were deliberately killed, or committed suicide, all at once, when we hove into sight. But why?"
"You tell me," Rosco said. "That sounds like your department."
But Ernest could tell him nothing until after the lieutenant came back with a long slender cylinder enclosing a seemingly endless coil of fine wire. The lieutenant also brought a companion cylinder, apparently a means of playing back what was recorded on the coil.
Ernest experimented until he learned how to operate it, then shooed everybody out of his cabin and went to work.
Ernest Hotaling had joined the crew of the research ship Pringle on Ganymede as a replacement for Old Craddock, who'd decided on short notice that thirty years of spacefaring were enough. It would be another ten or twelve years before the Pringle returned to Earth and though Craddock was only seventy-eight his yearning to start a proper bee farm became overwhelming.
The others were not unhappy about his departure. The swarm he'd kept in his cabin was small but the bees were gregarious and were as likely to be found in the recreation room as in their hive. So when Craddock and the paraphernalia he'd collected over the decades had debarked, the rest of the crew sighed in collective relief and the skipper went looking for a replacement.
Ernest Hotaling, fresh out of Ganymede U., was the only man qualified, on the record, for the job. He had the necessary languages and his doctorate was in psychology, though his specialty was child therapy.
The skipper puzzled through the copy of Ernest's master's thesis. The lad—he was twenty-three then—had devoted it to children's folklore. The skipper, admittedly a simple man, wasn't sure it contributed profitably to the world's knowledge to spend a year in the study and explanation of Winnie the Pooh, or Step on a crack/Break your mother's back, or The Wizard of Oz.
The skipper had gone to Space Prep at the age of fourteen and later to the Academy itself and there were obviously wide areas of childhood that had passed him by. He'd never heard of Struwwelpeter, for instance, or Ibbety bibbety gibbety goat, and he wondered if a grown man who immersed himself in this sort of thing was the one for the job.