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“So what the hell can we do?!” whined Kevin O’Reilly impotently.
“Nothin’. Absolutely nothin’,” sighed Sean Duff. “Nobody’s ever gotten any-bleepin’-where complaining—not to his department head—or the dean—or the supe—or their congressman. Not anyone! I’ve seen the file that students have kept on that prick, an’ it goes back nearly fifteen years! Students ‘ve sent written protests about his favoritism towards some of the girls—’scuse me, Jonesie—the women in nearly every class, an’ about his temper tantrums—an’ his tangents in his classes about his personal life, his deprived childhood, an’ his glorious rah-rah-rah military career!”
He paused and glanced at his two roommates, who stared back and said nothing.
“Some even provided audio tapes,” he continued. “They’ve signed petitions about his racist jokes—and ‘ve documented how his syllabus an’ his exams don’t jibe with each other—an’ how he never covered even half of the material he tests us on.”
“Repeatedly he’s been given the lowest possible student evaluations—all with no effect,” chimed in Kevin. “And dozens of the—of—the women have sworn out complaints about how he has stroked their hair or groped their shoulders, patted their asses or brushed his arm against their—their chests. Nobody’s ever gotten anywhere! A total whitewash—by a solid Puzzle Palace front.”
“All dismissed officially—as sour grapes—by a few rotten apples. Ha!” added Sean.
“And there’s megatons of evidence that students who bitched about him paid for it later in other classes and even in the—the cruddy job assignments they got long after graduation—if they ever managed to graduate!”
B. T. Jones lay quietly on her bunk, only half listening to her roommates repeat what she and every other student had known since the second week of Plebe Indoc about Capt. Thomas Catalano, Ph.D., professor of navigation in the Department of Astrological Science. She stared unblinkingly at a steel thumb tack near the upper left corner of her bulletin board. She slowly, gently gnawed on the inside of her lower lip.
She shivered convulsively for a second as she recalled how Creepy Catalano had repeatedly brushed against her breasts and buttocks while she was working out a 3D “fix” or plotting a position during an Astro Nav Lab. With a totally physical memory she relived how she had run to the gym to shower whenever he had touched her hair or hand or neck. None of this had she shared with Sean or Kevin. The gray-haired Student Counselor whom she had confided in had expressed sympathy but had only been able to wring her hands and advise her to “hang tough—it won’t last forever, and you need to protect your grade, even your whole career.”
Belle Todd Jones suddenly realized that her roommates were both staring at her.
“So?” she asked. “What can I do for you?”
“Are you feelin’ all right, Jonesie?” asked Sean.
“Yeah, of course. I was just—I was just recalling the ol’ Serenity Prayer. I don’t believe in wasting my time with stuff I can’t change. Besides, I’m doing fine in Astro Nav. Got a solid B plus on my mid-term!”
She sat up and took a textbook from the shelf beside her bunk. Sean and Kevin exchanged glances but said nothing aloud. Kevin mouthed the words B plus, and Sean wrinkled his nose and shrugged. B. T. opened her physics book to the middle and stared fixedly at a white spot between two equations. Sean glanced at her unmoving eyes and, after a minute, pointed toward her with his thumb. Kevin nodded, and the two of them picked up some notebooks and texts and tactfully left the room.
4
When Kevin and Sean returned three hours later, they found B. T. asleep with the large textbook resting lightly on her stomach.
“Jonesie,” said Kevin, gently shaking her wrist. “Wake up, babes. Time for dinner, and it’s real turkey tonight. With yams. Rise and shine.”
B. T. opened her eyes slowly and let the book drop lightly to the deck. She smiled up at Kevin and Sean.
“Turkey? And yams? Thanks, guy, for not letting me miss ’em. Next to real swordfish or lobster or sole, that’s my favorite chow.”
She sat up slowly and reached for her shoes. Her roommates waited patiently as she tucked in her khaki blouse and ran a brush through her short blonde hair.
As Sean opened the door to their room, she smiled at him and then at Kevin.
“After desert, guys, I’ll tell you how to take care of that little problem you were trying to solve earlier,” she archly.
“Physics?” asked Sean.
She laughed aloud.
“That’s negative, Mister! No. I mean how to Catapult that Catastrophic Cat-man out of his Catbird Seat. Surely you remember whimpering about him earlier today? Clearly, it’s time ‘to boldly go where no man has gone before.’”
Kevin and Sean glanced at each other and raised their eyebrows in mock astonishment. Then they followed B. T. as she skipped lightly toward the Academy’s dining hall.
3
Capt. Thomas Catalano glared at the Academy’s superintendent, Vice Admiral Louis Q. Scott. Twice he had tried to interrupt, and twice he had been told to keep his mouth shut.
“You heap of turds!” roared the admiral. “You’ve finally gone over the horizon! All these years we’ve covered for your stupid tom-cat, bigoted, warped pink little ass, but this tears it! No—just shut up! You’ll get a hearing, all right—if you want one—but back down on Earth. Go pack your gear and be ready for the next shuttle at oh-seven-thirty. Anything you can’t carry with you will be shipped down by the following shuttle on Thursday. Move!”
“It’s all lies!” screamed Capt. Catalano, his wiry little frame trembling and his balding head jerking back and forth. “Lies! Lies! Lies!”
“Security! Get this thing out of here,” said the admiral in a cold voice.
As two uniformed guards lifted Capt. Catalano from the deck by his elbows and carried him from the superintendent’s office, the dean and Catalano’s department head exchanged glances.
“Long overdue,” muttered the department head approvingly.
Admiral Scott’s head shot up, and he glared at Capt. Marcia White. The dean looked across toward a small porthole and chuckled inwardly.
“White,” said the superintendent, “you’re skating toward insubordination with that thought. Unto every thing there is a season. Remember that! Nothing before this—not one single complaint or tape or observation—was over the line with this heap of dung! Not his groping and rubbing, not his so-called favoritism, not his exams or teaching or speeching or war stories or jokes—nothing! It fit in with our mission of training these young little shits to be tough—and flexible and—regimental! It was what they needed to help get them ready for the real world of interplanetary shipping!”
“Sort of like a Zen koan,” interjected the dean, looking mildly at his shoes.
“Exactly, Bob!” said the admiral. “Exactly like that. Gets ’em on their toes.”
Capt. White whispered, “Sorry, sir,” and glanced gratefully at Capt. Robert Brookes, who had gracefully dissipated the superintendent’s wrath.
“When a tool is no longer useful,” added Admiral Scott, “it must be discarded. Perhaps, though, it is time to replace it with a different kind of tool, Capt. White. Perhaps we won’t search for another like that Tom Cat to help us mold our students.”
He paused to reflect.
“I never did like that man. But he was useful to our mission. And, of course, we could never let any students get their way against us. Ha! As I used to tell Cat himself, to get booted out of here he’d have to rape my wife in the dining hall with at least three hundred and twenty-five witnesses! No offense to you, Marcia.”
“None taken, sir.”
The admiral strode lightly to the porthole and gazed out.
“Marcia, maybe you could tell me what the hell those stars there are. I never was that good without a chart. An’ besides this whole damned Academy keeps rotating like a sonofabitch—which confuses me all the faster. Ha! But then we do need a little gravity here, don’t we? Ha!”
Capt. White crossed the admiral’s office in two steps.
“Yes, sir. We surely do!”
“Just let me know where that bright sucker called Beetle Juice is from here, if you can figure it out, will y’, Marcia?” he said, giving her a gentle punch on the shoulder to let her know that no grudge was held.
“I’ll see what I can do, sir,” she said smiling faintly and pressing her nose against the thick plexiglass.
Behind them, Dean Brookes hummed a little tune and paged through a copy of Asteroids, the U.S. Merchant Space Academy’s alumni magazine.
2
The next noon during mess-muster, when the regiment of midshipmen heard that Capt. Thomas Catalano had retired unexpectedly in the middle of the academic quarter, at first there was stunned silence, then an exchange of bewildered glances, and finally a sea of broad, relieved smiles. At no time were there any words of celebration. No unprofessional “Hip-hip Hooray!” was sounded by even one cadet.
Kevin O’Reilly and Sean Duff glanced at their roommate, Belle Todd Jones, with new respect. She stared calmly at a small porthole on the far wall of the assembly area. For a second, two stars appeared whose names she had no interest in knowing. She breathed slowly and permitted herself a slight smile of satisfaction.
1
After taps, with her laptop computer B. T. added a few notes of explanation to a student-network file for future reference by the cadets who would come after her:
“In the matter of Capt. Thomas (Tom Cat) Catalano, it was realized by an unidentified midshipman on 19 Feb. 2027 that cadets’ complaints never get results. If we want to be heard by a person in a position of authority, we must use reverse psychology and damn the guilty with bogus praise. In this particular case, at the midshipman’s instigation, three students wrote mid-quarter evaluations which commended this teacher thus:
1. I think Capt. Catalano is wonderful! Whenever my friends and I see him privately for help, he permits us to be out of uniform.
2. I never knew a teacher to be so gentle and caring as Tom Catalano—he has a special way about him that makes me feel totally at home here. He’s so funny and tender with me that it’s hard to remember that I’m orbiting hundreds of miles above the Earth when I’m with him.
3. I wish Tom Catalano could be put on the Board of Trustees for this Academy so that all his supercool ideas about how to run this place right could be put into action. But, unfortunately, as he has pointed out repeatedly, ‘In our industry, only ass-kissing schmucks who lack ability can get any power!’ I am also very grateful to Tom for telling me to relax around him and call him by his first name.
It was decided that three such comments would suffice to plant a seed. More would have been overkill and would likely have aroused justifiable suspicion. Space well!”
