The first time, they offered Tomas a flight on a Thursday.
He didn’t even look up from his computer.
“No.”
The woman sitting across the desk noted something down.
“May I ask why?”
“I’m needed more here.”
She nodded.
As if she had expected exactly that answer.
That same week he received the offer two more times.
The third time, he said:
“You’re not looking for a psychologist.”
“Then what?”
“A witness.”
The woman smiled for the first time.
“Interesting, why do you think that?”
“Because you don’t ask about my qualifications.”
“Only about my life.”
She closed the folder.
The conversation was over.
A month later, Tomas noticed something strange.
The selection committee had not once asked whether he could operate the ship’s systems.
They weren’t interested in physical fitness.
Nor in reaction time.
Nor in professional experience.
They were only interested in small details.
Whether he had ever been jealous.
Whether he’d gotten into fights as a child.
Whether he remembered the first time he lied.
Whether he’d ever done something he never told anyone about.
Some questions repeated in different wordings.
After a few weeks, Tomas understood they weren’t searching for answers.
They were checking whether the answers stayed the same.
That evening he went down to the archive.
Not to search for astronauts’ files.
For psychologists’.
Over twenty years, there had been twelve of them.
All of them flew.
All of them returned.
All of them, within a few months, submitted a request to leave the Institute.
The reasons differed.
One became a teacher.
Another moved to a colony on Mars.
A third started restoring old clocks.
A fourth settled alone by the sea.
To Tomas this seemed strange.
Not because they changed professions.
People do that.
What was strange was that not one of them ever worked with people again.
A handwritten note was pinned to the last file.
No signature.
No date.
Just one line.
After every expedition, it grows harder and harder to believe that a person is always one and the same person.
Tomas read the sentence three times.
It wasn’t a medical conclusion.
Not a diagnosis.
More a note to oneself.
He put the note back.
For the first time in many years, the thought occurred to him that perhaps the Institute wasn’t studying what happens after the Crossing.
Perhaps it was only trying to find people who hadn’t yet noticed that something had already been happening for a long time.