The Sky So Big and Black

At least I don’t have to pretend I’m a scientist. I can admit I’m an artist. And a cop. I do have to admit that I’m a cop.
I raise my glass to my own reflection in the mirror by my door; lately this is as close as I get to drinking with a colleague. There might be a couple of hundred of us shrinks, nowadays, in all the parts of the solar system where there’s any reason for us to exist—here on Mars, over on the Moon, out on the twenty-some settled asteroids, hunkered down in the Jovian moon colonies. Right now, during the emergency, I doubt they can afford any of us on Titan or Mercury, but there’s probably someone with the training, currently emptying bedpans, cooking soup, mining methane, or something, and if an occasion came up I guess they could shift them to cover.
There might be seventy shrinks on the Moon, many of them exactly the kind of expert that Teri’s case needs, and if anyone upstairs had had any sense that’s where we’d have sent the poor kid in the first place, a whole Mars year ago, once we knew what was going on. But they didn’t; the district officers decided that it could all ... read full excerpt from The Sky So Big and Black ebook