Oh, they gained a few details, but none of any importance. The fact remained simply that Doug Laughlin had walked out of the ship one day while Johnny was asleep. He hadn’t come back. He had taken nothing with him except what he wore on his back, and the food and equipment normally kept in the sand cat, plus, presumably, four pages out of the Log. Nowhere in the detailed memories of the days before Laughlin’s disappearance, or the months after, was there slightest evidence that Wendt had torn those sheets out, nor that he had even read them at any time. Nowhere was there anything to relate Laughlin’s disappearance, or the mutilation of the Log, to the Soviet ship, _Lenin_. Nowhere was there any shred of cause to believe that either of the two who went out in _Colombo_ had seen or heard anything at all of the other ship. The objective facts of the case, as far as Johnny Wendt knew them, or ever had known them, were exactly as stated before. But, adding Kutler’s findings to those of the men who had preceded him, and to the evidence of conversations on tape, they could at least form an opinion on which it was just barely possible to rest a theory. As far as Johnny himself was concerned, the final official verdict was that he was guilty of nothing but guilt itself. The two ideas to which the guilt was most frequently attached were-- a) the obvious possibility that he had in some way been personally, directly, responsible for Laughlin’s death: and b) the completely suppressed (except under hypnotic recall) fear of remembering that for a time, before Laughlin’s disappearance, a strong homosexual attraction had apparently been developing between the two men. In neither case was there any reason to believe that Johnny’s self-accusations were based on anything other than fearful fantasies. As to what had actually happened to Doug--it was still anyone’s guess. The best guess seemed to be that he was suffering from the same developing fear of inversion that had afflicted Wendt; that he had been even more horrified at the idea than Johnny was, and had chosen deliberate suicide in preference to involuntary surrender to “degeneracy”; and that, perhaps, he had written something into those four pages that he thought might be revealing, and so removed them before he left. It hung together. As a theory, it made sense. The only trouble was, if the theory was correct, then the wrong man had come back. The same psychiatrists who formulated the theories swore up and down that psych-tests on both men before the trip made it absurd to think that Laughlin would have reacted in this way. If _any_one did, it should have been Wendt; and that would not have made much _more_ sense. But the theory was all they had. The only way they would ever know more was to go back and find out--and the very fact that they _didn’t_ know more was enough to whittle down the chances of going back, any time soon, almost to the vanishing point.