FROM THE ADAMA JOURNALS:

I never knew Lieutenant Starbuck during his cadet days. However, stories—myths and legends of the academy—have come back to me. I can’t verify their truth.

I heard that, on off-duty hours, he would often unlock the war-game room (with “borrowed” keys, of course) and turn the area into a vast amusement arcade, conducting lotteries on how many hits could be scored within specified amounts of time by a mock-flight vehicle shooting at images of Cylon ships, hiring the best hand-to-hand fighters to hold matches under simulated battle conditions (again, a certain amount of gentlemanly wagering was supervised by Starbuck), and using the numbers of randomly selected spot quiz questions of a testing computer for some sort of roulette-styled game. Even though he conducted the arcade with a clientele of about one-third of the students attending, nobody on the teaching staff could ever nab him. They tried. But each time they tried to catch him in the act, they entered a war-game room that was dark and silent.

Another time, it’s said, a cheating ring developed among many of the cadets who were under so much pressure to succeed that stealing tests or sending in better students as substitutes to take the exams began to seem like the most reasonable way out of their plight. They figured that Starbuck, with his reputation for engaging anyone around him in a con, would go along with their plan and help them.

“Sure,” he said, I imagine with that sometimes irritating sly smile on his face. “What do you need, chums? What’s coming up? Let’s see—Intermediate Military Strategy I, am I right? Tomorrow? Okay, you guys meet me in the Cylon throne room just before the test, I’ll have copies of the answers ready for you there. No sweat. See ya around, kiddies.”

(“Cylon throne room” was an academy euphemism for the communal bathrooms at the academy.)

The next day the cadets in the cheating ring showed up in the throne room and, sure enough, Starbuck was there, a twinkle in his eye and a set of answer papers in his hands. He told the cadets that this first instance of the answer service would be free of charge, they could discuss terms when the students had evaluated the worth of the service.

I don’t know how the cadets got the answers into the testing rooms. Perhaps they merely memorized them, or sneaked them into the place in some ingenious cadet fashion. Anyway, the tests were fed to each individual testing cubicle by the exam-transmission system. The tests had been kept under lock and key, and guarded, since the previous morning when instructors made them up. The examiner who told me this anecdote said there was no way any intruder could have gotten near the exams or discovered the answers. At least the staff thought so.

The cadets from the cheating ring eagerly set to work, marking answers with their electronic pencils at a rate that no monitor had ever before seen from a cadet class. It looked like many of the students would finish the test way ahead of time, something of a phenomenon with the monstrously difficult academy tests. A feeling of great confidence swept among the cadets who’d received the answers from Starbuck.

Then they turned to the last page of the test booklet. At the bottom of the page was scribbled a note which was unmistakably in Starbuck’s handwriting. This note appeared only in the test booklets of the cadets who were part of the cheating ring, another maneuver which led the examiner to tell me he believed the story might be apocryphal. Anyway, the note read:

All of the answers which I supplied you in the throne room are incorrect. If you filled in each and every one of them, you just achieved a zero on this exam. However, since this is a test of intermediate military strategy—a fancy term for grace under pressure or the successful use of reason and instinct to stay out of trouble—those of you who deserve to pass, who deserve to succeed beyond cadethood, have this option: there is sufficient time for you to rush back through this exam, change your answers, read the questions properly and choose the correct answer, and—if you got my kind of luck—successfully achieve a passing score on this exam. But, before you do that, first erase this note. Bless you all. S.

The examiner who told me this story swore up and down that it couldn’t possibly be true.

I have observed Starbuck closely, ever since he came aboard the Galactica as a green but crafty young ensign. I have watched him starbuck everybody in sight, including myself.

I believe the story.