Zachary Smith

Zachary Smith
Species:	Human
Gender:	Male
Home planet:	Earth
First Appearance:	The Reluctant Stowaway
Portrayed by:	Jonathan Harris

Would-be saboteur, inadvertent passenger and stowaway aboard the Jupiter 2 spacecraft.

On the Screen

Dr. Zachary Smith was protrayed by the venerable actor Jonathan Harris.

The following information is taken from The Alpha Control Reference Manual and is not considered canon.

Vital Statistics

Full Name: Zachary Smith

Birth Date: November 6, 1955	Birth Place: Lowell, Massachusetts
Height: 5’ 11”	Weight: 199 pounds
Eyes: Green	Hair: Brown-Gray
Rank: Colonel	Likes: Opera, gardening, and cooking, gold, money, precious gems, power

Biography

USSC staff psychologist and environmental expert, and sixteen year USAF veteran, Col. Zachary Smith was born in the Bronx of New York in 1955. The future doctor spent the first few years of his childhood living in lower Manhattan, until his parents were killed in a boating accident in 1958. After their deaths, the young Smith became the custody of his Aunt Maude, his only living adult relative, and he spent the next fifteen years growing up in her home in Marietta, Georgia. Aunt Maude was the matriarch of the Smith family, and she raised Zachary with a stern hand. In his own words, the doctor admitted that sometimes he had “a tendency to be lazy”, but the determined lady pressured him into obtaining reasonable grades at school. Through her considerable social connections, she managed to obtain Marshall scholarships, for the entrance of both him and his cousin Jeremiah to Oxford University.

From 1973 to 1977 Smith worked towards earning a degree in psychology, and while there he became the Grand Master of the Oxford Chess Society for three years in a row. In 1977 Smith returned to the United States for the first time since entering the school, and that fall he transferred to Harvard. In 1979 Smith earned his doctorate, and upon graduation in 1979, he joined the United States Air Force.

Zachary spent the next sixteen years putting together an exceptional career as a military psychologist, and he was stationed at a number of U.S. and European bases. Having reached the rank of colonel in 1995, the doctor became interested in joining the United States Space Corps, and his application for transfer was accepted that summer. Upon entering the USSC, he was assigned to the Houston Training Center, where he would spend the next six months in an extensive retraining program. The training combined his expertise as a psychologist with a new branch of medicine dealing with the stress and pressures that would be put on future space colonists. Smith was among two dozen people in the world who specialized in this field, and he was recognized within the medical and scientific communities as an expert on Environmental Space Psychology.

Smith was also involved with the programming of the Jupiter 2’s B-9 robot, which was being sent on the mission primarily to make the final environmental tests before the crew left the ship after reaching their new home. At the same time, he overviewed the psychological status of potential pilots for the mission, the Robinson family, and the other volunteers for colonization missions. He would remain involved in the training program until October 16, 1997, when he performed the final stress analysis examinations of the Robinson family before they entered the Jupiter 2 and left Earth.

After The Launch

The first reliable verification that Smith was on board the Jupiter 2 at the time of launch came from the Jupiter 2 logs left at the fuel barge by John Robinson. He not only verified Smith’s part in sabotaging the ship, but also listed many other accounts of Smith’s attempts to kill - on purpose or through carelessness - the crew members of the ship. Also, as could be predicted, the use of 100% of engine power when leaving the Earth’s atmosphere affected the unshielded doctor’s mind. Within two or three weeks the behavior of the colonel grew more and more bizarre, and within a year, his exposure to the magnetic fields which propelled the interstellar ship would leave the man a shell of his former self. In Smith’s defense, while he certainly was a murderer, spy, and saboteur, it is also equally true that he was a brilliant, if eccentric, man. Many grateful former patients would have never believed his true purpose for being in the military.

Now that the investigation into Col. Smith’s background has been concluded, we are leaving the decision up to the President as to whether Smith should be tried in absentia for murder, attempted murder, espionage, etc. Considering the negative publicity such a trial would receive, the current mental condition of the man, and the simple fact that Smith will probably never return to Earth to have whatever sentence he receives carried out, we can only recommend that the man not be brought to trial unless he returns to his home planet.

Special Security Report

The biography previously listed for Col. Smith was compiled from standard USSC personnel file information. Up until the time of the Jupiter 2 launch, there was little reason to suspect that it was inaccurate, but we now know that the biographical information was purposely falsified to conceal the doctor’s true goal: to sabotage the Jupiter 2 mission and the United States’ colonization efforts.

When Col. Smith was transferred the standard USSC security check revealed no problems in his past, and allowed Smith access to both confidential and classified information within the program. The psychologist’s record of service with the USAF had been impeccable, and his references came from reliable sources. At the time there was no reason to believe that the Air Force veteran might be a security problem.

Approximately nine months prior to the Jupiter launch, Smith insisted on becoming involved in the programming of the ships B9 robot. Although this was not within his field, Smith proved to have a knack for computer programming and became a real asset in the preparation of this valuable piece of equipment. We now believe that Smith used this position to sabotage the mission by instructing the robot to destroy the ship by disabling several key control systems. This conclusion was reached when Smith disappeared at the time of the launch and the ship strayed off course because of an overweight condition - the exact weight of Smith at his most-recent medical check-up. Prior to the launch, Smith had been observed in the Jupiter 2 tampering with the robot, and he was still on board when the last technician left the ship after the final pre-launch check. The robot’s premature release from its magnetic pedestal resulted in the near-destruction of the ship. The questioning of all B-9 technicians reinforced the opinion that only Smith could have altered the robot’s programming, as the mobile computer had been completely checked and approved only one hour before the launch.

Not long after the Jupiter 2 liftoff, SSGT Joseph L. McWilliams was found in a dumpster that had been near the ship before the launch. The USSC MP had had his neck broken by a sharp blow, and his body had been dumped in the trash container via the waste disposal tube of the colonization vessel. While there is no concrete proof that Smith murdered the MP, there is every likelihood, that Mc Williams came across Smith sabotaging the ship, and his discovery cost him his life. For national security reasons, McWilliams’ death was ruled accidental and the matter covered up.

After the loss of the Jupiter 2, Alpha Control explained that the loss was probably due to sabotage on the part of a foreign power, although little other information will be released to the public until the full extent of the security breach can be determined.

The security investigation following the loss of the Jupiter 2 revealed the presence of foreign agents, a group calling themselves "Aeolis Umbra”, of which Smith was a member. Furthermore, a thorough check into the background of Smith found that his personnel file contained many errors, misleading information, and outright lies. The following information has been put together after three years of intensive research by the CIA, FBI, and USSC Security.

Smith’s parents died when he was young, and he went to live with his Aunt Maude. Her late husband, Thaddeus Smith, was a highly eccentric, perhaps bizarre individual. The questioning of people who had known the Smith family revealed this to be a fairly common trait in the entire family line, including Zachary. But Aunt Maude ruled the family with an iron hand, and had pressured both Zachary and her son Jeremiah to succeed in school and college. While Zachary was always the most academically inclined of the two, both owed most of their high grades to cheating and bribery. To get them away from their well-deserved reputation in their Georgia home town, Maude sent the cousins off to England to study at Oxford. Rumor had it that their entrance was gained through a bribe paid by the prosperous Aunt. It also seems that the two were cajoled into attending by a promise from Aunt Maude that whoever graduated first would inherit her fortune. Within six weeks of their arrival at the school, Jeremiah was expelled for gambling and he returned to Marietta, where, a few months later, the aunt died under mysterious circumstances. Not long after, the cousin also disappeared, and despite considerable searching, investigators were never able to determine his whereabouts. A local rumor tied Jeremiah to his mother’s death, and his disappearance seemed to verify this suspicion.

With one Smith out of school and Aunt Maude dead, the conditions of her will were revised so that the last surviving Smith cousin would receive her fortune; be it Zachary or Jeremiah. Zachary, now without the comfortable income to which he was accustomed, dropped out of school during his second year and traveled throughout Europe for about two years as a common drifter. Sometime during this period, he is believed to have been contacted by a member of the KGB who offered him the position of being a “plant” within the USAF. Smith, well known to his former classmates as a thief, a cheat, and a totally lazy sort, probably found this relatively work free method of receiving substantial sums of money very attractive. In 1977 Smith turned up again in the United States with an Oxford degree in hand. (We know now that it was forged.) His intelligence contacts made sure that his references were in order, and he was accepted into Harvard to finish a doctorate in psychology.

In 1979 Smith received his degree, joined the USAF, and twelve weeks later finished Officers Training School at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas. We believe that Smith used his position as military psychologist over the next sixteen years to pry secrets - using hypnosis and other means - from unsuspecting patients. His cover was obviously a good one, for while Smith never made many friends with his caustic personality, he did develop an excellent reputation as a doctor and no one ever suspected his true purpose within the military.

Over the years that Smith spent in the service, his tastes became more expensive and he pressed his intelligence contacts for a different position that might net him a greater income. As it turned out, they had a need for other operatives within the USSC, and Smith would be relatively easy to get into the organization. In 1995 the doctor transferred to the Space Corps, where he received appropriate training and became heavily involved in the project.

By this time, several other operatives had been planted in the USSC. The destruction of the Jupiter 1 in 1993 - officially ruled an accident caused by a fuel system malfunction - was almost certainly due to sabotage by an enemy agent. Smith had not been involved in this disaster for Alpha Control. However, there is every reason to believe that the same people who destroyed the Jupiter 1 and killed her crew also assisted Smith in the attempted destruction of the second colonization ship.