Measure for a Loner

by Jim Harmon

tellit to me himself, I decided.

  "Doesn't seem much to brag about," I said. "Anybody who can make up agrocery list should be able to figure out how to isolate himself on SealIsland."

  He sat forward, a lean Viking with a hot Latin glance, very confident ofhimself.

  "I reckoned on you locating me, on you hustling me back to pilot the_Evening Star_. That's why I holed in there."

  "I can't accept your story," I lied cheerfully. "Nobody is going tomaroon himself on an island for three years because of a wildpossibility like that."

  Meyverik smiled and his sureness swelled out until it almost jabbed mein the stomach.

  "I took a broad gamble," he said, "but it hit the wire, didn't it?"

  I didn't reply, but he had his answer.

  Instead I scanned the report Madison had given me from Intelligenceconcerning the man's unorthodox behavior.

  Meyverik had quit his post-graduate studies and passed by the securedjob that had been waiting for him eighteen months in a genial governmentoffice to barricade himself in an old shelter on Seal Island. It washard to know what to make of it. He had brought impressive stores offood with him, books, sound and vision tapes but not telephone ortelevision. For the next three years he had had no contact with humanityat all.

  And he said he had planned it all.

  "Sure," he drawled. "I knew the government was looking for somebody tosteer the interstellar ship that's been gossip for decades. That job,"he said distinctly, "is one I would give a lot to settle into."

  I looked at him across my unlittered brand new desk and accepted hisirritating blond masculinity, disliked him, admired him, and continuedto examine him to decide on my _final_ evaluation.

  "You've given three years already," I said, examining the sheets of thereport with which I was thoroughly familiar.

  He twitched. He didn't like that, not spending three years. It wasspendthrift, even if a good buy. He was planning on winding up somewhereimportant and to do it he had to invest his years properly.

  "You are trying to make me believe you deliberately extrapolated thegovernment's need for a man who could stand being alone for longperiods, and then tried to phoney up references for the work by stayingon that island?"

  "I don't like that word 'phoney'," Meyverik growled.

  "No? You name your word for it."

  Meyverik unhinged to his full height.

  "It was _proof_," he said. "A test."

  "A man can't test himself."

  "A lot you know," the big blond snorted.

  "I _know_," I told him drily. "A man who isn't a hopeless maniacdepressive can't consciously create a test for himself that he knows hewill fail. You proved you could stay alone on an island, buster. Youdidn't prove you could stay alone in a spaceship out in the middle ofinfinity for three years. Why didn't you rent a conventional rocket andtry looking at some of our local space? It all looks much the same."

  Meyverik sat down.

  "I don't know why I didn't do that," he whispered.

  * * * * *

  Probably for the first time since he had got clever enough to beat uphis big brother Meyverik was doubting himself, just a little, for just atime.

  I don't know whether it was good or bad for him--contemporary psychologyisn't in my line--but I knew I couldn't trust a cocky kid.

  But I had to find out if he could still hit the target uncocked.

  * * * * *

  Stan Johnson was our second lonely man, remember, General?

  He was stubborn.

  I questioned him for a half hour the first day, two hours the second andon the third I turned him over to Madison.

  Then as I was having my lunch I suddenly thought of something and madesteps back to my office.

  I got there just in time to grab Madison's bony wrist.

  The thing in his fist was silver and sharp, a hypodermic needle.Johnson's forearm was tanned below the torn pastel sleeve. Two sad-facedyoung men were holding him politely by the shoulders in the canvaschair. Johnson met my glance expressionlessly.

  I tugged on Madison's arm sharply.

  "What's in that damned sticker?"

  "Polypenthium." Madison's face was as blank as Johnson's--only his bodyseemed at once tired and taut.

  "What's it for?" I rasped.

  "You're the psychologist," he said sharply.

  I met his eyes and held on but it was impossible to stare him down.

  "I don't know about physical methods, I told you. I've been dealing withpeople in books, films, tapes all my life, not living men up till now,can't you absorb that?"

  "Apparently I've had more experience with these things than you then,Doctor. Shall I proceed?"

  "You shall not," I cried omnisciently. "I know enough to understand wecan't get the results the government wants by drugs. You going to putthat away?"

  Madison nodded once.

  "All right," he said.

  I unshackled my fingers and he put the shiny needle away in its case, inhis suitcoat pocket.

  "You understand, Thorn," he said, "that the general won't like this."

  I turned around and looked at him.

  "Did he order you to drug Johnson?"

  The government agent shook his head.

  "I didn't think so." I was beginning to understand governmentoperations. "He only wanted it done. Get out."

  Madison and his assistants marched out in orthodox Euclidian triangleformation.

  The doors hissed shut.

  "You know what?" The words jerked out from Johnson. "I think the bunchof you are crazy. _Crazy._"

  I decided to treat him like a client. Maybe that was the waycontemporary psychologists handled their men.

  * * * * *

  I sat on the edge of the desk jauntily, confidently, and tried to letthe domino mask up a father image.

  "You may as well get it straight, Stan. The government needs you andit's pointless for you to say that need is unconstitutional or anything.Bring it up and it won't be long. When survival is outside the rules,the rules change."

  The eyes of Johnson were strikingly like Meyverik's, dark and unsettled.Only this boy, younger, smaller than the Nordic, had an appropriate skintone, stained by the tropical sun somewhere in his ancestral past. Hedropped his gaze, expelled his breath mightily and pounded one angularknee with a half-closed fist.

  "I'm not complaining about conscription without representation, Doctor,but I can't make any sense out of these fool questions you keep firingat me. What in blazes are you trying to get at? What kind of reason areyou after for my staying by myself? I just do it because I _like_ itthat way."

  With a galvanic jolt, I realized he was telling the painfully simpletruth. I groaned at the realization.

  Meyverik had convinced all of us that in our well-adjusted or at anyrate well-conditioned world somebody had to have some purposeful_reason_ in loneliness, solitude, so on that one instance our thinkinghad already been patterned, discarding all the other evidence ofgenerations that the lonely man was only a personality type, likeJohnson.

  I felt I had achieved at least the quantum state of a fool.

  Johnson silently studied the half-cupped hands laying in his lap.

  "The hunting lodge in the Andes seemed as good a place as any to liveafter mother and father were killed. You might think it was lonesome atnight in the mountains, but it isn't at all. You aren't alone when youcan watch the burning worlds shadow the bow of God...."

  I cleared my throat. The poor kid sounded like he would begin spoutingsomething akin to poetry next.

  "So I believe you," I told him. "That doesn't finish it. We have toconvince _them_. I don't like this, but the simplest way would be tovolunteer for their hibitor injection. I've found out Madison and hiscrowd don't believe men awake, only assorted dopes."

  Johnson deflated his area of the room with his breath intake.

  "Okay," he said at last. "I guess so."
>
  * * * * *

  When Johnson gave us what we needed to clear the problem, it didn't takeme long to finish processing the rest of the handful of possible lonerswe had located. Unlike Johnson, all the rest had _reasons_ for theirself-imposed loneliness. Unlike Meyverik none of their reasons wereassociated with the interstellar flight. They instead involved literaryresearch, swindles, isolated paranoid insanity and other things inwhich the government had no interest.

  Suddenly I found my job was done and that we had located only the two ofthem.

  Madison read my final report braced on the edge of my desk, his handcomradely on my shoulder.

  "Good job, Doc," he vouched replacing the papers on my blotter with afinal rustle. "Now I've got news for you. The government wants you to_test_ these boys for us now that you've found 'em for us."

  I closed my jaw. "That's completely out of line--_my_ line. I know youneed a contemporary man for that job."

  Madison punched me on the bicep, fast enough to hurt.

  "Doc, after this project you know more about contemp' stuff than anyprofessor who got his degree studying the textbooks _you_ wrote."

  It was impossible to dislike Madison except for practiced periods--thatwas probably one reason he had his job.

  "All right," I growled. "Get your dirty pants off my clean desk and I'llget out the bottle. We'll--celebrate, huh?"

  But you know how I felt, General? You remember how I tried to get out ofit. I felt like I had led in the lambs and now I had to help shear them.As a part-time historian I can tell you there's a word for that--Judasgoat. Give or take a word.

  * * * * *

  "It isn't the real thing, Doc," Madison spelled out for me, wearing alemon twist of smile.

  I looked at the twin banks of gauge-facings and circuit housings inwhich centered TV screens picturing either Meyverik or Johnson. Red andsea-green lights chased each other around the control boards, died, wereborn again. On the screens the three color negatives mixed to purple,shifted through a series of wrong combinations and settled to normal asthe stereo-oscillation echoed, convexed insanely, and deepened to hold.Video reception is lousy from five hundred thousand miles out.

  I was too eye-heavy to be surprised.

  "Don't tell me this is _The Strange Flight of Richard Clayton_ all overagain?"

  Madison clapped me on the shoulder and breathed mint at me, eyes ontwittering round faces.

  "Who wrote that? Poe? No, no mock-up to fake space conditions for thembut calculate the cost of the _real_ interstellar ship. We couldn'ttrust either of them with it yet. You didn't really think we couldafford _two_ ships. Why do you think we haven't told one man about hisopposite in a second ship? No safety margin allowable in ourappropriation, Doc. Or so they tell me. There's enough fuel and food totake Johnson and Meyverik a long way but not the distance."

  He shook his lean head almost wistfully.

  "Damn it, Madison, do you mean I've been beating my lobes out for weeksfor _nothing_? I tested them. I checked them out. Either was capable ofmaking the flight successfully--for their own different reasons."

  Madison took his hand off my shoulder and made a fist of it.

  "I'm not questioning your decision! Will you ram that through yourobscene skull, Thorn!"

  "Who is?" I whispered.

  "Not me. Not I, not I."

  "The general," I announced.

  "Just not me." Was he actually trembling? But it wasn't concern aboutwhat I thought of him. Somebody closer, maybe. Things were building upfor him.

  He jammed his nose almost up against the glass dial surfaces, swayinggently in his cups, staring slightly cross-eyed at the arrowed numbers.

  "You'll continue your tests from here," Madison said. "Tell them theyare going to die."

  My face was at once cool and damp.

  "That's a tough examination," I gasped.

  "A lie," Madison told me. "The boys at Psychicentre worked out theproblems."

  "You told me you wanted me!" I screamed at him furiously.

  "Control your passionate, dainty voice. You worked well with those two.The experts could work through you better."

  "Right through me, like a razor blade through margarine," I said. "It'snot fair."

  "No, it's science. Psychology as a science, not an art. Don't damnme--I'm not the inventor," Madison continued.

  "I'm one of them," I murmured, "but I'd just as rather you didn't blameme either."

  Madison punched the button for me with a palsied, manicured thumb.

  "Guess what, Meyverik?" I said viciously. "You're going to die."

  "What the blazes are you babbling about?" the blond doll snapped at mefrom the box of the video screen.

  * * * * *

  I scanned the typed, stiff-backed Idiot Prompters Madison shoved into myfist. "It's--true. You can't get out alive."

  "What's happened?" His face perfectly blank.

  "Nothing out of the ordinary," I said. "They have just informed me itwas planned this way. It wasn't possible to build a round-trip rocketyet. You need a lot of fuel to make course adjustments for the curvatureof space, so forth. The radio will send back your reports on the AlphaCentaurian planets. Undoubtedly by all rules of probability they won'tsupport life without a mass of equipment. They suckered me too,Meyverik, I swear. You turning back?"

  "No," he said almost immediately.

  "I thought you were after the rewards, trained to get them. You won't beable to enjoy them posthumously."

  The video blanked. He had turned off his camera.

  "I guess I thought so," Meyverik's voice said. "But I kind of like itout here--alone. I like people but back there there's no one to _touch_.They smother you but you can't reach them. I can't do anything betterback there than I can do here."

  * * * * *

  Madison got a bottle and he and I got sloppily drunk, leaning on eachother, singing innocently obscene songs of our youth. The technicians,good government men, were openly disgusted with us.

  Two hours after we had contacted Meyverik, I left Madison snoring on thedesk and lurched to the control board, bunching my soiled shirt at thethroat with my hand.

  I called Johnson.

  "Going to die, Johnson. Tricked you. Can't get back, Johnson. Not ever.No fuel. Ha, you can't ever go home again, Johnson. Like that, youdamned runny-nosed little poet?"

  His dark face worked weakly.

  Ha, he sure as thunderation _didn't_ like it.

  He asked for the bloody details and I fed them to him.

  "Turning back, aren't you?" I jeered.

  "I just wanted a place and a time for thinking," he said across theSolar System. "But I'll die and I don't know if you can dream in death."

  "Just what I thought," I sneered.

  "I'm not turning back," he said slowly. "People need me. I've got a jobto do. Haven't I? Haven't I?"

  "_No_," I screamed at him. "You're just using that as an excuse to killyourself. Don't try to tell me you're not weak! Don't you try to make methink you're strong! Hear me, Johnson, hear me?"

  But he couldn't hear me.

  One of the government technicians had broken the contact before thatlast spurt.

  * * * * *

  "This is good," Madison said, pawing fuzzily at his pocket."Really--_good_."

  I studied the three or four watchdials wobbling up and down my elongatedwrist. They seemed to say it was almost sunrise.

  I leered at Madison. "Yeah, yeah, what is it? Huh, huh?"

  He shoved a crumpled card into my lax fingers.

  "Now," he said, "now tell them--"

  "Yeah, yeah."

  "Tell them the whole thing is useless."

  * * * * *

  My stomach retched drily, grinding the sober pills to dust between itsulcerating walls.

  "Meyverik," I said to the empty video tube,
"they made a mistake. Theyunderestimated curvature. You can't reach Alpha Centauri. You can'tcorrect enough. Free space is all you'll hit. Ever. You may as well comehome."

  The soft voice came out of nowhere, from nothing.

  "I don't want to come back. I like it here. This is what I've alwaysbeen trying to get and I never knew it."

  Madison grabbed my arm with pronged fingers.

  "Shut up, Doc. That's just the way the government wants him to be."

  "Johnson," I said to the creased face in the screen, "they made amistake. They underestimated curvature. You can't reach Alpha Centauri.You can't correct enough. Free space is all you'll hit. Ever. You may aswell come--back."

  Johnson sighed, a whisper of breath across the miles.

  "I'll keep going. No one has ever been so far out before. I can reportvaluable things."

  I stood there. The textbooks report it takes muscular effort to frown,more so than to smile. But my face seemed to flow into the lines of painso hard it ached without any effort of my will. And I knew it would_hurt_ to smile.

  "They passed the final test," Madison said at my side. "Tell them