Jim Harmon

“ Meyverik had convinced all of us that in our well-adjusted or at any rate well-conditioned world somebody had to have some purposeful reason in loneliness, solitude, so on that one instance our thinking had already been patterned, discarding all the other evidence of generations that the lonely man was only a personality type, like Johnson. ”

“ The government representative inhaled deeply and steepled his manicured fingers.
"Our system of childhood psycho-conditioning succeeds in burying loneliness in the subconscious so completely that even the records can't reveal if it was ever present."
I cleared my throat in order to stall, to think.
"I'm not acquainted with contemporary psychology, Madison. This comes as news to me. You mean people aren't really well-adjusted today, that they have just been conditioned to act as if they were?" ”

“ Now we need a lonely man and we can't find him."
"To pilot the interstellar spaceship?"
"For the Evening Star, yes," Madison agreed.
I picked up my pencil and held it between my two index fingers. I couldn't think of a damned thing to say.
"The whole problem," Madison was saying, "goes back to the early days of space travel. Men were confined in a small area facing infinite space for measureless periods in freefall. Men cracked—and ships, they cracked up. But as space travel advanced ships got larger, carried more people, more ties and reminders of human civilization. ”

“ The government needs you and it'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 skin tone, stained by the tropical sun somewhere in his ancestral past. He dropped his gaze, expelled his breath mightily and pounded one angular knee with a half-closed fist. ”

“ I said. "It's not fair."
"No, it's science. Psychology as a science, not an art. Don't damn me—I'm not the inventor," Madison continued.
"I'm one of them," I murmured, "but I'd just as rather you didn't blame me 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 me from the box of the video screen.
I scanned the typed, stiff-backed Idiot Prompters Madison shoved into my fist. "It's—true. You can't get out alive." ”

“ Madison clapped me on the shoulder and breathed mint at me, eyes on twittering round faces.
"Who wrote that? Poe? No, no mock-up to fake space conditions for them but calculate the cost of the real interstellar ship. We couldn't trust either of them with it yet. You didn't really think we could afford two ships. Why do you think we haven't told one man about his opposite in a second ship? No safety margin allowable in our appropriation, Doc. Or so they tell me. There's enough fuel and food to take Johnson and Meyverik a long way but not the distance." ”

“ 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 a mistake. They underestimated curvature. You can't reach Alpha Centauri. You can't correct enough. Free space is all you'll hit. Ever. You may as well 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 report valuable things."
I stood there. The textbooks report it takes muscular effort to frown, more so than to smile. ”

“ The Evening Star is waiting and I have found for you a man with the true measure of loneliness. It is impossible for this man to become any more or any less lonely. It isn't the Ultimate Possible Loneliness, understand that, General. ”

“ 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 better back there than I can do here."
Madison got a bottle and he and I got sloppily drunk, leaning on each other, 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 the desk and lurched to the control board, bunching my soiled shirt at the throat with my hand.
I called Johnson.
"Going to die, Johnson. Tricked you. Can't get back, Johnson. ”

“ 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 you need 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 any professor who got his degree studying the textbooks you wrote."
It was impossible to dislike Madison except for practiced periods—that was probably one reason he had his job.
"All right," I growled. "Get your dirty pants off my clean desk and I'll get out the bottle. ”

“ We don't use the term that way. Perhaps you don't understand my work. It's been an honest way to make a living for a few generations but it's so specialized it might sound foolish to someone outside the psychological industry. ”

“ I rode a bus fifty miles to see him at an Air Force Day celebration when I was a dewy-eared kid. It's funny how kids still worship heroes who did everything before they were even born. Uncle Max had told me about standing outside the hospital with a bunch of boys his own age the evening Babe Ruth died of cancer. ”