Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1, page 731
"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 about what I thought of him. Somebody closer, maybe. Things were building up for him.
He jammed his nose almost up against the glass dial surfaces, swaying gently in his cups, staring slightly cross-eyed at the arrowed numbers.
"You'll continue your tests from here," Madison said. "Tell them they are 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 the problems."
"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'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."
"What's happened?" His face perfectly blank.
"Nothing out of the ordinary," I said. "They have just informed me it was planned this way. It wasn't possible to build a round-trip rocket yet. You need a lot of fuel to make course adjustments for the curvature of space, so forth. The radio will send back your reports on the Alpha Centaurian planets. Undoubtedly by all rules of probability they won't support 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 be able 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 it out 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 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. Not ever. No fuel. Ha, you can't ever go home again, Johnson. Like that, you damned 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 the Solar 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 job to do. Haven't I? Haven't I?"
"No," I screamed at him. "You're just using that as an excuse to kill yourself. Don't try to tell me you're not weak! Don't you try to make me think you're strong! Hear me, Johnson, hear me?"
But he couldn't hear me.
One of the government technicians had broken the contact before that last 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 elongated wrist. 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 its ulcerating walls.
"Meyverik," I said to the empty video tube, "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 home."
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 always been 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 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. But my face seemed to flow into the lines of pain so 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 it was a test."
I would do it for him. I didn't need to do it for myself.
I motioned the technician to open both channels.
"The ship you are in," I said, with no need to tell them of each other, "is not the real Evening Star. It will not take you to the stars. This has been only a test to credit your fitness to pilot the real interstellar craft of the Star Project. You must return to the Lunar Satellite. This is a direct order."
The two screens remained blank. Only the windless silence of space echoed over Johnson's channel, but the tapes later proved that I actually did hear a whispered laugh from Meyverik.
I faced Madison.
"They won't come back. They could have passed any test except the fact that what we put them through was only a test. For their own reasons, they will keep going. As far as they can."
Madison took out his notebook and seemed to look for vital information. Except that he never cracked the cover.
"Of course, we can't get them back if they won't come," he said. "If cybernetic remotes functioned operationally at this distance we wouldn't have to send men at all."
He replaced the pocket secretary and looked at me edgewise, speculatively.
I touched his arm.
"Let's find another bottle," I said.
He stepped back.
"You found them. You tested them. You killed them."
And the government man walked away and left me standing with a murderer.
You see it now, don't you, General?
What I'm carrying around on my back is guilt. Not guilt complex, not guilt fixation, just plain old Abel-Cain guilt.
In this nice, well-ordered age I'm a killer and everybody knows it.
You see our mistake, General.
We sent men with variable amounts of loneliness. These amounts could alter. But now we have a golden opportunity.
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.
It's just that by himself or with others he is always in a crowd of three, no more, no less.
The interstellar ship is waiting.
So tell me, General, have you ever seen a lonelier man than me, your humble servitor, Dr. Thorn? No, I mean it. Have you?
* * *
Contents
THE LAST PLACE ON EARTH
By Jim Harmon
Sam Collins flashed the undertaker a healthy smile, hoping it wouldn't depress old Candle too much. He saluted. The skeletal figure in endless black nodded gravely, and took hold of Sam Collins' arm with a death grip.
"I'm going to bury you, Sam Collins," the undertaker said.
The tall false fronts of Main Street spilled out a lake of shadow, a canal of liquid heat that soaked through the iron weave of Collins' jeans and turned into black ink stains. The old window of the hardware store showed its age in soft wrinkles, ripples that had caught on fire in the sunset. Collins felt the twilight stealing under the arms of his tee-shirt. The overdue hair on the back of his rangy neck stood up in attention. It was a joke, but the first one Collins had ever known Doc Candle to make.
"In time, I guess you'll bury me all right, Doc."
"In my time, not yours, Earthling."
"Earthling?" Collins repeated the last word.
The old man frowned. His face was a collection of lines. When he frowned, all the lines pointed to hell, the grave, decay and damnation.
"Earthling," the undertaker repeated. "Earthman? Terrestrial? Solarian? Space Ranger? Homo sapiens?"
Collins decided Candle was sure in a jokey mood. "Kind of makes you think of it, don't it, Doc? The spaceport going right up outside of town. Rocketships are going to be out there taking off for the Satellite, the Moon, places like that. Reminds you that we are Earthlings, like they say in the funnies, all right."
"Not outside town."
"What?"
"Inside. Inside town. Part of the spaceship administration building is going to go smack in the middle of where your house used to be."
"My house is."
"For less time than you will be yourself, Earthling."
"Earthling yourself! What's wrong with you, Doc?"
"No. I am not an Earthling. I am a superhuman alien from outer space. My mission on Earth is to destroy you."
Collins pulled away gently. When you lived in a town all your life and knew its people, it wasn't unusual to see some old person snap under the weight of years.
"You have to destroy the rocketship station, huh, Doc, before it sends up spaceships?"
"No. I want to kill you. That is my mission."
"Why?"
"Because," Candle said, "I am a basically evil entity."
The undertaker turned away and went skittering down Main Street, his lopsided gait limping, sliding, hopping, skipping, at a refined leisurely pace. He was a collection of dancing, straight black lines.
Collins stared after the old man, shook his head and forgot about him.
He moved into the hardware store. The bell tinkled behind him. The store was cramped with shadows and the smell of wood and iron. It was lined off as precisely as a checkerboard, with counters, drawers, compartments.
Ed Michaels sat behind the counter, smoking a pipe. He was a handsome man, looking young in the uncertain light, even at fifty.
"Hi, Ed. You closed?"
"Guess not, Sam. What are you looking for?"
"A pound of tenpenny nails."
Michaels stood up.
Sarah Comstock waddled energetically out of the back. Her sweet, angelic face lit up with a smile. "Sam Collins. Well, I guess you'll want to help us murder them."
"Murder?" Collins repeated. "Who?"
"Those Air Force men who want to come in here and cause all the trouble."
"How are you going to murder them, Mrs. Comstock?"
"When they see our petition in Washington, D.C., they'll call those men back pretty quick."
"Oh," Collins said.
Mrs. Comstock produced the scroll from her voluminous handbag. "You want to sign, don't you? They're going to put part of the airport on your place. They'll tear down your house."
"They can't tear it down. I won't sell."
"You know government men. They'll just take it and give you some money for it. Sign right there at the top of the new column, Sam."
Collins shook his head. "I don't believe in signing things. They can't take what's mine."
"But Sam, dear, they will. They'll come in and push your house down with those big tractors of theirs. They'll bury it in concrete and set off those guided missiles of theirs right over it."
"They can't make me get out," Sam said.
Ed Michaels scooped up a pound, one ounce of nails and spilled them onto his scale. He pinched off the excess, then dropped it back in and fed the nails into a brown paper bag. He crumpled the top and set it on the counter. "That's twenty-nine plus one, Sam. Thirty cents."
Collins laid out a quarter and a nickel and picked up the bag. "Appreciate you doing this after store hours, Ed."
Michaels chuckled. "I wasn't exactly getting ready for the opera, Sam."
Collins turned around and saw Sarah Comstock still waiting, the petition in her hand.
"Now what's a pretty girl like you doing, wasting her time in politics?" Collins heard himself ask.
Mrs. Comstock twittered. "I'm old enough to be your mother, Sam Collins."
"I like mature women."
Collins watched his hand in fascination as it reached out to touch one of Sarah Comstock's plump cheeks, then dropped to her shoulder and ripped away the strap-sleeve of her summer print dress.
A plump, rosy shoulder was revealed, splattered with freckles.
Sarah Comstock put her hands over her ears as if to keep from hearing her own shrill scream. It reached out into pure soprano range.
Sarah Comstock backed away, into the shadows, and Sam Collins followed her, trying to explain, to apologize.
"Sam! Sam!"
The voice cut through to him and he looked up.
Ed Michaels had a double-barreled shotgun aimed at him. Mrs. Michaels' face was looking over his shoulder in the door to the back, her face a sick white.
"You get out of here, Sam," Michaels said. "You get out and don't you come back. Ever."
Collins' hands moved emptily in air. He was always better with his hands than words, but this time even they seemed inexpressive.
He crumpled the sack of nails in both fists, and turned and left the hardware store.
II
His house was still there, sitting at the end of Elm Street, at the end of town, on the edge of the prairie. It was a very old house. It was decorated with gingerboard, a rusted-out tin rooster-comb running the peak of the roof and stained glass window transoms; and the top of the house was joined to the ground floor by lapped fishscales, as though it was a mermaid instead of a house. The house was a golden house. It had been painted brown against the dust, but the keening wind, the relentless sun, the savage rape of the thunderstorms, they had all bleached the brown paint into a shining pure gold.
Sam stepped inside and leaned back against the front door, the door of full-length glass with a border of glass emeralds and rubies. He leaned back and breathed deep.
The house didn't smell old. It smelled new. It smelled like sawdust and fresh-hewn lumber as bright and blond as a high school senior's crewcut.
He walked across the flowered carpet. The carpet didn't mind footsteps or bright sun. It never became worn or faded. It grew brighter with the years, the roses turning redder, the sunflowers becoming yellower.
The parlor looked the same as it always did, clean and waiting to be used. The cane-backed sofa and chairs eagerly waiting to be sat upon, the bead-shaded kerosene lamps ready to burst into light.
Sam went into his workshop. This had once been the ground level master bedroom, but he had had to make the change. The work table held its share of radios, toasters, TV sets, an electric train, a spring-wind Victrola. Sam threw the nails onto the table and crossed the room, running his fingers along the silent keyboard of the player piano. He looked out the window. The bulldozers had made the ground rectangular, level and brown, turning it into a gigantic half-cent stamp. He remembered the mail and raised the window and reached down into the mailbox. It was on this side of the house, because only this side was technically within city limits.
As he came up with the letters, Sam Collins saw a man sighting along a plumbline towards his house. He shut the window.
Some of the letters didn't have any postage stamps, just a line of small print about a $300 fine. Government letters. He went over and forced them into the tightly packed coal stove. All the trash would be burned out in the cold weather.
Collins sat down and looked through the rest of his mail. A new catalogue of electronic parts. A bulky envelope with two paperback novels by Richard S. Prather and Robert Bloch he had ordered. A couple of letters from hams. He tossed the mail on the table and leaned back.
He thought about what had happened in the hardware store.
It wasn't surprising it had happened to him. Things like that were bound to happen to him. He had just been lucky that Ed Michaels hadn't called the sheriff. What had got into him? He had never been a sex maniac before! But still … it was hardly unexpected.
Might as well wait to start on those rabbit cages until tomorrow, he decided. This evening he felt like exploring.
The house was so big, and packed with so many things that he never found and examined them all. Or if he did, he forgot a lot about the things between times, so it was like reading a favorite book over again, always discovering new things in it.
The parlor was red in the fading light, and the hall beyond the sliding doors was deeply shadowed. In the sewing room, he remembered, in the drawers of the treadle machine the radio was captured. The rings and secret manuals of the days when radio had been alive. He hadn't looked over those things in some little time.
He looked up the shadowed stairway. He remembered the night, a few weeks before Christmas when he had been twelve and really too old to believe, his mother had said she was going up to see if Santa Claus had left any packages around a bit early. They often gave him his presents early, since they were never quite sure he would live until Christmas.
But his mother had been playing a trick on him. She hadn't been going up after packages. She had gone up those stairs to murder his father.
