Read Ebook: Measure for a Loner by Harmon Jim

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Ebook has 192 lines and 8221 words, and 4 pages

MEASURE FOR A LONER

So, General, I came in to tell you I've found the loneliest man in the world for the Space Force.

How am I supposed to rate his loneliness for you? In Megasorrows or Kilofears? I suspect I know quite a library on the subject, but you know more about stripes and bars. Don't try to stop me this time, General.

Now that you mention it, I'm not drunk. I had to have something to back me up so I stopped off at the dispensary and stole a needle.

Let me tell it, for God's sake.

Then for Security's sake? I thought you would let me tell it, General.

I've been coming in here and giving you pieces of it for months but now I want to let you be drenched in the whole thing. You're going to take it all.

There were the two of them, the two lonely men, and I found them for you.

You remember the way I found them for you.

The intercom on my blond desk made an electronic noise at me and the words I had been arranging in my mind for the morning letters splattered into alphabet soup like a printer dropping a prepared slug of type.

I made the proper motion to still the sound.

"Yes," I grunted.

My secretary cleared her throat on my time.

"Dr. Thorn," she said, "there's a Mr. Madison here to see you. He lays claim to be from the Star Project."

He could come in and file his claim, I told the girl.

I rummaged in the wastebasket and uncrumpled the morning's facsimile newspaper. It was full of material about the Star Project.

We were building Man's first interstellar spaceship.

A surprising number of people considered it important. Flipping from the rear to page one, Wild Bill Star in the comics who had been blasting all the way to forty-first sub-space universe for decades was harking back to the good old days of Man's first star flight , the editor was calling the man to make the jaunt the Lindbergh of Space, and the staff photographer displayed a still of a Space Force pilot in pressure suit up front with his face blotted out by an air-brushed interrogation mark.

Who was going to be the Lindbergh of Space?

We had used up the Columbus of Space, the Magellan of Space, the Van Reck of Space. Now it was time for the Lone Eagle, one man who would wait out the light years to Alpha Centauri.

I remembered the first Lindbergh.

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. Lindbergh seemed like an old man to me when I finally saw him, but still active. Nobody had forgotten him. When his speech was over I cheered him with the rest just as if I knew what he had been talking about.

But I probably knew more about what he meant then as a boy than I did feeling the reality of the newspaper in my hands. Grown-up, I could only smile at myself for wanting to go to the stars myself.

Madison rapped on my office door and breezed in efficiently.

I've always thought Madison was a rather irritating man. Likable but irritating. He's too good looking in an unassuming masculine way to dress so neatly--it makes him look like a mannequin. That polite way of his of using small words slowly and distinctly proves that he loves his fellow man--even if his fellow always does have less brains or authority than Madison himself. That belief would be forgivable in him if it wasn't so often true.

Madison folded himself into the canary yellow client's chair at my direction, and took a leather-bound pocket secretary from inside his almost-too-snug jacket.

"Dr. Thorn," he said expansively, "we need you to help us locate an atavism."

I flicked professional smile No. Three at him lightly.

"I'm a historical psychologist," I told him. "That sounds in my line. Which of your ancestors are you interested in having me analyze?"

"I used the word 'atavism' to mean a reversion to the primitive."

I made a pencil mark on my desk pad. I could make notes as well as he could read them.

I laid my chrome yellow pencil down carefully beside the cream-colored pad.

"History is full of loneliness--most of the so-called great men were rather neurotic--but I thought, Madison, that introspection was pretty much of a thing of the, well, past."

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.

He nodded. "Yes, that's it. It's ironic. Now we need a lonely man and we can't find him."

"To pilot the interstellar spaceship?"

I picked up my pencil and held it between my two index fingers. I couldn't think of a damned thing to say.

I made myself look up at the earnest young man.

"But now," I said, "now you want me to find you an abnormal pilot who is used to being alone, who can stand it, maybe even like it?"

"Right."

I constructed a genuine smile for him for the first time.

The government representative pocketed his notebook deftly and then spread his hands clumsily for an instant.

It was a lonely job to find a lonely man, General, and maybe it was a crooked job to walk a crooked mile to find a crooked man.

I had to do it alone. No one else had enough experience in primitive psychology to recognize the phenomenon of loneliness, even as Madison had said.

The working conditions suited me. I had to think by myself but I had a comfortable staff to carry out my ideas. I liked my new office and the executive apartment the government supplied me. I had authority and respect and I had security. The government assured me they would find further use for my services after I found them their man. I knew this was to keep me from dragging my tracks. But nevertheless I got right down to work.

I found Gordon Meyverik exactly five weeks from the day Madison first visited me in my old office.

"Of course, I planned the whole thing, Dr. Thorn," Gordon said crisply.

I knew what he meant although I hadn't guessed it before. He could tell it to me himself, I decided.

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

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