Measure for a Loner | Page 2

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.
"Yes, I see," I murmured. "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 psychoanalyze historical figures for history books (of course), and scholars, interested descendants, what all, and that's all I do."
"All you have done," Madison admitted, "but your government is certain that you can do this new work for them--in fact, that you are one of the few men prepared to locate this esoteric--that is, this odd aberration since I understand you often have to deal with it in analyzing the past. Doctor, we want you to find us a lonely man."
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.
"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?"
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?"
"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. Pilots became more normal."
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.
"Madison, do you really think I can find your man when evidently all the government agencies have failed?"
The government representative pocketed his notebook deftly and then spread his hands clumsily for an instant.
"At least, Doctor," he said, "you may know it if you do find him."
* * * * *
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."
He sat forward, a lean Viking with a hot Latin glance, very confident of himself.
"I reckoned on you locating me, on you hustling