Measure for a Loner | Page 4

"He only wanted it done. Get out."
Madison and his assistants marched out in orthodox Euclidian triangle formation.
The doors hissed shut.
"You know what?" The words jerked out from Johnson. "I think the bunch of you are crazy. Crazy."
I decided to treat him like a client. Maybe that was the way contemporary psychologists handled their men.
* * * * *
I sat on the edge of the desk jauntily, confidently, and tried to let the domino mask up a father image.
"You may as well get it straight, Stan. 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'm not complaining about conscription without representation, Doctor, but I can't make any sense out of these fool questions you keep firing at me. What in blazes are you trying to get at? What kind of reason are you after for my staying by myself? I just do it because I like it that way."
With a galvanic jolt, I realized he was telling the painfully simple truth. I groaned at the realization.
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.
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 live after mother and father were killed. You might think it was lonesome at night in the mountains, but it isn't at all. You aren't alone when you can watch the burning worlds shadow the bow of God...."
I cleared my throat. The poor kid sounded like he would begin spouting something akin to poetry next.
"So I believe you," I told him. "That doesn't finish it. We have to convince them. I don't like this, but the simplest way would be to volunteer for their hibitor injection. I've found out Madison and his crowd 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 take me long to finish processing the rest of the handful of possible loners we had located. Unlike Johnson, all the rest had reasons for their self-imposed loneliness. Unlike Meyverik none of their reasons were associated with the interstellar flight. They instead involved literary research, swindles, isolated paranoid insanity and other things in which the government had no interest.
Suddenly I found my job was done and that we had located only the two of them.
Madison read my final report braced on the edge of my desk, his hand comradely on my shoulder.
"Good job, Doc," he vouched replacing the papers on my blotter with a final 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 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'll--celebrate, huh?"
But you know how I felt, General? You remember how I tried to get out of it. 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--Judas goat. Give or take a word.
* * * * *
"It isn't the real thing, Doc," Madison spelled out for me, wearing a lemon twist of smile.
I looked at the twin banks of gauge-facings and circuit housings in which centered TV screens picturing either Meyverik or Johnson. Red and sea-green lights chased each other around the control boards, died, were born again. On the screens the three color negatives mixed to purple, shifted through a series of wrong combinations and