Measure for a Loner | Page 5

settled to normal as the stereo-oscillation echoed, convexed insanely, and deepened to hold. Video reception is lousy from five hundred thousand miles out.
I was too eye-heavy to be surprised.
"Don't tell me this is The Strange Flight of Richard Clayton all over again?"
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."
He shook his lean head almost wistfully.
"Damn it, Madison, do you mean I've been beating my lobes out for weeks for nothing? I tested them. I checked them out. Either was capable of making the flight successfully--for their own different reasons."
Madison took his hand off my shoulder and made a fist of it.
"I'm not questioning your decision! Will you ram that through your obscene skull, Thorn!"
"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,