Measure for a Loner | Page 4

men up till now,
can't you absorb that?"
"Apparently I've had more experience with these things than you then,
Doctor. Shall I proceed?"
"You shall not," I cried omnisciently. "I know enough to understand we
can't get the results the government wants by drugs. You going to put
that away?"
Madison nodded once.
"All right," he said.
I unshackled my fingers and he put the shiny needle away in its case, in
his suitcoat pocket.
"You understand, Thorn," he said, "that the general won't like this."
I turned around and looked at him.
"Did he order you to drug Johnson?"
The government agent shook his head.
"I didn't think so." I was beginning to understand government
operations. "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