Measure for a Loner | Page 5

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 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