Measure for a Loner | Page 6

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, Johnson, hear me?"
But he couldn't hear me.
One of the government technicians had broken the contact before that
last spurt.
* * * * *
"This is good," Madison said, pawing fuzzily at his pocket.
"Really--good."
I studied the three or four watchdials wobbling up and down my
elongated wrist. They seemed to say it was almost sunrise.
I leered at Madison. "Yeah, yeah, what is it? Huh, huh?"
He shoved a crumpled card into my lax fingers.
"Now," he said, "now tell them--"
"Yeah, yeah."
"Tell them the whole thing is useless."

* * * * *
My stomach retched drily, grinding the sober pills to dust between its
ulcerating walls.
"Meyverik," I said to the empty video tube, "they made a mistake. They
underestimated curvature. You can't reach Alpha Centauri. You can't
correct enough. Free space is all you'll hit. Ever. You may as well come
home."
The soft voice came out of nowhere, from nothing.
"I don't want to come back. I like it here. This is what I've always been
trying to get and I never knew it."
Madison grabbed my arm with pronged fingers.
"Shut up, Doc. That's just the way the government wants him to be."
"Johnson," I said to the creased face in the screen, "they made a
mistake. They underestimated curvature. You can't reach Alpha
Centauri. You can't correct enough. Free space is all you'll hit. Ever.
You may as well come--back."
Johnson sighed, a whisper of breath across the miles.
"I'll keep going. No one has ever been so far out before. I can report
valuable things."
I stood there. The textbooks report it takes muscular effort to frown,
more so than to smile. But my face seemed to flow into the lines of
pain so hard it ached without any effort of my will. And I knew it
would hurt to smile.
"They passed the final test," Madison said at my side. "Tell them it was
a test."
I would do it for him. I didn't need to do it for myself.

I motioned the technician to open both channels.
"The ship you are in," I said, with no need to tell them of each other, "is
not the real Evening Star. It will not take you to the stars. This has been
only a test to credit your fitness to pilot the real interstellar craft of the
Star Project. You must return to the Lunar Satellite. This is a direct
order."
The two screens remained blank. Only the windless silence of space
echoed over Johnson's channel, but the tapes later proved that I actually
did hear a whispered laugh from Meyverik.
I faced Madison.
"They won't come back. They could have passed any test except the
fact that what we put them through was only a test. For their own
reasons, they will keep going. As far as they can."
Madison took out his notebook and seemed to look for vital
information. Except that he never cracked the cover.
"Of course, we can't get them back if they won't come," he said. "If
cybernetic remotes functioned operationally at this distance we
wouldn't have to send men at all."
He replaced the pocket secretary and looked at me edgewise,
speculatively.
I touched his arm.
"Let's find another bottle," I said.
He stepped back.
"You found them. You tested them. You killed them."
And the government man walked away and left me standing with a
murderer.

* * * * *
You see it now, don't you, General?
What I'm carrying around on my back is guilt. Not guilt complex, not
guilt fixation, just plain old Abel-Cain guilt.
In this nice, well-ordered age I'm a