Measure for a Loner

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  _You can measure everything these days--heat, light, gravity, reflexes, force-fields, star-drives. And now I know there even is a ..._

  MEASURE FOR A LONER

  By JIM HARMON

  So, General, I came in to tell you I've found the loneliest man in theworld for the Space Force.

  How am I supposed to rate his loneliness for you? In Megasorrows orKilofears? I suspect I know quite a library on the subject, but you knowmore about stripes and bars. Don't try to stop me this time, General.

  Now that you mention it, I'm not drunk. I had to have something to backme up so I stopped off at the dispensary and stole a needle.

  I want you to get off my back with that kind of talk. I've got enoughthere--it bends me over like I had bad kidneys. It isn't any of KingKong's little brothers. They over rate the stuff. It isn't the wayyou've been riding me either. Never mind what I'm carrying. Whatever itis--and believe me, it _is_--I have to get rid of it.

  Let me tell it, for God's sake.

  Then for Security's sake? I thought you would let me tell it, General.

  I've been coming in here and giving you pieces of it for months but nowI want to let you be drenched in the whole thing. You're going to takeit all.

  There were the two of them, the two lonely men, and I found them foryou.

  You remember the way I found them for you.

  The intercom on my blond desk made an electronic noise at me and thewords I had been arranging in my mind for the morning letters splatteredinto alphabet soup like a printer dropping a prepared slug of type.

  I made the proper motion to still the sound.

  "Yes," I grunted.

  My secretary cleared her throat on my time.

  "Dr. Thorn," she said, "there's a Mr. Madison here to see you. He laysclaim to be from the Star Project."

  He could come in and file his claim, I told the girl.

  I rummaged in the wastebasket and uncrumpled the morning's facsimilenewspaper. It was full of material about the Star Project.

  We were building Man's first interstellar spaceship.

  * * * * *

  A surprising number of people considered it important. Flipping from therear to page one, Wild Bill Star in the comics who had been blasting allthe way to forty-first sub-space universe for decades was harking backto the good old days of Man's first star flight (which he had madehimself through the magic of time travel), the editor was calling theman to make the jaunt the Lindbergh of Space, and the staff photographerdisplayed a still of a Space Force pilot in pressure suit up front withhis face blotted out by an air-brushed interrogation mark.

  Who was going to be the Lindbergh of Space?

  We had used up the Columbus of Space, the Magellan of Space, the VanReck of Space. Now it was time for the Lone Eagle, one man who wouldwait out the light years to Alpha Centauri.

  I remembered the first Lindbergh.

  I rode a bus fifty miles to see him at an Air Force Day celebration whenI was a dewy-eared kid. It's funny how kids still worship heroes who dideverything before they were even born. Uncle Max had told me aboutstanding outside the hospital with a bunch of boys his own age theevening Babe Ruth died of cancer. Lindbergh seemed like an old man to mewhen I finally saw him, but still active. Nobody had forgotten him. Whenhis speech was over I cheered him with the rest just as if I knew whathe had been talking about.

  But I probably knew more about what he meant then as a boy than I didfeeling the reality of the newspaper in my hands. Grown-up, I could onlysmile at myself for wanting to go to the stars myself.

  Madison rapped on my office door and breezed in efficiently.

  I've always thought Madison was a rather irritating man. Likable butirritating. He's too good looking in an unassuming masculine way todress so neatly--it makes him look like a mannequin. That polite way ofhis of using small words slowly and distinctly proves that he loves hisfellow man--even if his fellow always does have less brains or authoritythan Madison himself. That belief would be forgivable in him if itwasn't so often true.

  Madison folded himself into the canary yellow client's chair at mydirection, and took a leather-bound pocket secretary from inside hisalmost-too-snug jacket.

  "Dr. Thorn," he said expansively, "we need you to help us locate anatavism."

  I flicked professional smile No. Three at him lightly.

  "I'm a historical psychologist," I told him. "That sounds in my line.Which of your ancestors are you interested in having me analyze?"

  "I used the word 'atavism' to mean a reversion to the primitive."

  I made a pencil mark on my desk pad. I could make notes as well as hecould read them.

  "Yes, I see," I murmured. "We don't use the term that way. Perhaps youdon't understand my work. It's been an honest way to make a living for afew generations but it's so specialized it might sound foolish tosomeone outside the psychological industry. I psychoanalyze historicalfigures for history books (of course), and scholars, interesteddescendants, what all, and that's _all_ I do."

  "All you _have_ done," Madison admitted, "but your government is certainthat you can do this new work for them--in fact, that you are one of thefew men prepared to locate this esoteric--that is, this odd aberrationsince I understand you often have to deal with it in analyzing the past.Doctor, we want you to find us a lonely man."

  I laid my chrome yellow pencil down carefully beside the cream-coloredpad.

  "History is full of loneliness--most of the so-called great men wererather neurotic--but I thought, Madison, that introspection was prettymuch of a thing of the, well, past."

  The government representative inhaled deeply and steepled his manicuredfingers.

  "Our system of childhood psycho-conditioning succeeds in buryingloneliness in the subconscious so completely that even the records can'treveal if it was ever present."

  * * * * *

  I cleared my throat in order to stall, to think.

  "I'm not acquainted with _contemporary_ psychology, Madison. This comesas news to me. You mean people aren't really well-adjusted today, thatthey have just been conditioned to _act_ as if they were?"

  He nodded. "Yes, that's it. It's ironic. Now we need a lonely man and wecan't find him."

  "To pilot the interstellar spaceship?"

  "For the _Evening Star_, yes," Madison agreed.

  I picked up my pencil and held it between my two index fingers. Icouldn't think of a damned thing to say.

  "The whole problem," Madison was saying, "goes back to the early days ofspace travel. Men were confined in a small area facing infinite spacefor measureless periods in freefall. Men cracked--and ships, theycracked up. But as space travel advanced ships got larger, carried morepeople, more ties and reminders of human civilization. Pilots becamemore _normal_."

  I made myself look up at the earnest young man.

  "But now," I said, "now you want me to find you an abnormal pilot who isused to being alone, who can stand it, maybe even like it?"

  "Right."

  I constructed a genuine smile for him for the first time.

  "Madison, do you really think _I_ can find your man when evidently allthe government agencies have failed?"

  The government representative pocketed his notebook deftly and thenspread his hands clumsily for an instant.

  "At least, Doctor," he said, "you may _know_ it if you do find him."

  * * * * *

  It was a lonely job to find a lonely man, General, and maybe it was acrooked job to walk a
crooked mile to find a crooked man.

  I had to do it alone. No one else had enough experience in primitivepsychology to recognize the phenomenon of loneliness, even as Madisonhad said.

  The working conditions suited me. I had to think by myself but I had acomfortable staff to carry out my ideas. I liked my new office and theexecutive apartment the government supplied me. I had authority andrespect and I had security. The government assured me they would findfurther use for my services after I found them their man. I knew thiswas to keep me from dragging my tracks. But nevertheless I got rightdown to work.

  I found Gordon Meyverik exactly five weeks from the day Madison firstvisited me in my old office.

  "Of course, I planned the whole thing, Dr. Thorn," Gordon said crisply.

  I knew what he meant although I hadn't guessed it before. He could