[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine
October 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the
U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Every lonely man tries to make friends. Manet just didn't know when to
stop!
William Manet was alone.
In the beginning, he had seen many advantages to being alone. It would
give him an unprecedented opportunity to once and for all correlate
loneliness to the point of madness, to see how long it would take him
to start slavering and clawing the pin-ups from the magazines, to begin
teaching himself classes in philosophy consisting of interminable
lectures to a bored and captive audience of one.
He would be able to measure the qualities of peace and decide whether
it was really better than war, he would be able to get as fat and as
dirty as he liked, he would be able to live more like an animal and
think more like a god than any man for generations.
But after a shorter time than he expected, it all got to be a tearing
bore. Even the waiting to go crazy part of it.
Not that he was going to have any great long wait of it. He was already
talking to himself, making verbal notes for his lectures, and he had
cut out a picture of Annie Oakley from an old book. He tacked it up and
winked at it whenever he passed that way.
Lately she was winking back at him.
Loneliness was a physical weight on his skull. It peeled the flesh from
his arms and legs and sandpapered his self-pity to a fine sensitivity.
No one on Earth was as lonely as William Manet, and even William Manet
could only be this lonely on Mars.
Manet was Atmosphere Seeder Station 131-47's own human.
All Manet had to do was sit in the beating aluminum heart in the middle
of the chalk desert and stare out, chin cupped in hands, at the flat,
flat pavement of dirty talcum, at the stars gleaming as hard in the
black sky as a starlet's capped teeth ... stars two of which were moons
and one of which was Earth. He had to do nothing else. The whole
gimcrack was cybernetically controlled, entirely automatic. No one was
needed here--no human being, at least.
The Workers' Union was a pretty small pressure group, but it didn't
take much to pressure the Assembly. Featherbedding had been carefully
specified, including an Overseer for each of the Seeders to honeycomb
Mars, to prepare its atmosphere for colonization.
They didn't give tests to find well-balanced, well-integrated people
for the job. Well-balanced, well-integrated men weren't going to
isolate themselves in a useless job. They got, instead, William Manet
and his fellows.
The Overseers were to stay as long as the job required. Passenger fare
to Mars was about one billion dollars. They weren't providing commuter
service for night shifts. They weren't providing accommodations
for couples when the law specified only one occupant. They weren't
providing fuel (at fifty million dollars a gallon) for visits between
the various Overseers. They weren't very providential.
But it was two hundred thousand a year in salary, and it offered
wonderful opportunities.
It gave William Manet an opportunity to think he saw a spaceship making
a tailfirst landing on the table of the desert, its tail burning as
bright as envy.
<tb>
Manet suspected hallucination, but in an existence with all the pallid
dispassion of a requited love he was happy to welcome dementia.
Sometimes he even manufactured it. Sometimes he would run through the
arteries of the factory and play that it had suddenly gone mad hating
human beings, and was about to close down its bulkheads on him as sure
as the Engineers' Thumb and bale up the pressure-dehydrated digest,
making so much stall flooring of him. He ran until he dropped with a
kind of climaxing release of terror.
So Manet put on the pressure suit he had been given because he would
never need it, and marched out to meet the visiting spaceship.
He wasn't quite clear how he came from walking effortlessly across
the Martian plain that had all the distance-perpetuating qualities of
a kid's crank movie machine to the comfortable interior of a strange
cabin. Not a ship's cabin but a Northwoods cabin.
The black and orange Hallowe'en log charring in the slate stone
fireplace seemed real. So did the lean man with the smiling mustache
painted with the random designs of the fire, standing before the
horizontal pattern of chinked wall.
"Need a fresher?" the host inquired.
Manet's eyes wondered down to heavy water tumbler full of rich, amber
whiskey full of sparks from the hearth. He stirred himself in the
comfortingly warm leather chair. "No, no, I'm <i>fine</i>." He let the word
hang there for examination. "Pardon me, but could you tell me just what
place this is?"
The host shrugged. It was the only word for it. "Whatever place you
choose it to be, so long as you're with Trader Tom. 'Service,' that's
my motto. It is a way of life with me."
"Trader Tom? Service?"
"Yes! That's it exactly. It's <i>me</i> exactly. Trader Tom Service--Serving
the Wants of the Spaceman Between the Stars. Of course, 'stars' is
poetic. Any point of light in the sky in a star. We service the
planets."
Manet took the tumbler in both hands and drank. It was good whiskey,
immensely powerful. "The government wouldn't pay for somebody serving
the wants of spacemen," he exploded.
"Ah," Trader Tom said, cautionary. He moved nearer the fire and warmed
his hands and buttocks. "Ah, but I am not a <i>government</i> service. I
represent free enterprise."
<tb>
"Nonsense," Manet said. "No group of private individuals can build a
spaceship. It takes a combine of nations."
"But remember only that businessmen are reactionary. It's well-known.
Ask anyone on the street. Businessmen are reactionary even beyond the
capitalistic system. Money is a fiction that exists mostly on paper.
They play along on paper to get paper things, but to get real things
they can forego the papers. Comprehend, <i>mon ami</i>? My businessmen
have gone back to the barter system. Between them, they have the raw
materials, the trained men, the man-hours to make a spaceship. So they
make it. Damned reactionaries, all of my principals."
"I don't believe you," Manet stated flatly. His conversation had grown
blunt with disuse. "What possible profit could your principals turn
from running a trading ship among scattered exploration posts on the
planets? What could you give us that a benevolent government doesn't
already supply us with? And if there was anything, how could we pay for
it? My year's salary wouldn't cover the transportation costs of this
glass of whiskey."
"Do you find it good whiskey?"
"Very good."
"Excellent?"
"Excellent, if you prefer."
"I only meant--but never mind. We give you what you want. As for
paying for it--why, forget about the payment. You may apply for a
Trader Tom Credit Card."
"And I could buy anything that I wanted with it?" Manet demanded.
"That's absurd. I'd never be able to pay for it."
"That's it precisely!" Trader Tom said with enthusiasm. "You <i>never</i>
pay for it. Charges are merely deducted from your <i>estate</i>."
"But I may leave no estate!"
Trader Tom demonstrated his peculiar shrug. "All businesses operate on
a certain margin of risk. That is our worry."
<tb>
Manet finished the mellow whiskey and looked into the glass. It seemed
to have been polished clean. "What do you have to offer?"
"Whatever you want?"