"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 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.