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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Measure for a Loner, by James Judson Harmon
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Measure for a Loner
+
+Author: James Judson Harmon
+
+Release Date: September 14, 2007 [EBook #22596]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MEASURE FOR A LONER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Greg Weeks, Stephen Blundell and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+          _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 the
+world for the Space Force.
+
+How am I supposed to rate his loneliness for you? In Megasorrows or
+Kilofears? I suspect I know quite a library on the subject, but you know
+more 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 back
+me 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 enough
+there--it bends me over like I had bad kidneys. It isn't any of King
+Kong's little brothers. They over rate the stuff. It isn't the way
+you've been riding me either. Never mind what I'm carrying. Whatever it
+is--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 now
+I want to let you be drenched in the whole thing. You're going to take
+it all.
+
+There were the two of them, the two lonely men, and I found them for
+you.
+
+You remember the way I found them for you.
+
+The intercom on my blond desk made an electronic noise at me and the
+words I had been arranging in my mind for the morning letters splattered
+into 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 lays
+claim 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 facsimile
+newspaper. 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 the
+rear to page one, Wild Bill Star in the comics who had been blasting all
+the way to forty-first sub-space universe for decades was harking back
+to the good old days of Man's first star flight (which he had made
+himself through the magic of time travel), the editor was calling the
+man to make the jaunt the Lindbergh of Space, and the staff photographer
+displayed a still of a Space Force pilot in pressure suit up front with
+his 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 Van
+Reck of Space. Now it was time for the Lone Eagle, one man who would
+wait 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 when
+I was a dewy-eared kid. It's funny how kids still worship heroes who did
+everything before they were even born. Uncle Max had told me about
+standing outside the hospital with a bunch of boys his own age the
+evening Babe Ruth died of cancer. Lindbergh seemed like an old man to me
+when I finally saw him, but still active. Nobody had forgotten him. When
+his speech was over I cheered him with the rest just as if I knew what
+he had been talking about.
+
+But I probably knew more about what he meant then as a boy than I did
+feeling the reality of the newspaper in my hands. Grown-up, I could only
+smile 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 but
+irritating. He's too good looking in an unassuming masculine way to
+dress so neatly--it makes him look like a mannequin. That polite way of
+his of using small words slowly and distinctly proves that he loves his
+fellow man--even if his fellow always does have less brains or authority
+than Madison himself. That belief would be forgivable in him if it
+wasn't so often true.
+
+Madison folded himself into the canary yellow client's chair at my
+direction, and took a leather-bound pocket secretary from inside his
+almost-too-snug jacket.
+
+"Dr. Thorn," he said expansively, "we need you to help us locate an
+atavism."
+
+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 he
+could read them.
+
+"Yes, I see," I murmured. "We don't use the term that way. Perhaps you
+don't understand my work. It's been an honest way to make a living for a
+few generations but it's so specialized it might sound foolish to
+someone outside the psychological industry. I psychoanalyze historical
+figures for history books (of course), and scholars, interested
+descendants, what all, and that's _all_ I do."
+
+"All you _have_ done," Madison admitted, "but your government is certain
+that you can do this new work for them--in fact, that you are one of the
+few men prepared to locate this esoteric--that is, this odd aberration
+since 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-colored
+pad.
+
+"History is full of loneliness--most of the so-called great men were
+rather neurotic--but I thought, Madison, that introspection was pretty
+much of a thing of the, well, past."
+
+The government representative inhaled deeply and steepled his manicured
+fingers.
+
+"Our system of childhood psycho-conditioning succeeds in burying
+loneliness in the subconscious so completely that even the records can't
+reveal if it was ever present."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I cleared my throat in order to stall, to think.
+
+"I'm not acquainted with _contemporary_ psychology, Madison. This comes
+as news to me. You mean people aren't really well-adjusted today, that
+they 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 we
+can'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. I
+couldn't think of a damned thing to say.
+
+"The whole problem," Madison was saying, "goes back to the early days of
+space travel. Men were confined in a small area facing infinite space
+for measureless periods in freefall. Men cracked--and ships, they
+cracked up. But as space travel advanced ships got larger, carried more
+people, more ties and reminders of human civilization. Pilots became
+more _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 is
+used 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 all
+the government agencies have failed?"
+
+The government representative pocketed his notebook deftly and then
+spread 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 a
+crooked job to walk a crooked mile to find a crooked man.
+
+I had to do it alone. No one else had enough experience in primitive
+psychology to recognize the phenomenon of loneliness, even as Madison
+had said.
+
+The working conditions suited me. I had to think by myself but I had a
+comfortable staff to carry out my ideas. I liked my new office and the
+executive apartment the government supplied me. I had authority and
+respect and I had security. The government assured me they would find
+further use for my services after I found them their man. I knew this
+was to keep me from dragging my tracks. But nevertheless I got right
+down to work.
+
+I found Gordon Meyverik exactly five weeks from the day Madison first
+visited 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 tell
+it to me himself, I decided.
+
+"Doesn't seem much to brag about," I said. "Anybody who can make up a
+grocery list should be able to figure out how to isolate himself on Seal
+Island."
+
+He sat forward, a lean Viking with a hot Latin glance, very confident of
+himself.
+
+"I reckoned on you locating me, on you hustling me back to pilot the
+_Evening Star_. That's why I holed in there."
+
+"I can't accept your story," I lied cheerfully. "Nobody is going to
+maroon himself on an island for three years because of a wild
+possibility like that."
+
+Meyverik smiled and his sureness swelled out until it almost jabbed me
+in the stomach.
+
+"I took a broad gamble," he said, "but it hit the wire, didn't it?"
+
+I didn't reply, but he had his answer.
+
+Instead I scanned the report Madison had given me from Intelligence
+concerning the man's unorthodox behavior.
+
+Meyverik had quit his post-graduate studies and passed by the secured
+job that had been waiting for him eighteen months in a genial government
+office to barricade himself in an old shelter on Seal Island. It was
+hard to know what to make of it. He had brought impressive stores of
+food with him, books, sound and vision tapes but not telephone or
+television. For the next three years he had had no contact with humanity
+at all.
+
+And he said he had planned it all.
+
+"Sure," he drawled. "I knew the government was looking for somebody to
+steer the interstellar ship that's been gossip for decades. That job,"
+he said distinctly, "is one I would give a lot to settle into."
+
+I looked at him across my unlittered brand new desk and accepted his
+irritating blond masculinity, disliked him, admired him, and continued
+to examine him to decide on my _final_ evaluation.
+
+"You've given three years already," I said, examining the sheets of the
+report with which I was thoroughly familiar.
+
+He twitched. He didn't like that, not spending three years. It was
+spendthrift, even if a good buy. He was planning on winding up somewhere
+important and to do it he had to invest his years properly.
+
+"You are trying to make me believe you deliberately extrapolated the
+government's need for a man who could stand being alone for long
+periods, and then tried to phoney up references for the work by staying
+on that island?"
+
+"I don't like that word 'phoney'," Meyverik growled.
+
+"No? You name your word for it."
+
+Meyverik unhinged to his full height.
+
+"It was _proof_," he said. "A test."
+
+"A man can't test himself."
+
+"A lot you know," the big blond snorted.
+
+"I _know_," I told him drily. "A man who isn't a hopeless maniac
+depressive can't consciously create a test for himself that he knows he
+will fail. You proved you could stay alone on an island, buster. You
+didn't prove you could stay alone in a spaceship out in the middle of
+infinity for three years. Why didn't you rent a conventional rocket and
+try looking at some of our local space? It all looks much the same."
+
+Meyverik sat down.
+
+"I don't know why I didn't do that," he whispered.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Probably for the first time since he had got clever enough to beat up
+his big brother Meyverik was doubting himself, just a little, for just a
+time.
+
+I don't know whether it was good or bad for him--contemporary psychology
+isn't in my line--but I knew I couldn't trust a cocky kid.
+
+But I had to find out if he could still hit the target uncocked.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Stan Johnson was our second lonely man, remember, General?
+
+He was stubborn.
+
+I questioned him for a half hour the first day, two hours the second and
+on the third I turned him over to Madison.
+
+Then as I was having my lunch I suddenly thought of something and made
+steps back to my office.
+
+I got there just in time to grab Madison's bony wrist.
+
+The thing in his fist was silver and sharp, a hypodermic needle.
+Johnson's forearm was tanned below the torn pastel sleeve. Two sad-faced
+young men were holding him politely by the shoulders in the canvas
+chair. Johnson met my glance expressionlessly.
+
+I tugged on Madison's arm sharply.
+
+"What's in that damned sticker?"
+
+"Polypenthium." Madison's face was as blank as Johnson's--only his body
+seemed at once tired and taut.
+
+"What's it for?" I rasped.
+
+"You're the psychologist," he said sharply.
+
+I met his eyes and held on but it was impossible to stare him down.
+
+"I don't know about physical methods, I told you. I've been dealing with
+people in books, films, tapes all my life, not living men up till now,
+can't you absorb that?"
+
+"Apparently I've had more experience with these things than you then,
+Doctor. Shall I proceed?"
+
+"You shall not," I cried omnisciently. "I know enough to understand we
+can't get the results the government wants by drugs. You going to put
+that away?"
+
+Madison nodded once.
+
+"All right," he said.
+
+I unshackled my fingers and he put the shiny needle away in its case, in
+his suitcoat pocket.
+
+"You understand, Thorn," he said, "that the general won't like this."
+
+I turned around and looked at him.
+
+"Did he order you to drug Johnson?"
+
+The government agent shook his head.
+
+"I didn't think so." I was beginning to understand government
+operations. "He only wanted it done. Get out."
+
+Madison and his assistants marched out in orthodox Euclidian triangle
+formation.
+
+The doors hissed shut.
+
+"You know what?" The words jerked out from Johnson. "I think the bunch
+of you are crazy. _Crazy._"
+
+I decided to treat him like a client. Maybe that was the way
+contemporary psychologists handled their men.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I sat on the edge of the desk jauntily, confidently, and tried to let
+the domino mask up a father image.
+
+"You may as well get it straight, Stan. The government needs you and
+it's pointless for you to say that need is unconstitutional or anything.
+Bring it up and it won't be long. When survival is outside the rules,
+the rules change."
+
+The eyes of Johnson were strikingly like Meyverik's, dark and unsettled.
+Only this boy, younger, smaller than the Nordic, had an appropriate skin
+tone, stained by the tropical sun somewhere in his ancestral past. He
+dropped his gaze, expelled his breath mightily and pounded one angular
+knee with a half-closed fist.
+
+"I'm not complaining about conscription without representation, Doctor,
+but I can't make any sense out of these fool questions you keep firing
+at me. What in blazes are you trying to get at? What kind of reason are
+you after for my staying by myself? I just do it because I _like_ it
+that way."
+
+With a galvanic jolt, I realized he was telling the painfully simple
+truth. I groaned at the realization.
+
+Meyverik had convinced all of us that in our well-adjusted or at any
+rate well-conditioned world somebody had to have some purposeful
+_reason_ in loneliness, solitude, so on that one instance our thinking
+had already been patterned, discarding all the other evidence of
+generations that the lonely man was only a personality type, like
+Johnson.
+
+I felt I had achieved at least the quantum state of a fool.
+
+Johnson silently studied the half-cupped hands laying in his lap.
+
+"The hunting lodge in the Andes seemed as good a place as any to live
+after mother and father were killed. You might think it was lonesome at
+night in the mountains, but it isn't at all. You aren't alone when you
+can watch the burning worlds shadow the bow of God...."
+
+I cleared my throat. The poor kid sounded like he would begin spouting
+something akin to poetry next.
+
+"So I believe you," I told him. "That doesn't finish it. We have to
+convince _them_. I don't like this, but the simplest way would be to
+volunteer for their hibitor injection. I've found out Madison and his
+crowd don't believe men awake, only assorted dopes."
+
+Johnson deflated his area of the room with his breath intake.
+
+"Okay," he said at last. "I guess so."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Johnson gave us what we needed to clear the problem, it didn't take
+me long to finish processing the rest of the handful of possible loners
+we had located. Unlike Johnson, all the rest had _reasons_ for their
+self-imposed loneliness. Unlike Meyverik none of their reasons were
+associated with the interstellar flight. They instead involved literary
+research, swindles, isolated paranoid insanity and other things in
+which the government had no interest.
+
+Suddenly I found my job was done and that we had located only the two of
+them.
+
+Madison read my final report braced on the edge of my desk, his hand
+comradely on my shoulder.
+
+"Good job, Doc," he vouched replacing the papers on my blotter with a
+final rustle. "Now I've got news for you. The government wants you to
+_test_ these boys for us now that you've found 'em for us."
+
+I closed my jaw. "That's completely out of line--_my_ line. I know you
+need a contemporary man for that job."
+
+Madison punched me on the bicep, fast enough to hurt.
+
+"Doc, after this project you know more about contemp' stuff than any
+professor who got his degree studying the textbooks _you_ wrote."
+
+It was impossible to dislike Madison except for practiced periods--that
+was probably one reason he had his job.
+
+"All right," I 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 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 killer and everybody knows it.
+
+You see our mistake, General.
+
+We sent men with variable amounts of loneliness. These amounts could
+alter. But now we have a golden opportunity.
+
+The _Evening Star_ is waiting and I have found for you a man with the
+true measure of loneliness. It is impossible for this man to become any
+more or any less lonely. It isn't the Ultimate Possible Loneliness,
+understand that, General.
+
+It's just that by himself or with others he is always in a crowd of
+three, no more, no less.
+
+The interstellar ship is waiting.
+
+So tell me, General, have you ever seen a lonelier man than me, your
+humble servitor, Dr. Thorn? No, I mean it. Have you?
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note
+
+This etext was produced from _Amazing Science Fiction Stories_ March
+1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
+copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
+typographical errors have been corrected without note.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Measure for a Loner, by James Judson Harmon
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