A Saucer of Loneliness (45 page)

We lay at Borinquen for four days. Nothing much happened except I was busy. That’s what’s tough about pursering. You got nothing to do for weeks in space, and then, when you’re in spaceport, you have too much work to do even to go ashore much, unless it’s a long layover.

I never really minded much. I’m one of those mathematical geniuses, you know, even if I don’t have too much sense otherwise, and I take pride in my work. Everybody has something he’s good at, I guess. I couldn’t tell you how the gimmick works that makes the ship travel faster than light, but I’d hate to trust the Chief Engineer with one of
my interplanetary cargo manifests, or a rate-of-exchange table,
glunker
pelts to U.E. dollars.

Some hard-jawed character with Space Navy Investigator credentials came inboard with a portable voice recorder and made me and the Third Officer recite a lot of nonsense for some sort of test, I don’t know what. The SNI is always doing a lot of useless and mysterious things. I had an argument with the Port Agent, and l went ashore with Cooky for a fast drink. The usual thing. Then I had to work overtime signing on a new Third—they transferred the old one to a corvette that was due in, they told me.

Oh, yes, that was the trip the Skipper resigned. I guess it was high time. He’d been acting very nervous. He gave me the damnedest look when he went ashore that last time, like he didn’t know whether to kill me or burst into tears. There was a rumor around that he’d gone beserk and threatened the crew with a gun, but I don’t listen to rumors. And anyway, the Port Captain signs on new skippers. It didn’t mean any extra work for me, so it didn’t matter much.

We up-shipped again and made the rounds. Boötes Sigma and Nightingale and Caranho and Earth—chemical glassware, black prints,
sho
seed and glitter crystals; perfume, music tape,
glizzard
skins and Aldebar—all the usual junk for all the usual months. And round we came again to Borinquen.

Well, you wouldn’t believe a place could change so much in so short a time. Borinquen used to be a pretty free-and-easy planet. There was just the one good-sized city, see, and then trapper camps all through the unsettled area. If you liked people, you settled in the city, and you could go to work in the processing plants or maintenance or some such. If you didn’t, you could trap
glunker
s. There was always something for everybody on Borinquen.

But things were way different this trip. First of all, a man with a Planetary Government badge came aboard, by God, to censor the music tapes consigned for the city, and he had the credentials for it, too. Next thing I find out, the municipal authorities have confiscated the warehouses—
my
warehouses—and they were being converted into barracks.

And where were the goods—the pelts and ingots for export?
Where was the space for our cargo? Why, in houses—in hundreds of houses, all spread around every which way, all indexed up with a whole big new office full of conscripts and volunteers to mix up and keep mixed up! For the first time since I went to space, I had to request layover so I could get things unwound.

Anyway it gave me a chance to wander around the town, which I don’t often get.

You should have seen the place! Everybody seemed to be moving out of the houses. All the big buildings were being made over into hollow shells, filled with rows and rows of mattresses. There were banners strung across the streets: ARE YOU A MAN OR ARE YOU ALONE? A SINGLE SHINGLE IS A SORRY SHELTER! THE DEVIL HATES A CROWD!

All of which meant nothing to me. But it wasn’t until I noticed a sign painted in whitewash on the glass front of a barroom, saying—TRAPPERS STAY OUT!—that I was aware of one of the biggest changes of all.

There were no trappers on the streets—none at all. They used to be one of the tourist attractions of Borinquen, dressed in
glunker
fur, with the long tail-wings afloat in the wind of their walking, and a kind of distance in their eyes that not even spacemen had. As soon as I missed them, I began to see the TRAPPERS STAY OUT! signs just about everywhere—on the stores, the restaurants, the hotels and theaters.

I stood on a street comer, looking around me and wondering what in hell was going on here, when a Borinquen cop yelled something at me from a monowheel prowl car. I didn’t understand him, so I just shrugged. He made a U-turn and coasted up to me.

“What’s the matter, country boy? Lose your traps?”

I said, “What?”

He said, “If you want to go it alone,
glunker
, we got solitary cells over at the Hall that’ll suit you fine.”

I just gawked at him. And, to my surprise, another cop poked his head up out of the prowler. A one-man prowler, mind. They were really jammed in there.

This second one said, “Where’s your trapline, jerker?”

I said, “I don’t have a trapline.” I pointed to the mighty tower of my ship, looming over the spaceport. “I’m the Purser off that ship.”

“Oh, for God’s sakes!” said the first cop. “I might have known. Look, Spacer, you’d better double up or you’re liable to get yourself mobbed. This is no spot for a soloist.”

“I don’t get you, Officer. I was just—”

“I’ll take him,” said someone. I looked around and saw a tall Borinqueña standing just inside the open doorway of one of the hundreds of empty houses. She said, “I came back here to pick up some of my things. When I got done in here, there was nobody on the sidewalks. I’ve been here an hour, waiting for somebody to go with.” She sounded a little hysterical.

“You know better than to go in there by yourself,” said one of the cops.

“I know—I know. It was just to get my things. I wasn’t going to stay.” She hauled up a duffel bag and dangled it in front of her. “Just to get my things,” she said again, frightened.

The cops looked at each other. “Well, all right. But watch yourself. You go along with the Purser here. Better straighten him out—he don’t seem to know what’s right.”

“I will,” she said thankfully.

But by then the prowler had moaned off, weaving a little under its double load!

I looked at her. She wasn’t pretty. She was sort of heavy and stupid.

She said, “You’ll be all right now. Let’s go.”

“Where?”

“Well, Central Barracks, I guess. That’s where most everybody is.”

“I have to get back to the ship.”

“Oh, dear,” she said, all distressed again. “Right away?”

“No, not right away. I’ll go in town with you, if you want.” She picked up her duffel bag, but I took it from her and heaved it up on my shoulder. “Is everybody here crazy?” I asked her, scowling.

“Crazy?” She began walking, and I went along. “I don’t
think
so.”

“All this,” I persisted. I pointed to a banner that said, NO LADDER HAS A SINGLE RUNG. “What’s that mean?”

“Just what it says.”

“You have to put up a big thing like that just to tell me …”

“Oh,” she said. “You mean what does it
mean
!” She looked at me strangely. “We’ve found out a new truth about humanity. Look, I’ll try to tell it to you the way the Lucilles said it last night.”

“Who’s Lucille?”

“
The
Lucilles,” she said, in a mildly shocked tone. “Actually, I suppose there’s really only one—though, of course, there’ll be someone else in the studio at the time,” she added quickly. “But on trideo it looks like four Lucilles, all speaking at once, sort of in chorus.”

“You just go on talking,” I said when she paused. “I catch on slowly.”

“Well, here’s what they say. They say no one human being ever did
anything
. They say it takes a hundred pairs of hands to build a house, ten thousand pairs to build a ship. They say a single pair is not only useless—it’s
evil
. All humanity is a thing made up of many parts. No part is good by itself. Any part that wants to go off by itself hurts the whole main thing—the thing that has become so great. So we’re seeing to it that no part ever gets separated. What good would your hand be if a finger suddenly decided to go off by itself?”

I said, “And you believe this—what’s your name?”

“Nola.
Believe
it? Well, it’s true, isn’t it? Can’t you see it’s true? Everybody
knows
it’s true.”

“Well,
it could
be true,” I said reluctantly. “What do you do with people who want to be by themselves?”

“We help them.”

“Suppose they don’t want help?”

“Then they’re trappers,” she said immediately. “We push them back into the bush, where the evil soloists come from.”

“Well, what about the fur?”

“
No
body uses furs any more!”

So that’s what happened to our fur consignments! And I was thinking those amateur red-tapers had just lost ’em somewhere.

She said, as if to herself, “All sin starts in the lonesome dark,” and when I looked up, I saw she’d read it approvingly off another banner.

We rounded a corner and I blinked at a blaze of light. It was one of the warehouses.

“There’s the Central,” she said. “Would you like to see it?”

“I guess so.”

I followed her down the street to the entrance. There was a man sitting at a table in the doorway. Nola gave him a card. He checked it against a list and handed it back.

“A visitor,” she said. “From the ship.”

I showed him my Purser’s card and he said, “Okay. But if you want to stay, you’ll have to register.”

“I won’t want to stay,” I told him. “I have to get back.”

I followed Nola inside.

The place had been scraped out to the absolute maximum. Take away one splinter of vertical structure more and it wouldn’t have held a roof. There wasn’t a concealed comer, a shelf, a drape, an overhang. There must have been two thousand beds, cots and mattresses spread out, cheek by jowl, over the entire floor, in blocks of four, with only a hand’s-breadth between them.

The light was blinding—huge floods and spots bathed every square inch in yellow-white fire.

Nola said, “You’ll get used to the light. After a few nights, you don’t even notice it.”

“The lights never get turned off?”

“Oh, dear, no!”

Then I saw the plumbing—showers, tubs, sinks and everything else. It was all lined up against one wall.

Nola followed my eyes. “You get used to that, too. Better to have everything out in the open than to let the devil in for one secret second. That’s what the Lucilles say.”

I dropped her duffel bag and sat down on it. The only thing I could think of was, “Whose idea was all this? Where did it start?”

“The Lucilles,” she said vaguely. Then, “Before them, I don’t know. People just started to realize. Somebody bought a warehouse—no,
it was a hangar—I don’t know,” she said again, apparently trying hard to remember. She sat down next to me and said in a subdued voice, “Actually, some people didn’t take to it so well at first.” She looked around. “
I
didn’t. I mean it, I really didn’t. But you believed, or you had to act as if you believed, and one way or another everybody just came to this.” She waved a hand.

“What happened to the ones who wouldn’t come to Centrals?”

“People made fun of them. They lost their jobs, the schools wouldn’t take their children, the stores wouldn’t honor their ration cards. Then the police started to pick up soloists—like they did you.” She looked around again, a sort of contented familiarity in her gaze. “It didn’t take long.”

I turned away from her, but found myself staring at all that plumbing again. I jumped up. “I have to go, Nola. Thanks for your help. Hey—how do I get back to the ship, if the cops are out to pick up any soloist they see?”

“Oh, just tell the man at the gate. There’ll be people waiting to go your way. There’s always somebody waiting to go everywhere.”

She came along with me. I spoke to the man at the gate, and she shook hands with me. I stood by the little table and watched her hesitate, then step up to a woman who was entering. They went in together. The doorman nudged me over toward a group of what appeared to be loungers.

“North
!” he bawled.

I drew a pudgy little man with bad teeth, who said not one single word. We escorted each other two-thirds of the way to the spaceport, and he disappeared into a factory. I scuttled the rest of the way alone, feeling like a criminal, which I suppose I was. I swore I would never go into that crazy city again.

And the next morning, who should come out for me in an armored car with six two-man prowlers as escort, but Mr. Costello himself!

It was pretty grand seeing him again. He was just like always, big and handsome and good-natured. He was not alone. All spread out in the back corner of the car was the most beautiful blonde woman that ever struck me speechless. She didn’t say very much. She would just look at me every once in a while and sort of smile,
and then she would look out of the car window and bite on her lower lip a little, and then look at Mr. Costello and not smile at all.

Mr. Costello hadn’t forgotten me. He had a bottle of that same red cinnamon wine, and he talked over old times the same as ever, like he was a special uncle. We got a sort of guided tour. I told him about last night, about the visit to the Central, and he was pleased as could be. He said he knew I’d like it. I didn’t stop to think whether I liked it or not.

“Think of it!” he said. “All humankind, a single unit. You know the principle of cooperation, Purser?”

When I took too long to think it out, he said, “You know. Two men working together can produce more than two men working separately. Well, what happens when a thousand—a million—work, sleep, eat, think, breathe together?” The way he said it, it sounded fine.

He looked out past my shoulder and his eyes widened just a little. He pressed a button and the chauffeur brought us to a sliding stop.

“Get that one,” Mr. Costello said into a microphone beside him.

Two of the prowlers hurtled down the street and flanked a man.

He dodged right, dodged left, and then a prowler hit him and knocked him down.

“Poor chap,” said Mr. Costello, pushing the Go button. “Some of ’em just won’t learn.”