A Saucer of Loneliness (46 page)

I think he regretted it very much. I don’t know if the blonde woman did. She didn’t even look.

“Are you the mayor?” I asked him.

“Oh, no,” he said. “I’m a sort of broker. A little of this, a little of that. I’m able to help out a bit.”

“Help out?”

“Purser,” he said confidentially, “I’m a citizen of Borinquen now. This is my adopted land and I love it. I mean to do everything in my power to help it. I don’t care about the cost. This is a people that has found the
truth
, Purser. It awes me. It makes me humble.”

“I …”

“Speak up, man. I’m your
friend
.”

“I appreciate that, Mr. Costello. Well, what I was going to say, I saw that Central and all. I just haven’t made up my mind. I mean whether it’s good or not.”

“Take your time, take your time,” he said in the big soft voice. “Nobody has to
make
a man see a truth, am I right? A real truth? A man just sees it all by himself.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Yeah, I guess so.” Sometimes it was hard to find an answer to give Mr. Costello.

The car pulled up beside a building. The blonde woman pulled herself together. Mr. Costello opened the door for her with his own hands. She got out. Mr. Costello rapped the trideo screen in front of him.

He said, “Make it a real good one, Lucille, real good. I’ll be watching.”

She looked at him. She gave me a small smile. A man came down the steps and she went with him up into the building.

We moved off.

I said, “She’s the prettiest woman I ever saw.”

He said, “She likes you fine, Purser.”

I thought about that. It was too much.

He asked, “How would you like to have her for your very own?”

“Oh,” I said, “she wouldn’t.”

“Purser, I owe you a big favor. I’d like to pay it back.”

“You don’t owe me a thing, Mr. Costello!”

We drank some of the wine. The big car slid silently along. It went slowly now, headed back out to the spaceport.

“I need some help,” he said after a time. “I know you, Purser. You’re just the kind of man I can use. They say you’re a mathematical genius.”

“Not mathematics exactly, Mr. Costello. Just numbers—statistics—conversion tables and like that. I couldn’t do astrogation or theoretical physics and such. I got the best job I could have right now.

“No, you haven’t. I’ll be frank with you. I don’t want any more responsibility on Borinquen than I’ve got, you understand, but the
people are forcing it on me. They want order, peace and order—tidiness. They want to be as nice and tidy as one of your multiple manifests. Now I could organize them, all right, but I need a tidy brain like yours to keep them organized. I want full birth- and death-rate statistics, and then I want them projected so we can get policy. I want calorie-counts and rationing, so we can use the food supply the best way. I want, well, you see what I mean. Once the devil is routed—”

“What devil?”

“The trappers,” he said grayly.

“Are the trappers really harming the city people?”

He looked at me, shocked. “They go out and spend weeks alone by themselves, with their own evil thoughts. They are wandering cells, wild cells in the body of humanity. They must be destroyed.”

I couldn’t help but think of my consignments. “What about the fur trade, though?”

He looked at me as if I had made a pretty grubby little mistake. “My dear Purser,” he said patiently, “would you set the price of a few pelts above the immortal soul of a race?”

I hadn’t thought of it that way.

He said urgently, “This is just the beginning, Purser. Borinquen is only a start. The unity of that great being, Humanity, will become known throughout the Universe.” He closed his eyes. When he opened them, the organ tone was gone. He said in his old, friendly voice, “And you and I, we’ll show ’em how to do it, hey, boy?”

I leaned forward to look up to the top of the shining spire of the spaceship. “I sort of like the job I’ve got. But—my contract’s up four months from now …”

The car turned into the spaceport and hummed across the slag area.

“I think I can count on you,” he said vibrantly. He laughed. “Remember this little joke, Purser?”

He clicked a switch, and suddenly my own voice filled the tonneau
. “I take bribes from passengers
.”

“Oh, that,” I said, and let loose one
ha
of a
ha-ha
before I understood what he was driving at. “Mr. Costello, you wouldn’t use that against me.”

“What do you take me for?” he demanded, in wonderment.

Then we were at the ramp. He got out with me. He gave me his hand. It was warm and hearty.

“If you change your mind about the Purser’s job when your contract’s up, son, just buzz me through the field phone. They’ll connect me. Think it over until you get back here. Take your time.” His hand clamped down on my biceps so hard I winced. “But you’re not going to take any longer than that, are you, my boy?”

“I guess not,” I said.

He got into the front, by the chauffeur, and zoomed away.

I stood looking after him and, when the car was just a dark spot on the slag area, I sort of came to myself. I was standing alone on the foot of the ramp. I felt very exposed.

I turned and ran up to the airlock, hurrying, hurrying to get near people.

That was the trip we shipped the crazy man. His name was Hynes. He was United Earth Consul at Borinquen and he was going back to report. He was no trouble at first, because diplomatic passports are easy to process. He knocked on my door the fifth watch out from Borinquen. I was glad to see him. My room was making me uneasy and I appreciated his company.

Not that he was really company. He was crazy. That first time, he came busting in and said, “I hope you don’t mind, Purser, but if I don’t talk to somebody about this, I’ll go out of my mind.” Then he sat down on the end of my bunk and put his head in his hands and rocked back and forth for a long time, without saying anything. Next thing he said was, “Sorry,” and out he went. Crazy, I tell you.

But he was back in again before long. And then you never heard such ravings.

“Do you know what’s happened to Borinquen?” he’d demand. But he didn’t want any answers. He had the answers. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with Borinquen—Borinquen’s gone mad!” he’d say.

I went on with my work, though there wasn’t much of it in space, but that Hynes just couldn’t get Borinquen out of his mind.

He said, “You wouldn’t believe it if you hadn’t seen it done. First
the little wedge, driven in the one place it might exist—between the urbans and the trappers. There was never any conflict between them—never! All of a sudden, the trapper was a menace. How it happened, why, God only knows. First, these laughable attempts to show that they were an unhealthy influence. Yes, laughable—how could you take it seriously?

“And then the changes. You didn’t have to prove that a trapper had done anything. You only had to prove he was a trapper. That was enough. And the next thing—how could you
anticipate
anything as mad as this?”—he almost screamed—“the next thing was to take anyone who wanted to be alone and lump him with the trappers. It all happened so fast—it happened in our sleep. And all of a sudden you were afraid to be alone in a room for a
second
. They left their homes. They built barracks. Everyone afraid of everyone else, afraid, afraid …

“Do you know what they
did
?” he roared. “They burned the paintings, every painting on Borinquen they could find that had been done by one artist. And the few artists who survived as artists—I’ve seen them. By twos and threes, they work together on the one canvas.”

He cried. He actually sat there and cried.

He said, “There’s food in the stores. The crops come in. Trucks run, planes fly, the schools are in session. Bellies get full, cars get washed, people get rich. I know a man called Costello, just in from Earth a few months, maybe a year or so, and already owns half the city.”

“Oh, I know Mr. Costello,” I said.

“Do you now! How’s that?”

I told him about the trip out with Mr. Costello. He sort of backed off from me. “
You’re
the one!”

“The one what?” I asked in puzzlement.

“
You’re
the man who testified against your Captain, broke him, made him resign.”

“I did no such a thing.”

“I’m the Consul. It was my hearing, man! I was
there!
A recording of the Captain’s voice, admitting to insanity, declaring he’d take
a gun to his crew if they overrode him. Then your recorded testimony that it was his voice, that you were present when he made the statement. And the Third Officer’s recorded statement that all was not well on the bridge. The man denied it, but it was his voice.”

“Wait, wait,” I said. “I don’t believe it. That would need a trial. There was no trial. I wasn’t called to any trial.”

“There would have been a trial, you idiot! But the Captain started raving about draw poker without a draw, about the crew fearing poisoning from the cook, about the men wanting witnesses even to change the bridge-watch. Maddest thing I ever heard. He realized it suddenly, the Captain did. He was old, sick, tired, beaten. He blamed the whole thing on Costello, and Costello said he got the recordings from you.”

“Mr. Costello wouldn’t do such a thing!” I guess I got mad at Mr. Hynes then. I told him a whole lot about Mr. Costello, what a big man he was. He started to tell me how Mr. Costello was forced off the Triumverate for making trouble in the high court, but they were lies and I wouldn’t listen. I told him about the poker, how Mr. Costello saved us from the cheaters, how he saved us from poisoning, how he made the ship safe for us all.

I remember how he looked at me then. He sort of whispered, “What has happened to human beings? What have we done to ourselves with these centuries of peace, with confidence and cooperation and no conflict? Here’s distrust by man for man, waiting under a thin skin to be punctured by just the right vampire, waiting to hate itself and kill itself all over again …

“My
God
!” he suddenly screamed at me. “Do you know what I’ve been hanging onto? The idea that, for all its error, for all its stupidity, this One Humanity idea on Borinquen was a
principle?
I hated it, but because it was a principle, I could respect it. It’s Costello—Costello, who doesn’t gamble, but who uses fear to change the poker rules—Costello, who doesn’t eat your food, but makes you fear poison—Costello, who can see three hundred years of safe interstellar flight, but who through fear makes the watch officers doubt themselves without a witness—Costello, who runs things without being seen!

“My God, Costello doesn’t
care!
It isn’t a principle at all. It’s just Costello spreading fear anywhere, everywhere, to make himself strong!”

He rushed out, crying with rage and hate. I have to admit I was sort of jolted. I guess I might even have thought about the things he said, only he killed himself before we reached Earth. He was crazy.

We made the rounds, same as ever, scheduled like an interurban line: Load, discharge, blastoff, fly and planetfall. Refuel, clearance, manifest. Eat, sleep, work. There was a hearing about Hynes. Mr. Costello sent a spacegram with his regrets when he heard the news. I didn’t say anything at the hearing, just that Mr. Hynes was upset, that’s all, and it was about as true as anything could be. We shipped a second engineer who played real good accordion. One of the inboard men got left on Carànho. All the usual things, except I wrote up my termination with no options, ready to file.

So in its turn we made Borinquen again, and what do you know, there was the space fleet of United Earth. I never guessed they had that many ships. They sheered us off, real Navy: all orders and no information. Borinquen was buttoned up tight; there was some kind of fighting going on down there. We couldn’t get or give a word of news through the quarantine. It made the skipper mad and he had to use part of the cargo for fuel, which messed up my records six ways from the middle. I stashed my termination papers away for the time being.

And in its turn, Sigma, where we lay over a couple of days to get back in the rut, and, same as always, Nightingale, right on schedule again.

And who should be waiting for me at Nightingale but Barney Roteel, who was medic on my first ship, years back when I was fresh from the Academy. He had a potbelly now and looked real successful. We got the jollity out of the way and he settled down and looked me over, real sober. I said it’s a small Universe—I’d known he had a big job on Nightingale, but imagine him showing up at the spaceport just when I blew in!

“I showed up
because
you blew in, Purser,” he answered.

Then before I could take that apart, he started asking me questions. Like how was I doing, what did I plan to do.

I said, “I’ve been a purser for years and years. What makes you think I want to do anything different?”

“Just wondered.”

I wondered, too. “Well,” I said, “I haven’t exactly made up my mind, you might say—and a couple of things have got in the way—but I did have a kind of offer.” I told him just in a general way about how big a man Mr. Costello was on Borinquen now, and how he wanted me to come in with him. “It’ll have to wait, though. The whole damn Space Navy has a cordon around Borinquen. They wouldn’t say why. But whatever it is, Mr. Costello’ll come out on top. You’ll see.”

Barney gave me a sort of puckered-up look. I never saw a man look so weird. Yes, I did, too. It was the old Iron Man, the day he got off the ship and resigned.

“Barney, what’s the matter?” I asked.

He got up and pointed through the glass door-lights to a white monowheel that stood poised in front of the receiving station. “Come on,” he said.

“Aw, I can’t. I got to—”

“Come
on
!”

I shrugged. Job or no, this was Barney’s bailiwick, not mine. He’d cover me.

He held the door open and said, like a mind reader, “I’ll cover you.”

We went down the ramp and climbed in and skimmed off.

“Where are we going?”