A Saucer of Loneliness (47 page)

But he wouldn’t say. He just drove.

Nightingale’s a beautiful place. The most beautiful of them all, I think, even Sigma. It’s run by the UE, one hundred per cent; this is one planet with no local options, but
none
. It’s a regular garden of a world and they keep it that way.

We topped a rise and went down a curving road lined with honest-to-God Lombardy poplars from Earth. There was a little lake
down there and a sandy beach. No people.

The road curved and there was a yellow line across it and then a red one, and after it a shimmering curtain, almost transparent. It extended from side to side as far as I could see.

“Force-fence,” Barney said and pressed a button on the dash.

The shimmer disappeared from the road ahead, though it stayed where it was at each side. We drove through and it formed behind us, and we went down the hill to the lake.

Just this side of the beach was the coziest little Sigma cabana I’ve seen yet, built to hug the slope and open its arms to the sky. Maybe when I get old they’ll turn me out to pasture in one half as good.

While I was goggling at it, Barney said, “Go on.”

I looked at him and he was pointing. There was a man down near the water, big, very tanned, built like a space-tug. Barney waved me on and I walked down there.

The man got up and turned to me. He had the same wide-spaced, warm deep eyes, the same full, gentle voice. “Why, it’s the Purser! Hi, old friend. So you came, after all!”

It was sort of rough for a moment. Then I got it out. “Hi, Mr. Costello.”

He banged me on the shoulder. Then he wrapped one big hand around my left biceps and pulled me a little closer. He looked uphill to where Barney leaned against the monowheel, minding his own business. Then he looked across the lake, and up in the sky.

He dropped his voice. “Purser, you’re just the man I need. But I told you that before, didn’t I?” He looked around again. “We’ll do it yet, Purser. You and me, we’ll hit the top. Come with me. I want to show you something.”

He walked ahead of me toward the beach margin. He was wearing only a breech-ribbon, but he moved and spoke as if he still had the armored car and the six prowlers. I stumbled after him.

He put a hand behind him and checked me, and then knelt. He said, “To look at them, you’d think they were all the same, wouldn’t you? Well, son, you just let me show you something.”

I looked down. He had an anthill. They weren’t like Earth ants. These were bigger, slower, blue, and they had eight legs. They built
nests of sand tied together with mucus, and tunneled under them so that the nests stood up an inch or two like on little pillars.

“They look the same, they act the same, but you’ll see,” said Mr. Costello.

He opened a synthine pouch that lay in the sand. He took out a dead bird and the thorax of what looked like a Caranho roach, the one that grows as long as your forearm. He put the bird down here and the roach down yonder.

“Now,” he said, “watch.”

The ants swarmed to the bird, pulling and crawling. Busy. But one or two went to the roach and tumbled it and burrowed around. Mr. Costello picked an ant off the roach and dropped it on the bird. It weaved around and shouldered through the others and scrabbled across the sand and went back to the roach.

“You see, you
see
?” he said, enthusiastic. “Look.”

He picked an ant off the dead bird and dropped it by the roach. The ant wasted no time or even curiosity on the piece of roach. It turned around once to get its bearings, and then went straight back to the dead bird.

I looked at the bird with its clothing of crawling blue, and I looked at the roach with its two or three voracious scavengers. I looked at Mr. Costello.

He said raptly, “See what I mean? About one in thirty eats something different. And that’s all we need. I tell you, Purser, wherever you look, if you look long enough, you can find a way to make most of a group turn on the rest.”

I watched the ants. “They’re not fighting.”

“Now wait a minute,” he said swiftly. “Wait a minute. All we have to do is let these bird-eaters know that the roach-eaters are dangerous.”

“They’re not dangerous,” I said. “They’re just different.”

“What’s the difference, when you come right down to it? So we’ll get the bird-eaters scared and they’ll kill all the roach-eaters.”

“Yes, but why, Mr. Costello?”

He laughed. “I like you, boy. I do the thinking, you do the work. I’ll explain it to you. They all look alike. So once we’ve made ’em
drive out these—” he pointed to the minority around the roach—“they’ll never know which among ’em might be a roach-eater. They’ll get so worried, they’ll do anything to keep from being suspected of roach-eating. When they get scared enough, we can make ’em do anything we want.”

He hunkered down to watch the ants. He picked up a roach-eater and put it on the bird. I got up.

“Well, I only just dropped in, Mr. Costello,” I said.

“I’m not an ant,” said Mr. Costello. “As long as it makes no difference to me what they eat, I can make ’em do anything in the world I want.”

“I’ll see you around,” I said.

He kept on talking quietly to himself as I walked away. He was watching the ants, figuring, and paid no attention to me.

I went back to Barney. I asked, sort of choked, “What is he doing, Barney?”

“He’s doing what he has to do,” Barney said.

We went back to the monowheel and up the hill and through the force-gate. After a while, I asked, “How long will he be here?”

“As long as he wants to be.” Barney was kind of short about it.

“Nobody wants to be locked up.”

He had that odd look on his face again. “Nightingale’s not a jail.”

“He can’t get out.”

“Look, chum, we could start him over. We could even make a purser out of him. But we stopped doing that kind of thing a long time ago. We let a man do what he wants to do.”

“He never wanted to be boss over an anthill.”

“He didn’t?”

I guess I looked as if I didn’t understand that, so he said, “All his life he’s pretended he’s a man and the rest of us are ants. Now it’s come true for him. He won’t run human anthills any more because he will never again get near one.”

I looked through the windshield at the shining finger that was my distant ship. “What happened on Borinquen, Barney?”

“Some of his converts got loose around the System. That Humanity One idea had to be stopped.” He drove a while, seeing badly out
of a thinking face. “You won’t take this hard, Purser, but you’re a thick-witted ape. I can say that if no one else can.”

“All right,” I said. “Why?”

“We had to
smash
into Borinquen, which used to be so free and easy. We got into Costello’s place. It was a regular fort. We got him and his files. We didn’t get his girl. He killed her, but the files were enough.”

After a time I said, “He was always a good friend to me.”

“Was he?”

I didn’t say anything. He wheeled up to the receiving station and stopped the machine.

He said, “He was all ready for you if you came to work for him. He had a voice recording of you large as life, saying ‘Sometimes a man’s just
got
to be by himself.’ Once you went to work for him, all he needed to do to keep you in line was to threaten to put that on the air.”

I opened the door. “What did you have to show him to me for?”

“Because we believe in letting a man do what he wants to do, as long as he doesn’t hurt the rest of us. If you want to go back to the lake and work for Costello, for instance, I’ll take you there.”

I closed the door carefully and went up the ramp to the ship.

I did my work and when the time came, we blasted off. I was mad. I don’t think it was about anything Barney told me. I wasn’t especially mad about Mr. Costello or what happened to him, because Barney’s the best Navy psych doc there is and Nightingale’s the most beautiful hospital planet in the Universe.

What made me mad was the thought that never again would a man as big as Mr. Costello give that big, warm, soft, strong friendship to a lunkhead like me.

T
HE PRISON SHIP
,
UNDER FULL SHIELDS
, slipped down toward the cove, and made no shadow on the moonlit water, and no splash as it slid beneath the surface. They put her out and she swam clear, and the ship nosed up and silently fled. Two wavelets clapped hands softly, once, and that was the total mark the ship made on the prison wall.

For killing the Preceptor, she had been sentenced to life imprisonment.

With torture.

She swam toward the beach until smooth fluid sand touched her knee. She stood up, flung her long hair back with a single swift motion, and waded up the steep shingle, one hand lightly touching the bulging shoulder of the rocks which held the cove in their arms.

Ahead she heard the slightest indrawn breath, then a cough. She stopped, tall in the moonlight. The man took a half-step forward, then turned his head sidewise and a little upward away from her, into the moon.

“I’m—I beg your—sorry,” he floundered.

She sensed his turmoil, extracted its source, delved for alternative acts, and chose the one about which he showed the most curious conflict. She crouched back into the shadows by the rock.

I didn’t see you there
.

“I didn’t see you until you … I’m sorry. Why am I standing here like this when you … I’11 move on down the … I’m sorry.”

She took and fanned out his impressions, sorted them, chose one.
My clothes
—

He started away from the rocks, looking about him, as if he might have been leaning against something hot, or something holy. “Where
are they? Am I in the way? Shall I put them near the … I’ll just move on down.”

No … no clothes. Directly from him she took
Where are they
?

“I don’t see any. Somebody must’ve—are you sure you put them—where did you put them?” He was floundering again.

She caught and used the phrase
Why, who would … what low-down trick!

“Is your—do you have a car up there?” he asked, peering up at the grassy rim of the beach. He added immediately, “But even if you got to the car …”

I have no car
.

“My God!” he said indignantly. “Anybody that would … here, what am I standing here yapping for? You must be chilled to the bone.”

He was wearing a battered trench coat. He whipped it off and approached her, three-quarters backward, the coat dangling from his blindly extended arm like a torn jib on a bowsprit. She took it, shook it out, turned it over curiously, then slipped into it so that it fell around her the way it had covered him.

Thank you
.

She stepped out of the shadows, and the huge relief he felt, and the admixture of guilty regret that went with it made her smile.

“Well!” he said, rubbing his hands briskly. “That’s better, now, isn’t it?” He looked up the lonely beach, and down. “Live around here somewhere?”

No
.

“Oh.” He said it again, then, “Friends bring you down?” he asked diffidently.

She hesitated.
Yes
.

“Then they’ll be back for you!”

She shook her head. He scratched his. Suddenly he stepped away from her and demanded, “Look, you don’t think I had anything to do with stealing your clothes, do you?”

Oh, no
!

“Well, all right, because I didn’t, I mean I couldn’t do a thing like that, even in fun. What I was going to say, I mean, now I don’t want
you to think anyth …” He ground to a stop, took a breath and tried again. “What I mean is, I have a little shack over the rise there. You’d be perfectly safe. I have no phone, but there’s one a mile down the beach. I could go and call your friends. I mean I’m not one of those … well, look, you do just what you think is best.”

She searched. She felt it emerged correctly:
I really mustn’t put you to that trouble. But you’re very kind
.

“I’m not kind. You’d do exactly the same thing for me, now wouldn’t …”

He stopped because she was laughing silently, her eyes turned deep into the corners to look at him. She laughed because she had sensed his startled laughter at what he was saying even before it had uncurled.

“I—can’t say you would at that,” he faltered, and then his laughter surfaced. By the time it had run its course, she was striding lithely beside him.

They walked for a while in silence, until he said, “I do the same thing myself, go swimming in the—I mean without … at night. But generally not this late in the year.”

She found this unremarkable and made no reply.

“Uh,” he began, and then faltered and fell silent again.

She wondered why he felt it so necessary to talk. She probed, and discovered that it was because he was excited and frightened and guilty and happy all at once, full of little half-finished plans concerning cold odds and ends of food and the contents of a clothes closet, the breathless flash of a mental picture of her emerging from the water with certain details oddly highlighted, the quick blanking of the picture and the stern frown that did it, the timid hope that she did not suspect feelings that he could not control … Oh, yes, he must talk.

“You have a—do you mind if I say something personal?”

She looked up attentively.

“You have a funny sort of way of talking. I mean—” he leaned close—“you hardly move your lips when you talk.”

She turned her head slightly and flexed her lips. She made the
effort and said aloud, “Oh?”

“Maybe it’s the moonlight,” he informed himself. Inwardly he pictured her still face and said
Strange, strange, strange
. “What’s your name?”

“Dru. Drusilla,” she said carefully. It was not her name, but she had probed and discovered that he liked it. “Drusilla Strange.”

“Beautiful,” he breathed. “Say, that’s a beautiful name, did you know that? Drusilla Strange. That’s just … just exactly
right
.” He looked about at the cool white blaze of the beach, at the black grass under the moon. “Oh!” he said abruptly, “I’m Chan. Chandler Behringer. It’s a clumsy sort of name, hard to say, not like—”