A Saucer of Loneliness

by Theodore Sturgeon

  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. B
ut 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?”

  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.

  The Education of Drusilla Strange

  THE 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.