The Year's Best Science Fiction 10

THE LAST LONELY MAN John Brunner

“Don’t see you in here much any more, Mr. Hale,” Geraghty said as he set my glass in front of me.

“Must be eighteen months,” I said. “But my wife’s out of town and I thought I’d drop by for old time’s sake.” I looked down the long bar and round at the booths against the opposite wall, and added, “It looks as though you don’t see anybody much any more. I never saw the place so empty at this time of evening. Will you have one?”

“Sparkling soda, if you please, Mr. Hale, and thank you very much.” Geraghty got down a bottle and poured for himself. I never knew him to drink anything stronger than a beer, and that rarely.

”Things have changed,” he went on after a pause. “You know what caused it, of course.”

I shook my head.

“Contact, naturally. Like it’s changed everything else.”

I stared at him for a moment, and then I had to chuckle. I said, “Well, I knew it had hit a lot of things—like the churches in particular. But I wouldn’t have thought it would affect you.”

“Oh, yes.” He hoisted himself on a stool behind the bar; that was new since I used to come here regularly. Eighteen months ago he wouldn’t have the chance to sit down all evening long; he’d be dead on his feet when the bar closed. “I figure it this way. Contact has made people more careful in some ways, and less in others. But it’s cut out a lot of reasons for going to bars and for drinking. You know how it used to be. A bartender was a sort of professional open ear, the guy to spill your troubles to. That didn’t last long after Contact came in. I knew a tenderhearted bartender who went on being like that for a while after Contact. He got himself loaded to here with lonely guys—and gals too.” Geraghty laid his palm on the top of his head.

“Occupational risk!” I said.

“Not for long, though. It hit him one day what it would be like if they all came home to roost, so he went and had them all expunged and started over with people he chose himself, the way anyone else does. And round about then it all dried up. People don’t come and spill their troubles any more. The need has mostly gone. And the other big reason for going to bars—chance company—that’s faded out too. Now that people know they don’t have to be scared of the biggest loneliness of all, it makes them calm and mainly self-reliant. Me, I’m looking round for another trade. Bars are closing down all over.”

“You’d make a good Contact consultant,” I suggested, not more than half-joking. He didn’t take it as a joke, either.

“I’ve considered it,” he said seriously. “I might just do that. I might just.”

I looked around again. Now Geraghty had spelled it out for me, I could see how it must have happened. My own case, even if I hadn’t realized it till now, was an illustration. I’d spilled troubles to bartenders in my time, gone to bars to escape loneliness. Contact had come in about three years ago, about two years ago it took fire and everyone but everyone lined up for the treatment, and a few months after that I quit coming here, where I’d formerly been as much of a fixture as the furniture. I’d thought nothing of it— put it down to being married and planning a family and spending money other ways.

But it wasn’t for that. It was that the need had gone.

In the old style, there was a mirror mounted on the wall behind the bar, and in that mirror I could see some of the booths reflected. All were empty except one, and in that one was a couple. The man was nothing out of the ordinary, but the girl—no, woman—took my eye. She wasn’t so young; she could be forty or so, but she had a certain something. A good figure helped, but most of it was in the face. She was thin, with a lively mouth and laughter wrinkles round the eyes, and she was clearly enjoying whatever she was talking about. It was pleasant to watch her enjoying it. I kept my eyes on her while Geraghty held forth.

“Like I say, it makes people more careful, and less careful. More careful about the way they treat others, because if they don’t behave, their own Contacts are liable to expunge them, and then where will they be? Less careful about the way they treat themselves, because they aren’t scared much of dying any more. They know that if it happens quick, without pain, it’ll just be a blur and then confusion and then picking up again and then melting into someone else. No sharp break, no stopping. Have you picked anyone up, Mr. Hale?”

“Matter of fact, I have,” I said. “I picked up my father just about a year ago.”

“And was it okay?”

“Oh, smooth as oil. Disconcerting for a while—like having an itch I couldn’t scratch—but that passed in about two or three months and then he just blended in and there it was.”

I thought about it for a moment. In particular, I thought about the peculiar sensation of being able to remember how I looked in my cradle, from outside, and things like that. But it was comforting as well as peculiar, and anyway there was never any doubt about whose memory it was. All the memories that came over when a Contact was completed had indefinable auras that labeled them and helped keep the receiver’s mind straight.

“And you?” I said.

Geraghty nodded. “Guy I know in the Army. Just a few weeks back he had a car smash. Poor guy lived for ten days with a busted back, going through hell. He was in bad shape when he came over. Pain—it was terrible!”

“Ought to write your Congressman,” I said. “Get this new bill through. Hear about it?”

“Which one?”

“Legalize mercy killing provided the guy has a valid Contact. Everyone has nowadays, so why not?”

Geraghty looked thoughtful. “Yes, I did hear about it. I wasn’t happy about it. But since I picked up my buddy and got his memory of what happened—well I guess I’m changing my mind. I’ll do like you say.”

We were quiet for a bit then, thinking about what Contact had done for the world. Geraghty had said he wasn’t happy at first about this euthanasia bill—well, I and a lot of other people weren’t sure about Contact at first, either. Then we saw what it could do, and had a chance to think the matter out, and now I felt I didn’t understand how I’d gone through so much of my life without it. I just couldn’t think myself back to a world where when you died you had to stop. It was horrible!

With Contact, that problem was solved. Dying became like a change of vehicle. You blurred, maybe blacked out, knowing you would come to, as it were, looking out of somebody’s eyes that you had Contact with. You wouldn’t be in control any more, but he or she would have your memories, and for two or three months you’d ease around, fitting yourself to your new partner and then bit by bit there’d be a shift of viewpoint, and finally a melting together, and click. No interruption; just a smooth painless process taking you on into another instalment of life as someone who was neither you nor someone else, but a product of the two.

For the receiver, as I knew from experience, it was at worst uncomfortable, but for someone you were fond of you could take far more than discomfort.

Thinking of what life had been like before Contact, I found myself shuddering. I ordered another drink—a double this time. I hadn’t been out drinking for a long while.

I’d been telling Geraghty the news for maybe an hour, and I was on my third or fourth drink, when the door of the bar opened and a guy came in. He was medium-sized, rather ordinary, fairly well-dressed, and I wouldn’t have looked at him twice except for the expression on his face. He looked so angry and miserable I couldn’t believe my eyes.

He went up to his booth where the couple were sitting— the one where the woman was that I’d been watching—and planted his feet on the ground facing them. All the attractive light went out of the woman’s face, and the man with her got half to his feet as if in alarm.

“You know,” Geraghty said softly, “that looks like trouble. I haven’t had a row in this bar for more than a year, but I remember what one looks like when it’s brewing.”

He got up off his stool watchfully, and moved down the bar so he could go through the gap in the counter if he had to.

I swiveled on my stool and caught some of the conversation. As far as I could hear, it was going like this.

“You expunged me, Mary!” the guy with the miserable face was saying. “Did you?”

“Now look here!” the other man cut in. “It’s up to her whether she does or doesn’t.”

“You shut up,” the newcomer said. “Well, Mary? Did you?”

“Yes, Mack, I did,” she said. “Sam had nothing to do with it. It was entirely my idea—and your fault.”

I couldn’t see Mack’s face, but his body sort of tightened up, shaking, and he put his arms out as though he was going to haul Mary out of her seat. Sam—I presumed Sam was the man in the booth—seized his arm, yelling at him.

That was where Geraghty came in, ordering them to quit where they were. They didn’t like it, but they did, and Mary and Sam finished their drinks and went out of the bar, and Mack, after glaring after them, came up and took a stool next but one to mine.

“Rye,” he said. “Gimme the bottle—I’ll need it.”

His voice was rasping and bitter, a tone I realized I hadn’t heard in maybe months. I suppose I looked curious; anyway, he glanced at me and saw I was looking at him, and spoke to me.

“Know what that was all about?”

I shrugged. “Lost your girl?” I suggested.

“Much worse than that—and she isn’t so much a lost girl as a heartless she-devil.” He tossed down the first of the rye that Geraghty had brought for him. I noticed that Geraghty had moved to the other end of the counter and was washing glasses. If he was out of the habit of listening to people’s troubles, I wouldn’t blame him, I thought.

“She didn’t look that way,” I said at random.

“No, she doesn’t.” He took another drink and then sat for a while with the empty glass between his hands, staring at it.

“I suppose you have Contacts?” he said at last. It was a pretty odd question, and I answered it automatically out of sheer surprise.

“Well—yes of course I have!”

“I haven’t,” he said. “Not now. Not any more. Damn that woman!”

I felt the nape of my neck prickle. If he was telling the truth—well, he was a kind of living ghost! Everyone I knew had at least one Contact; I had three. My wife and I had a mutual, of course, like all married couples, and as insurance against our being killed together in a car wreck or by some similar accident I had an extra one with my kid brother Joe and a third with a guy I’d known in college. At least, I was fairly sure I did; I hadn’t heard from him in some months and he might perhaps have expunged me. I made a mental note to look him up and keep the friendship moving.

I studied this lonely guy. His name was Mack—I’d heard him called that. He was probably ten years older than I was, which made him in his middle forties—plenty old enough to have dozens of potential Contacts. There was nothing visibly wrong with him except this look of unspeakable misery he wore—and if he really had no Contacts at all, then I was surprised the look was of mere misery, not of terror.

“Did—uh—did Mary know that she was your only Contact?” I said.

“Oh, she knew. Of course. That’s why she did it without telling me.” Mack refilled his glass and held the bottle toward me. I was going to refuse, but if someone didn’t keep the poor devil company, he’d probably empty the bottle himself, and then maybe walk out staggering drunk and fall under a car and be done for. I really felt sorry for him. Anyone would have.

“How did you find out?”

“She—well, she went out tonight and I called at her place and someone said she’d gone out with Sam, and Sam generally brings her here. And there she was, and when I put it to her she confessed. I guess it was as well the bartender stepped in, or I’d have lost control and maybe done something really serious to her.”

I said, “Well—how come she’s the only one? Have you no friends or anything?”

That opened the floodgates.

The poor guy—his full name was Mack Wilson—was an orphan brought up in a foundling home which he hated; he ran away in his teens and was committed to reform school for some petty theft or other, and hated that too, and by the time he got old enough to earn his living, he was sour on the world, but he’d done his best to set himself straight, only to find that he’d missed learning how. Somewhere along the line he’d failed to get the knack of making friends.

When he’d told me the whole story, I felt he was truly pitiable. When I contrasted his loneliness with my comfortable condition, I felt almost ashamed. Maybe the rye had a lot to do with it, but it didn’t feel that way. I wanted to cry, and I hardly even felt foolish for wanting.

Round about ten or ten-thirty, when most of the bottle had gone, he slapped the counter and started to get down from his stool. He wobbled frighteningly. I caught hold of him, but he brushed me aside.

“Home, I guess,” he said hopelessly. “If I can make it. If I don’t get run down by some lucky so-and-so who’s careless what he hits because he’s all right, he has Contacts aplenty.”

He was darned right—that was the trouble. I said, “Look, don’t you think you should sober up first?”

“How in hell do you think I’ll get to sleep if I’m not pickled?” he retorted. And he was probably right there, too. He went on, “You wouldn’t know, I guess: what it’s like to lie in bed, staring into the dark, without a Contact anywhere. It makes the whole world seem hateful and dark and hostile. . . .”

“Jesus!” I said, because that really hit me.

A sudden glimmer of hope came into his eyes. He said, “I don’t suppose—no, it’s not fair. You’re a total stranger. Forget it.”

I pressed him, because it was good to see any trace of hope on that face. After a bit of hesitation, he came out with it.

“You wouldn’t make a Contact with me, would you? Just to tide me over till I talk one of my friends round? I know guys at work I could maybe persuade. Just a few days, that’s all.”

“At this time of night?” I said. I wasn’t sure I liked the idea; still, I’d have him on my conscience if I didn’t fall in.

“They have all-night Contact service at LaGuardia Airport,” he said. “For people who want to make an extra one as insurance before going on a long flight. We could go there.”

“It’ll have to be a one-way, not a mutual,” I said. “I don’t have twenty-five bucks to spare.”

“You’ll do it?” He looked as though he couldn’t believe his ears. Then he grabbed my hand and pumped it up and down, and settled his check and hustled me to the door and found a cab and we were on the way to the airport before I really knew what was happening.

The consultant at the airport tried to talk me into having a mutual; Mack had offered to pay for it. But I stood firm on that. I don’t believe in people adding Contacts to their list when the others are real friends. If something were to happen to me, I felt, and somebody other than my wife, or my brother, or my long-time friend from college, were to pick me up, I was certain they’d all three be very much hurt by it. So since there were quite a few customers waiting to make an extra Contact before flying to Europe, the consultant didn’t try too hard.

It had always been a source of wonder to me that Contact was such a simple process. Three minutes’ fiddling with the equipment; a minute or two to put the helmets properly on our heads; mere seconds for the scan to go to completion during which the brain buzzed with fragments of memory dredged up from nowhere and presented like single movie frames to consciousness . . . and finished.

The consultant gave us the standard certificates and the warranty form—valid five years, recommended reinforcement, owing to personality development, temporal-geo-graphical factor, in the event of death instantaneous transfer, adjustment lapse, in the event of more than one Contact being extant some possibility of choice, and so on. And there it was.

I never had been able to make sense of the principle on which Contact worked. I knew it wasn’t possible before the advent of printed-molecule electronics, which pushed the information capacity of computers up to the level of the human brain and beyond. I knew vaguely that in the first place they had been trying to achieve mechanical telepathy, and that they succeeded in finding means to scan the entire content of a brain and transfer it to an electronic store. I knew also that telepathy didn’t come, but immortality did.

What it amounted to, in lay terms, was this: only the advent of death was enough of a shock to the personality to make it want to get up and go. Then it wanted but desperately. If at some recent time the personality had been, as it were, shown to someone else’s mind, there was a place ready for it to go to.

At that point I lost touch with the explanations. So did practically everybody. Resonance came into it, and maybe the receiver’s mind vibrated in sympathy with the mind of the person about to die; that was a fair picture, and the process worked, so what more could anyone ask?

I was later in coming out from under than he was; this was a one-way, and he was being scanned which is quick, while I was being printed which is slightly slower. When I came out he was trying to get something straight with the consultant, who wasn’t interested, but he wouldn’t be just pushed aside—he had to have his answer. He got it as I was emerging from under the helmet.

“No, there’s no known effect. Sober or drunk, the process goes through!”

The point had never occurred to me before—whether liquor would foul up the accuracy of the Contact.

Thinking of the liquor reminded me that I’d drunk a great deal of rye and it was the first time I’d had more than a couple of beers in many months. For a little while I had a warm glow, partly from the alcohol partly from the knowledge that, thanks to me, this last lonely man wasn’t lonely any more.

Then I began to lose touch. I think it was because Mack had brought the last of the bottle along and insisted on our toasting our new friendship—or words like that. Anyway, I remembered that he got the cab and told the hackie my address and then it was the next morning and he was sleeping on the couch in the rumpus room and the doorbell was going like an electric alarm.

I pieced these facts together a little afterwards. When I opened the door, it was Mary standing there, the woman who had expunged Mack the day before.

She came in quite politely, but with a determined expression which I couldn’t resist in my morning-after state, and told me to sit down and took a chair herself.

She said, “Was it true what Mack told me on the phone?”

I looked vacant. I felt vacant.

Impatiently, she said, “About him making a Contact with you. He called me up at two a.m. and told me the whole story. I wanted to throw the phone out the window, but I hung on and got your name out of him, and some of your address, and the rest from the phone book. Because I wouldn’t want anybody to have Mack wished on him. Not anybody.”

By this time J was starting to connect. But I didn’t have much to say. I let her get on with it.

“I once read a story,” she said. “I don’t remember who by. Perhaps you’ve read it too. About a man who saved another man from drowning. And the guy was grateful, gave him presents, tried to do him favors, said he was his only friend in all the world, dogged his footsteps, moved into his home—and finally the guy who’d saved him couldn’t stand it any longer and took him and pushed him back in the river. That’s Mack Wilson. That’s why Mack Wilson has been expunged by everybody he’s conned into making Contact with him in the past two mortal years. I stood it for going on three months, and that’s about the record, as I understand it.”

There was a click, a door opening, and there was Mack in shirt and pants, roused from his sleep in the rumpus room by the sound of Mary’s voice. She got in first. She said, “You see? He’s started already.”

“You!” Mack said. “Haven’t you done enough?” And he turned to me. “She isn’t satisfied with expunging me and leaving me without a Contact in the world. She has to come here and try to talk you into doing the same! Can you imagine anybody hating me like that?”

On the last word his voice broke, and I saw that there were real tears in his eyes.

I put my muddled mind together and found something to say.

“Look,” I said. “All I did this for was just that I don’t think anyone should have to go without a Contact nowadays. All I did it for was to tide Mack over.” I was mainly talking to Mary. “I drank too much last night and he brought me home and that was why he’s here this morning. I don’t care who he is or what he’s done—I have Contacts myself, I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t, and until Mack fixes up something, maybe with somebody where he works, I’ll go bail for him. That’s all.”

“That’s the way it started with me,” Mary said. “Then he moved into my apartment. Then he started following me on the street to make sure nothing happened to me. He said.”

“Where would I have been if something had?” Mack protested.

Just then I caught sight of the clock on the wall, and saw it was noon. I jumped up.

“Jesus!” I said. “My wife and kids get back at four, and I promised to clear the apartment up while they were away.”

“I’ll give you a hand,” Mack said. “I owe you that, at least.”

Mary got to her feet. She was looking at me with’ a hopeless expression. “Don’t say you weren’t warned,” she said.

So she was right. So Mack was very helpful. He was better around the house than a lot of women I’ve known, and, though it took right up until my wife got home with the children, the job was perfect. Even my wife was impressed. So since it was getting on toward the evening, she insisted on Mack staying for supper with us, and he went and got some beer, and over it he told my wife the spot that he’d been put in, and then, at around nine or half past, he said he wanted an early night because of work tomorrow, and went home.

Which seemed great under the circumstances. I dismissed what Mary had said as the bitterness of a disappointed woman, and felt sorry for her. She hadn’t looked the type to be so bitter when I first saw her the evening before.

It was about three or four days later that I began to catch on. There was this new craze for going to see pre-Contact movies, and though I didn’t feel that I would get a bang out of watching soldiers and gunmen kill each other without Contact to look forward to, my wife had been told by all her friends that she oughtn’t to miss out on this eerie thrill.

Only there was the problem of the kids. We couldn’t take eleven-month twins along, very well. And we’d lost our regular sitter, and when we checked up there just didn’t seem to be anyone on hand.

I tried to talk her into going alone, but she didn’t like the idea. I’d noticed that she’d given up watching pre-Contact programs on TV, so that was of a piece.

So we’d decided to scrap the idea, though I knew she was disappointed, until Mack called, heard the problem, and at once offered to sit in.

Great, we thought. He seemed willing, competent, and ever eager to do us the favor, and we had no worries about going out. The kids were fast asleep before we left.

We parked the car and started to walk around to the movie house. It was getting dark, and it was chilly, so we hurried along although we had plenty of time before the start of the second feature.

Suddenly my wife glanced back and stopped dead in her tracks. A man and a boy following close behind bumped into her, and I had to apologize and when they’d gone on asked what on earth wets the trouble.

“I thought I saw Mack following us,” she said. “Funny . . .”

“Very funny,” I agreed. “Where?” I looked along the sidewalk, but there were a lot of people, including several who were dressed and built similarly to Mack. I pointed this out, and she agreed that she’d probably been mistaken. I couldn’t get her to go beyond probably.

The rest of our Walk to the movie was a kind of sidelong hobble, because she kept staring behind her. It got embarrassing after a while, and suddenly I thought I understood why she was doing it.

I said, “You’re not really looking forward to this, are you?”

“What do you mean?” she said, injured. “I’ve been looking forward to it all week.”

“You can’t really be,” I argued. “Your subconscious is playing tricks on you—milking you think you see Mack, so that you’ll have an excuse to go back home instead of seeing the movies. If you’re only here because of your kaffeeklatsch friends who’ve talked you into the idea, and you don’t actually think you’ll enjoy it, let’s go.”

I saw from her expression I was at least half right. But she shook her head. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “Mack would think it was awfully funny, wouldn’t he, if we came right home? He might think we didn’t trust him, or something.”

So we went in, and we sat through the second feature and were duly reminded of what life was like—and worse, what death was like—in those distant days a few years ago when Contact didn’t exist. When the lights went up briefly between the two pictures, I turned to toy wife.

“I must say—” I began and broke off short, staring.

He was there, right across the aisle from us. I knew it was Mack, not just someone who looked like Mack, because of the way he was trying to duck down into his collar and prevent me from recognizing him. I pointed, and my wife’s face went absolutely chalk-white.

We started to get to our feet. He saw us, and ran.

I caught him halfway down the block, grabbing his arm and spinning him round, and I said, “What in hell is this all about? This is just about the dirtiest trick that anyone ever played on me!”

If anything happened to those kids, of course, that was the end. You couldn’t make a Contact for a child till past the age of reading, at the earliest.

And he had the gall to try and argue with me. To make excuses for himself. He said something like, “I’m sorry, but I got so worried I couldn’t stand it any longer. I made sure everything was all right, and I only meant to be out for a little while, and—”

My wife had caught up by now, and she turned it on. I never suspected before that she knew so many dirty words, but she did, and she used them, and she finished up by slapping him across the face with her purse before leading me into a dash for the car. All the way home she was telling me what an idiot I’d been to get tangled up with Mack, and I was saying what was perfectly true—that I did the guy a favor because I didn’t think anyone should have to be lonely and without a Contact any more—but true or not it sounded hollow.

The most terrifying sound I ever heard was the noise of those two kids squalling as we came in. But nothing was wrong with either of them except they were lonely and miserable, and we comforted them and made a fuss of them till they quietened down.

The outside door opened while we were breathing sighs of relief and there he was again. Of course, we’d left him a key to the door while we were out, in case he had to step round the corner or anything. Well, a few minutes is one thing—but tracking us to the movie house and then sitting through the show was another altogether.

I was practically speechless when I saw who it was. I let him get the first few words in because of that. He said, “Please, you must understand! All I wanted was to make sure nothing happened to you! Suppose you’d had a crash on the way to the movie, and I didn’t know—where would I be then? I sat there and worried about it till I just couldn’t stand any more, and all I meant to do was make sure you were safe, but when I got down to the movie house I got worried about your coming home safe and—”

I still hadn’t found any words because I was so blind angry. So, since I couldn’t take any more, I wound up and let him have it on the chin. He went halfway backwards through the open door behind him, catching at the jamb to stop himself falling, and his face screwed up like a mommy’s darling who’s got in a game too rough for him and he started to snivel.

“Don’t drive me away!” he moaned. “You’re the only friend I have in the world! Don’t drive me away!”

“Friend!” I said. “After what you did this evening I wouldn’t call you my friend if you were the last guy on Earth! I did you a favor and you’ve, paid it back exactly the way Mary said you would. Get the hell out of here and don’t try to come back, and first thing in the morning I’m going to stop by at a Contact agency and have you expunged!”

“No!” he shrieked. I never thought a man could scream like that— as though red-hot irons had been put against his face. “No! You can’t do that! It’s inhuman! It’s—”

I grabbed hold of him and twisted the key out of his fingers, and for all he tried to cling to me and went on blubbering I pushed him out of the door and slammed it in his face.

That night I couldn’t sleep. I lay tossing and turning, staring up into the darkness. After half an hour of this, I heard my wife sit up in the other bed.

“What’s the trouble, honey?” she said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess maybe I feel ashamed of myself for kicking Mack out the way I did.”

“Nonsense!” she said sharply. “You’re too soft-hearted. You couldn’t have done anything else. Lonely, or not lonely, he played a disgusting, wicked trick on us—leaving the twins alone like that after he’d promised! You didn’t promise him anything. You said you were doing him a favor. You couldn’t know what sort of a person he’d turn out to be. Now you relax and go to sleep. I’m going to wake you early and make sure of getting you to a Contact agency before you go in to work.”

At that precise moment, as though he’d been listening, I picked him up.

I could never describe—not if I tried for twenty lifetimes—the slimy, underhand, snivelly triumph that was in his mind when it happened. I couldn’t convey the sensation of “Yah, tricked you again!” Or the undertone of “You treated me badly, see how badly I can treat you.”

I think I screamed a few times when I realized what had happened. Of course. He’d conned me into making a Contact with him, just as he’d done to a lot of other people before—only they’d seen through him in good time and expunged without telling him, so that when he found out, it was too late to cheat on the deal the way he’d cheated me.

I’d told him I was going to expunge him in the morning —that’s a unilateral decision, as they call it, and there wasn’t a thing he could do to stop me. Something in my voice must have shown that I really meant it. Because, though he couldn’t stop me, he could forestall me, and he’d done exactly that.

He’d shot himself in the heart.

I went on hoping for a little while. I fought the nastiness that had come into my mind—sent my wife and kids off to her parents again over the weekend—and tried to sweat it out by myself. I didn’t make it. I was preoccupied for a while finding out exactly how many lies Mack had told me —about his reform school, his time in jail, his undiscovered thefts and shabby tricks played on people he called friends like the one he’d played on me—but then it snapped, and I had to go and call up my father-in-law and find out if my wife had arrived yet, and she hadn’t, and I chewed my nails to the knuckle and called up my old friend Hank, who said hullo, yes of course I still have your Contact you old so-and-so and how are you and say I may be flying up to New York next weekend—

I was horrified. I couldn’t help it. I guess he thought I was crazy or at any rate idiotically rude, when I tried to talk him out of flying up, and we had a first-rate argument which practically finished with him saying he’d expunge the Contact if that was the way I was going to talk to an old pal.

Then I panicked and had to call my kid brother Joe, and he wasn’t home—gone somewhere for the weekend, my part of my mind told me, and nothing to worry about. But Mack’s part of my mind said he was probably dead and my old friend was going to desert me and pretty soon I wouldn’t have a Contact at all and then I’d be permanently dead and how about that movie last night with people being killed and having no Contacts at all?

So I called my father-in-law again and yes my wife and the twins were there now and they were going on the lake in a boat belonging to a friend and I was appalled and tried to say that it was too dangerous and don’t let them and I’d come up myself and hold them back if I had to and—

It hasn’t stopped. It’s been quite a time blending Mack in with the rest of me; I hoped and hoped that when the click came things would be better. But they’re worse.

Worse?

Well—I can’t be sure about that. I mean, it’s true that until now I was taking the most appalling risks. Like going out to work all day and leaving my wife at home alone— why, anything might have happened to her! And not seeing Hank for months on end. And not checking with Joe every chance I got, so that if he was killed I could have time to fix up another Contact to take his place.

It’s safer now, though. Now 1 have this gun, and I don’t go out to work, and I don’t let my wife out of my sight at all, and we’re going to drive very carefully down to Joe’s place, and stop him doing foolish things too, and when I’ve got him lined up, we’ll go to Hank’s and prevent him from making that insanely risky flight to New York and then maybe things will be okay.

The thing that worries me, though, is that I’ll have to go to sleep some time, and—what if something happens to them all when I’m asleep?