Troublemakers (14 page)

   
Madness had come often.

   
But they had selected him wisely. He clung to his sanity; he knew it was his only escape. He knew it would be a far more horrible thing to end out his days in this Quonset a helpless maniac, than to remain sane.

   
He swung back over the line and soon grew content with his world in a shell. He waited, for there was nothing else he could do; and in his waiting a contentment grew out of frantic restlessness. He began to think of it as a jail, then as a coffin, then as the ultimate black of the Final Hole. He would wake in the arbitrary night, choking, his throat constricted, his hands warped into claws that scrabbled at the foam rubber of the sleeping couch with fierceness.

   
The time was spent. A moment after it had passed, he could not tell
how
it had been spent. His life became dust-dry and at times he could hardly tell he
was
living. Had it not been for the sealed, automatic calendar, he would hardly have known the years were passing.

   
And ever, ever, ever-the huge, dull, sleeping eye of the warning buzzer. Staring back at him, veiled, from the ceiling.

   
It was hooked up with the scanners. The scanners that hulked behind the Quonset. The scanners in turn were hooked up to the net of tight inverspace rays that interlocked each other out to the farthest horizon Ferreno might ever know.

   
And the net, in turn, joined at stop-gap junctions with the doggie-guards, also waiting, watching with dumb metal and plastic minds for that implacable alien enemy that might someday come.

   
They had known the enemy would come, for they had found the remnants of those the enemy had destroyed. Remnants of magnificent and powerful cultures, ground to microscopic dust by the heel of a terrifying invader.

   
They could not chance roaming the universe with those Others somewhere. Somewhere...waiting. They had formed the inverspace net, joining it with the doggie-guards. And they had hooked the system in with the scanners; and they had wired the scanners to the big, dull eye in the ceiling of the Quonset.

   
Then they had set Ferreno to watching it.

   
At first Ferreno had watched the thing constantly. Waiting for it to make the disruptive noise he was certain it would emit. Breaking the perpetual silence of his bubble. He waited for the bloodiness of its blink to warp fantastic shadows across the room and furniture. He even spent five months deciding what shape those shadows would take, when they came.

   
Then he entered the period of nervousness. Jumping for no reason at all, to stare at the eye. The hallucinations: it was blinking, it was ringing in his ears. The sleeplessness: it might go off and he would not hear it.

   
Then as time progressed, he grew unaware of it, forgot it existed for long periods. Till it had finally come to the knowledge that it was there; a dim thing, an unremembered thing, as much a part of him as his own ears, his own eyes. He had nudged it to the back of his mind-but it was always there.

   
Always there, always waiting, always on the verge of disruption.

   
Ferreno never forgot why he was there. He never forgot the reason they had come for him.
The day they had come for him.

   
The evening had been pale and laden with sound. The flits clacking through the air above the city, the crickets in the grass, the noise of the holograph from the living room of the house.

   
He had been sitting on the front porch, arms tight about his girl, on a creaking porch glider that smacked the wall every time they rocked back too far. He remembered the taste of the sweet-acidy lemonade in his mouth as the three men stepped out of the gloom.

   
They had come up onto the porch.

   
“Are you Charles Jackson Ferreno, age nineteen, brown hair, brown eyes, five feet ten, 158 pounds, scar on right inner wrist?”

   
“Y-yes...why?” he had stammered.

   
The intrusion of these strangers on a thing as private as his love-making had caused him to falter.

   
Then they had grabbed him.

   
“What are you doing? Get your hands off him!” Marie had screamed.

   
They had flashed an illuminated card at her, and she had subsided into terrified silence in the face of their authority. Then they had taken him, howling, into a flit-black and silent -and whirled him off to the plasteel block in the Nevada desert that had been Central Space Service Headquarters.

   
They had hypno-conditioned him to operate the inverspace communicators. A task he could not have learned in two hundred years-involving the billion alternate dialing choices -had they not planted it mechanically.

   
Then they had prepared him for the ship.

   
“Why are you doing this to me? Why have you picked me!” he had screamed at them, fighting the lacing-up of the pressure suit.

   
They had told him. The Mark LXXXII. He had been chosen best out of forty-seven thousand punched cards whipped through its platinum vitals. Best by selection. An infallible machine had said he was the least susceptible to madness, inefficiency, failure. He was the best, and the Service needed him.

   
Then, the ship.

   
The nose of the beast had pointed straight up into a cloudless sky, blue and unfilmed as the best he had ever known. Then a rumble, and a scream, and the pressure as the ship had raced into space. And the almost imperceptible wrenching as the ship had slipped scudwise through inverspace. The travel through the milky pinkness of that not-space. Then the gut-pulling again, and
there!
off to the right through the port-that bleak little asteroid with its Quonset blemish.

   
When they had set him down and told him about the enemy, he had screamed at them, but they had pushed him back into the bubble, had sealed the pressure-lock, and had gone back to the ship.

   
They had left The Stone, then. Rushing up till they had popped out of sight around a bend in space.

   
His hands had been bloodied, beating against the resilient plasteel of the pressure-lock and the vista windows.

   
He never forgot why he was there.

   
He tried to conjure up the enemy. Were they horrible sluglike creatures from some dark star, spreading a ring of viscous, poisonous fluid inside Earth’s atmosphere; were they tentacled spider-men who drank blood; were they perhaps quiet, well-mannered beings who would sublimate all of man’s drives and ambitions; were they...

   
He went on and on, till it did not matter in the slightest to him. Then he forgot time. But he remembered he was here to watch. To watch and wait. A sentinel at the gate of the Forever, waiting for an unknown enemy that might streak out of nowhere bound for Earth and destruction. Or that might have died out millennia before-leaving him here on a worthless assignment, doomed to an empty life.

   
He began the hate. The hate of the men who had consigned him to this living death. He hated the men who had brought him here in their ship. He hated the men who had conceived the idea of a sentinel. He hated the Mark computer that had said:

   
“Get Charles Jackson Ferreno
only!”

   
He hated them all. But most of all he hated the alien enemy. The implacable enemy who had thrown fear into the hearts of the men.

   
Ferreno hated them all with a bitter intensity verging on madness, itself. Then, the obsession passed. Even that passed.

   
Now he was an old man. His hands and face and neck wrinkled with the skin-folding of age. His eyes had sunk back under ridges of flesh, his eyebrows white as the stars. His hair loose and uncombed, trimmed raggedly by an ultrasafe shaving device he had not been able to adopt for suicide. A beard of unkempt and foul proportions. A body slumped into a position that fitted his pneumo-chair exactly.

   
Thoughts played leapfrog with themselves. Ferreno was thinking. For the first time in eight years-since the last hallucination had passed-actually thinking. He sat humped into the pneumo-chair that had long ago formed itself permanently to his posture. The muted strains of some long since overfamiliarized piece of taped music humming above him. Was the horrible repetition Vivaldi’s
Gloria Mass
or a snatch of Monteverdi? He fumbled in the back of his mind, in the recess where this music had lived for so long-consigned there by horrible repetition.

   
His thoughts veered before he found the answer. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but the watching.

   
Beads of perspiration sprang out, dotting his upper lip and the receding arcs of sparse hair at his temples.

   
What if they
never
came?

   
What if they had gone already and through some failure of the mechanisms he had missed them? Even the subliminal persistence of the revolving scanners’ workings was not assurance enough. For the first time in many years he was hearing the scanners again, and did they sound right? Didn’t...they...sound...a...bit...off?

   
They didn’t sound right!
My God, all these years and now they weren’t working! He had no way of repairing them, no way of getting out of here, he was doomed to lie here till he died-his purpose gone! Oh My God! All these years here nowhere and my youth gone and they’ve stopped running and no-good damned things failing now and the aliens’ve slipped through and Earth’s gone and I’m no good here and it’s all for nothing and Marie and everything...

   
Ferreno! Good God, man! Stop yourself!

   
He grabbed control of himself abruptly, lurchingly. The machines were perfect. They worked on the basic substance of inverspace. They
couldn’t
go wrong, once set running on the pattern.

   
But the uselessness of it all remained.

   
His head fell into his shaking hands. He felt tears welling up behind his eyes. What could one puny man do here, away from all and everyone? They had told him more than one man would be dangerous. They would kill each other out of sheer boredom. The same for a man and a woman. Only one man could remain in possession of his senses, to tickle out the intricate warning on the inverspace communicator.

   
He recalled again what they had said about relief.

   
There could be none. Once sealed in, a man had begun the fight with himself. If they took him out and put in another man, they were upping the chances of a miscalculation-and a failure. By picking the very best man by infallible computer, they were putting all their eggs in one basket-but they were cutting risk to the bone.

   
He recalled again what they had said about a machine in his place.

   
Impossible. A robot brain, equipped to perform that remarkable task of sorting the warning factors, and recording it on the inverspace communicators-including any possible ramifications that might crop up in fifty years-would have to be fantastically large.

   
It would have had to be five hundred miles long by three hundred wide. With tapes and back-up circuits and tranversistors and punch-checks that, if laid end to end, would have reached halfway from The Stone to Earth.

   
He knew he was necessary, which had been one of the things that had somehow stopped him from finding a way to wreck himself or the whole Quonset during those twenty-four years.