How to Make Friends by Jim Harmon (great novels of all time txt) 📕

Every lonely man tries to make friends.
Manet just didn't know when to stop!

William Manet was alone.

In the beginning, he had seen many advantages to being alone. It would give him an unprecedented opportunity to once and for all correlate loneliness to the point of madness, to see how long it would take him to start slavering and clawing the pin-ups from the magazines, to begin teaching himself classes in philosophy consisting of interminable lectures to a bored and captive audience of one.

He would be able to measure the qualities of peace and decide whether it was really better than war, he would be able to get as fat and as dirty as he liked, he would be able to live more like an animal and think more like a god than any man for generations.

But after a shorter time than he expected, it all got to be a tearing bore. Even the waiting to go crazy part of it.

Not that he was going to have any great long wait of it. He was already talking to himself, making verbal notes for his lectures, and he had cut out a picture of Annie Oakley from an old book. He tacked it up and winked at it whenever he passed that way.

Lately she was winking back at him.

Loneliness was a physical weight on his skull. It peeled the flesh from his arms and legs and sandpapered his self-pity to a fine sensitivity.

No one on Earth was as lonely as William Manet, and even William Manet could only be this lonely on Mars.

Manet was Atmosphere Seeder Station 131-47's own human.

All Manet had to do was sit in the beating aluminum heart in the middle of the chalk desert and stare out, chin cupped in hands, at the flat, flat pavement of dirty talcum, at the stars gleaming as hard in the black sky as a starlet's capped teeth ... stars two of which were moons and one of which was Earth. He had to do nothing else. The whole gimcrack was cybernetically controlled, entirely automatic. No one was needed here—no human being, at least.

The Workers' Union was a pretty small pressure group, but it didn't take much to pressure the Assembly. Featherbedding had been carefully specified, including an Overseer for each of the Seeders to honeycomb Mars, to prepare its atmosphere for colonization.

They didn't give tests to find well-balanced, well-integrated people for the job. Well-balanced, well-integrated men weren't going to isolate themselves in a useless job. They got, instead, William Manet and his fellows.

The Overseers were to stay as long as the job required. Passenger fare to Mars was about one billion dollars. They weren't providing commuter service for night shifts. They weren't providing accommodations for couples when the law specified only one occupant. They weren't providing fuel (at fifty million dollars a gallon) for visits between the various Overseers. They weren't very providential.

But it was two hundred thousand a year in salary, and it offered wonderful opportunities.

It gave William Manet an opportunity to think he saw a spaceship making a tailfirst landing on the table of the desert, its tail burning as bright as envy.

Manet suspected hallucination, but in an existence with all the pallid dispassion of a requited love he was happy to welcome dementia. Sometimes he even manufactured it. Sometimes he would run through the arteries of the factory and play that it had suddenly gone mad hating human beings, and was about to close down its bulkheads on him as sure as the Engineers' Thumb and bale up the pressure-dehydrated digest, making so much stall flooring of him. He ran until he dropped with a kind of climaxing release of terror.

So Manet put on the pressure suit he had been given because he would never need it, and marched out to meet the visiting spaceship.

He wasn't quite clear how he came from walking effortlessly across the Martian plain that had all the distance-perpetuating qualities of a kid's crank movie machine to the comfortable interior of a strange cabin. Not a ship's cabin but a Northwoods cabin.

The black and orange Hallowe'en log charring in the slate stone fireplace seemed real. So did the lean man with the smiling mustache painted with the random designs of the fire, standing before the horizontal pattern of chinked wall.

"Need a fresher?" the host inquired.

Manet's eyes wondered down to heavy water tumbler full of rich, amber whiskey full of sparks from the hearth. He stirred himself in the comfortingly warm leather chair. "No, no, I'm fine." He let the word hang there for examination. "Pardon me, but could you tell me just what place this is?"

The host shrugged. It was the only word for it. "Whatever place you choose it to be, so long as you're with Trader Tom. 'Service,' that's my motto. It is a way of life with me."

"Trader Tom? Service?"

"Yes! That's it exactly. It's me exactly. Trader Tom Service—Serving the Wants of the Spaceman Between the Stars. Of course, 'stars' is poetic. Any point of light in the sky in a star. We service the planets."

Manet took the tumbler in both hands and drank. It was good whiskey, immensely powerful. "The government wouldn't pay for somebody serving the wants of spacemen," he exploded.

"Ah," Trader Tom said, cautionary. He moved nearer the fire and warmed his hands and buttocks. "Ah, but I am not a government service. I represent free enterprise."

"Nonsense," Manet said. "No group of private individuals can build a spaceship. It takes a combine of nations."

"But remember only that businessmen are reactionary. It's well-known. Ask anyone on the street. Businessmen are reactionary even beyond the capitalistic system. Money is a fiction that exists mostly on paper. They play along on paper to get paper things, but to get real things they can forego the papers. Comprehend, mon ami? My businessmen have gone back to the barter system. Between them, they have the raw materials, the trained men, the man-hours to make a spaceship. So they make it. Damned reactionaries, all of my principals."

"I don't believe you," Manet stated flatly. His conversation had grown blunt with disuse. "What possible profit could your principals turn from running a trading ship among scattered exploration posts on the planets? What could you give us that a benevolent government doesn't already supply us with? And if there was anything, how could we pay for it? My year's salary wouldn't cover the transportation costs of this glass of whiskey."

"Do you find it good whiskey?"

"Very good."

"Excellent?"

"Excellent, if you prefer."

"I only meant—but never mind. We give you what you want. As for paying for it—why, forget about the payment. You may apply for a Trader Tom Credit Card."

"And I could buy anything that I wanted with it?" Manet demanded. "That's absurd. I'd never be able to pay for it."

"That's it precisely!" Trader Tom said with enthusiasm. "You never pay for it. Charges are merely deducted from your estate."

"But I may leave no estate!"

Trader Tom demonstrated his peculiar shrug. "All businesses operate on a certain margin of risk. That is our worry."

Manet finished the mellow whiskey and looked into the glass. It seemed to have been polished clean. "What do you have to offer?"

"Whatever you want?"

Irritably, "How do I know what I want until I know what you have?"

"You know."

"I know? All right, I know. You don't have it for sale."

"Old chap, understand if you please that I do not only sell. I am a trader—Trader Tom. I trade with many parties. There are, for example ... extraterrestrials."

"Folk legend!"

"On the contrary, mon cher, the only reality it lacks is political reality. The Assembly could no longer justify their disposition of the cosmos if it were known they were dealing confiscation without representation. Come, tell me what you want."

Manet gave in to it. "I want to be not alone," he said.

"Of course," Trader Tom replied, "I suspected. It is not so unusual, you know. Sign here. And here. Two copies. This is yours. Thank you so much."

Manet handed back the pen and stared at the laminated card in his hand.