The Year's Best Science Fiction 10

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.