"To pilot the interstellar spaceship?"

"For the _Evening Star_, yes," Madison agreed.

I picked up my pencil and held it between my two index fingers. I couldn't think of a damned thing to say.

"The whole problem," Madison was saying, "goes back to the early days of space travel. Men were confined in a small area facing infinite space for measureless periods in freefall. Men cracked--and ships, they cracked up. But as space travel advanced ships got larger, carried more people, more ties and reminders of human civilization. Pilots became more _normal_."

I made myself look up at the earnest young man.

"But now," I said, "now you want me to find you an abnormal pilot who is used to being alone, who can stand it, maybe even like it?"

"Right."

I constructed a genuine smile for him for the first time.

"Madison, do you really think _I_ can find your man when evidently all the government agencies have failed?"

The government representative pocketed his notebook deftly and then spread his hands clumsily for an instant.

"At least, Doctor," he said, "you may _know_ it if you do find him."

* * * * *

It was a lonely job to find a lonely man, General, and maybe it was a crooked job to walk a crooked mile to find a crooked man.

I had to do it alone. No one else had enough experience in primitive psychology to recognize the phenomenon of loneliness, even as Madison had said.

The working conditions suited me. I had to think by myself but I had a comfortable staff to carry out my ideas. I liked my new office and the executive apartment the government supplied me. I had authority and respect and I had security. The government assured me they would find further use for my services after I found them their man. I knew this was to keep me from dragging my tracks. But nevertheless I got right down to work.

I found Gordon Meyverik exactly five weeks from the day Madison first visited me in my old office.

"Of course, I planned the whole thing, Dr. Thorn," Gordon said crisply.

I knew what he meant although I hadn't guessed it before. He could tell it to me himself, I decided.

"Doesn't seem much to brag about," I said. "Anybody who can make up a grocery list should be able to figure out how to isolate himself on Seal Island."

He sat forward, a lean Viking with a hot Latin glance, very confident of himself.

"I reckoned on you locating me, on you hustling me back to pilot the _Evening Star_. That's why I holed in there."

"I can't accept your story," I lied cheerfully. "Nobody is going to maroon himself on an island for three years because of a wild possibility like that."

Meyverik smiled and his sureness swelled out until it almost jabbed me in the stomach.

"I took a broad gamble," he said, "but it hit the wire, didn't it?"

I didn't reply, but he had his answer.

Instead I scanned the report Madison had given me from Intelligence concerning the man's unorthodox behavior.

Meyverik had quit his post-graduate studies and passed by the secured job that had been waiting for him eighteen months in a genial government office to barricade himself in an old shelter on Seal Island.