HOW TO MAKE FRIENDS

By JIM HARMON

Illustrated by WEST

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Magazine October 1962.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

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.

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.

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.

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."

"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."

"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."

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?"

"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."

"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."

"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."

When he looked up from the card, Manet saw the box. Trader Tom was pushing it across the floor towards him.

The box had the general dimensions of a coffin, but it wasn't wood—only brightly illustrated cardboard. There was a large four-color picture on the lid showing men, women and children moving through a busy city street. The red and blue letters said:

"It is commercialized," Trader Tom admitted with no little chagrin. "It is presented to appeal to a twelve-year-old child, an erotic, aggressive twelve-year-old, the typical sensie goer—but that is reality. It offends men of good taste like ourselves, yet sometimes it approaches being art. We must accept it."

"What's the cost?" Manet asked. "Before I accept it, I have to know the charges."

"You never know the cost. Only your executor knows that. It's the Trader Tom plan."

"There are no guarantees," Trader Tom admitted. "But I've never had any complaints yet."

Manet didn't open the box. He let it fade quietly in the filtered but still brilliant sunlight near a transparent wall.

Manet puttered around the spawning monster, trying to brush the copper taste of the station out of his mouth in the mornings, talking to himself, winking at Annie Oakley, and waiting to go mad.

Finally, Manet woke up one morning. He lay in the sheets of his bunk, suppressing the urge to go wash his hands, and came at last to the conclusion that, after all the delay, he was mad.

The cardboard lid seemed to have become both brittle and rotten. It crumbled as easily as ideals. But Manet was old enough to remember the boxes Japanese toys came in when he was a boy, and was not alarmed.

The contents were such a glorious pile of junk, of bottles from old chemistry sets, of pieces from old Erector sets, of nameless things and unremembered antiques from neglected places, that it seemed too good to have been assembled commercially. It was the collection of lifetime.

On top of everything was a paperbound book, the size of the Reader's Digest, covered in rippled gray flexiboard. The title was stamped in black on the spine and cover: The Making of Friends.

Manet opened the book and, turning one blank page, found the title in larger print and slightly amplified: The Making of Friends and Others. There was no author listed. A further line of information stated: "A Manual for Lifo, The Socialization Kit." At the bottom of the title page, the publisher was identified as: LIFO KIT CO., LTD., SYRACUSE.

He quickly riffled through the pages. Other Friends, Authority, A Companion.... Then The Final Model. Manet tried to flip past this section, but the pages after the sheet labeled The Final Model were stuck together. More than stuck. There was a thick slab of plastic in the back of the book. The edges were ridged as if there were pages to this section, but they could only be the tracks of lame ants.

He prowled through the box looking for some kind of a chart. There was nothing that looked like a chart inside. He retrieved the lid and looked at its inside. Nothing. He tipped the box and looked at its outside. Not a thing. There was always something missing from kits. Maybe even the Modifier itself.

He read on, and probed and scattered the parts in the long box. He studied the manual intently and groped out with his free hand.

Cheerfulness was a personality trait Manet had thumbed out for him. Cheerful. Submissive. Co-operative. Manet had selected these factors in order to make Ronald as different a person from himself as possible.

"The Korean-American War was the greatest of all wars," Ronald said pontifically.

Intelligence was one of the factors Manet had punched to suppress. Intelligence. Aggressiveness. Sense of perfection. Ronald couldn't know any more than Manet, but he could (and did) know less. He had seen to that when his own encephalograph matrix had programmed Ronald's feeder.

"The dogfight was a combat of hundreds of planes in a tight area, the last of which took place near the end of the First World War. The aerial duel, sometimes inaccurately referred to as a 'dogfight' was not seen in Korea either. The pilots at supersonic speeds only had time for single passes at the enemy. Still, I believe, contrary to all experts, that this took greater skill, man more wedded to machine, than the leisurely combats of World War One."

"Daniel Boone was still a crack shot at eight-five. He was said to be warm, sincere, modest, truthful, respected and rheumatic."

He was so damned sick of hearing about Korean air battles, Daniel Boone, the literary qualities of ancient sports fiction magazines, the painting of Norman Rockwell, New York swing, ad nauseum. What a narrow band of interests! With the whole universe to explore in thought and concept, why did he have to be trapped with such an unoriginal human being?

Manet had been interested in the Fabulous Forties—Lt. "Hoot" Gibson, Sam Merwin tennis stories, Saturday Evening Post covers—when he had first learned of them, and he had learned all about them. He had firm opinions on all these.

He yearned for someone to challenge him—to say that Dime Sports had been nothing but a cheap yellow rag and, why, Sewanee Review, there had been a magazine for you.

Manet's only consolidation was that Ronald's tastes were lower than his own. He patriotically insisted that the American Sabre Jet was superior to the Mig. He maintained with a straight face that Tommy Dorsey was a better band man than Benny Goodman. Ronald was a terrific jerk.

The two men separated and, puffing like steam locomotives passing the diesel works, closed again.

Manet stepped inside the swing and lifted an uppercut to the ledge of Ronald's jaw.

He lifted his bruised head from the deck and worked his reddened mouth. "Had enough?" he asked Manet.

Ronald was maddeningly co-operative and peaceful. He would even get in a fist fight to avoid trouble between them. He would do anything Manet wanted him to do. He was so utterly damned stupid.

But if he were so much more stupid than he, Manet, why was it that their checker games always ended in a tie?

The calendar said it was Spring on Earth when the radio was activated for a high-speed information and entertainment transmission.

By rolling his eyes back in his head, Manet could see over a hedge of eyebrows for several hundred flat miles of white sand.

For a moment he gloried in the blatant display of his flabby muscles and patchy sunburn.

Then he sighed, rolled over to his feet and started trudging toward Communication.

He padded down the rib-ridged matted corridor, taking his usual small pleasure in the kaleidoscopic effect of the spiraling reflections on the walls of the tubeway.

As he passed the File Room, he caught the sound of the pounding vibrations against the stoppered plug of the hatch.

Manet padded on down the hall. He had, he recalled, shoved Ronald in there on Lincoln's Birthday, a minor ironic twist he appreciated quietly. He had been waiting in vain for Ronald to run down ever since.

In Communication, he took a seat and punched the slowed down playback of the transmission.

"Hello, Overseers," the Voice said. It was the Voice of the B.B.C. It irritated Manet. He never understood how the British had got the space transmissions assignment for the English language. He would have preferred an American disk-jockey himself, one who appreciated New York swing.

"We imagine that you are most interested in how long you shall be required to stay at your present stations," said the Voice of God's paternal uncle. "As you on Mars may know, there has been much discussion as to how long it will require to complete the present schedule—" there was of course no "K" sound in the word—"for atmosphere seeding.

"The original, non-binding estimate at the time of your departure was 18.2 years. However, determining how long it will take our stations properly to remake the air of Mars is a problem comparable to finding the age of the Earth. Estimates change as new factors are learned. You may recall that three years ago the official estimate was changed to thirty-one years. The recent estimate by certain reactionary sources of two hundred and seventy-four years is not an official government estimate. The news for you is good, if you are becoming nostalgic for home, or not particularly bad if you are counting on drawing your handsome salary for the time spent on Mars. We have every reason to believe our original estimate was substantially correct. The total time is, within limits of error, a flat 18 years."

Finally, Manet went back to the solarium and dragged the big box out. There was a lot left inside.

One of those parts, one of those bones or struts of flesh sprayers, one of them, he now knew, was the Modifier.

If only the Master Chart hadn't been lost, so he would know what the Modifier looked like! He hoped the Modifier itself wasn't lost. He hated to think of Ronald locked in the Usher tomb of the File Room for 18 flat years. Long before that, he would have worn his fists away hammering at the hatch. Then he might start pounding with his head. Perhaps before the time was up he would have worn himself down to nothing whatsoever.

Manet selected the ripple-finished gray-covered manual from the hodgepodge, and thought: eighteen years.

Perhaps I should have begun here, he told himself. But I really don't have as much interest in that sort of thing as the earthier types. Simple companionship was all I wanted. And, he thought on, even an insipid personality like Ronald's would be bearable with certain compensations.

Veronica crept up behind Manet and slithered her hands up his back and over his shoulders. She leaned forward and breathed a moist warmth into his ear, and worried the lobe with her even white teeth.

She sighed her instant agreement and moved her expressive hands over his chest and up to the hollows of his throat.

Her hands instantly caressed his face to prove that she liked a rather bristly, masculine countenance.

He stood up and began pacing off the dimensions of the compartment. There was no doubt about it: he had been missing his regular exercise.

"If you were a jet pilot," Veronica said wistfully, "you would be romantic. You would grab love when you could. You would never know which moment would be last. You would make the most of each one."

"I'm not a jet pilot," Manet said. "There are no jet pilots. There haven't been any for generations."

"Don't be silly," Veronica said. "Who else would stop those vile North Koreans and Red China 'volunteers'?"

"Veronica," he said carefully, "the Korean War is over. It was finished even before the last of the jet pilots."

"Don't be silly," she snapped. "If it were over, I'd know about it, wouldn't I?"

She would, except that somehow she had turned out even less bright, less equipped with Manet's own store of information, than Ronald. Whoever had built the Lifo kit must have had ancient ideas about what constituted appropriate "feminine" characteristics.

"I suppose," he said heavily, "that you would like me to take you back to Earth and introduce you to Daniel Boone?"

She lowered her long blonde lashes on her pink cheeks. "That is a mean thing to say to me. But I forgive you."

An invisible hand began pressing down steadily on the top of his head until it forced a sound out of him. "Aaaawrraagggh! Must you be so cloyingly sweet? Do you have to keep taking that? Isn't there any fight in you at all?"

It was the first time he had ever struck a woman, he realized regretfully. He now knew he should have been doing it long ago.

Well, that was all right. He remembered he had once told her to ignore the noise. She was still following orders.

"Come on, Bill, open up the hatch for old Ronald," the voice carried through sepulchrally.

Why hadn't he thought of that before? Maybe because he secretly took comfort in the sound of an almost human voice echoing through the station.

Ronald looked just the same as had when Manet had seen him last. His hands didn't seem to have been worn away in the least. Ronald's lips seemed a trifle chapped. But that probably came not from all the shouting but from having nothing to drink for some months.

"You," Manet said to Veronica with a shove in the small of the back, "inside, inside."

"Do you know what I'm going to do with you?" Manet demanded. "I'm going to lock you up in here, and leave you for a day, a month, a year, forever! Now what do you think about that?"

Manet walked carefully down the corridor, watching streamers of his reflection corkscrewing into the curved walls. He had to walk carefully, else the artery would roll up tight and squash him. But he walked too carefully for this to happen.

As he passed the File Room, Ronald's voice said: "In my opinion, William, you should let us out."

Manet giggled. "What? What was that? Do you suggest that I take you back after you've been behind a locked door with my best friend?"

Pouring and tumbling through the Lifo kit, consulting the manual diligently, Manet concluded that there weren't enough parts left in the box to go around.

The book gave instructions for The Model Mother, The Model Father, The Model Sibling and others. Yet there weren't parts enough in the kit.

He would have to take parts from Ronald or Veronica in order to make any one of the others. And he could not do that without the Modifier.

He wished Trader Tom would return and extract some higher price from him for the Modifier, which was clearly missing from the kit.

Manet thumbed through the manual in mechanical frustration. As he did so, the solid piece of the last section parted sheet by sheet.

There seemed something ominous about that finality. But he had paid a price for the kit, hadn't he? Who knew what price, when it came to that? He had every right to get everything out of the kit that he could.

He read the unfolding page critically. The odd assortment of ill-matched parts left in the box took a new shape in his mind and under his fingers....

Victor leaped back into the Lifo kit and did a jig on one of the flesh-sprayers.

As the device twisted as handily as good intentions, Manet realized that it was not a flesh-sprayer but the Modifier.

Victor stepped out of the oblong box. "There is something you should understand. I am different from the others."

Manet felt nothing more at this information than an esthetic pleasure at the symmetry of the situation.

"It completes the final course in socialization," Victor continued. "I am your adversary. I will do everything I can to defeat you. I have all your knowledge. You do not have all your knowledge. If you let yourself know some of the things, it could be used against you. It is my function to use everything I possibly can against you."

"You'll have Veronica and Ronald and me forever now. We'll never change. You'll get older, and we'll never change. You'll lose your interest in New York swing and jet combat and Daniel Boone, and we'll never change. We don't change and you can't change us for others. I've made the worst thing happen to you that can happen to any man. I've seen that you will always keep your friends."

"Yes, it is time for the denouncement. Tell me, you feel that now you are through? You have fulfilled your function?"

"Now you will have but to lean back, as it were, so to speak, and see me suffer?"

"No. Can't do it, old man. Can't. I know. You're too human, too like me. The one thing a man can't accept is a passive state, a state of uselessness. Not if he can possibly avoid it. Something has to be happening to him. He has to be happening to something. You didn't kill me because then you would have nothing left to do. You'll never kill me."

"Rationalization. You don't want to kill me. And you can't stop challenging me at every turn. That's your function."

"Stop talking and just think about your miserable life," Victor said meanly. "Your friends won't grow and mature with you. You won't make any new friends. You'll have me to constantly remind you of your uselessness, your constant unrelenting sterility of purpose. How's that for boredom, for passiveness?"

"That's what I'm trying to tell you," Manet said irritably, his social manners rusty. "I won't be bored. You will see to that. It's your purpose. You'll be a challenge, an obstacle, a source of triumph every foot of the way. Don't you see? With you for an enemy, I don't need a friend!"