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 wouldgive him an unprecedented opportunity to once and for all correlateloneliness to the point of madness, to see how long it would take himto start slavering and clawing the pin-ups from the magazines, to beginteaching himself classes in philosophy consisting of interminablelectures to a bored and captive audience of one.

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

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

Not that he was going to have any great long wait of it. He was alreadytalking to himself, making verbal notes for his lectures, and he hadcut out a picture of Annie Oakley from an old book. He tacked it up andwinked 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 fromhis 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 Manetcould 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 middleof 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 theblack sky as a starlet's capped teeth ... stars two of which were moonsand one of which was Earth. He had to do nothing else. The wholegimcrack was cybernetically controlled, entirely automatic. No one wasneeded here—no human being, at least.

The Workers' Union was a pretty small pressure group, but it didn'ttake much to pressure the Assembly. Featherbedding had been carefullyspecified, including an Overseer for each of the Seeders to honeycombMars, to prepare its atmosphere for colonization.

They didn't give tests to find well-balanced, well-integrated peoplefor the job. Well-balanced, well-integrated men weren't going toisolate themselves in a useless job. They got, instead, William Manetand his fellows.

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

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

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