A Saucer of Loneliness Read Free Page B

a ball gown or overalls. You can’t cover up my carcass. It shows; it’s there whatever. I just didn’t want you to
see
me. At all.”
    “Me, or anyone?”
    She hesitated. “You.”
    I got up and stretched and walked a little, thinking. “Didn’t the F.B.I. try to stop you throwing those bottles?”
    “Oh, sure. They spent I don’t know how much taxpayers’ money gathering ’em up. They still make a spot check every once in a while. They’re getting tired of it, though. All the writing in the bottles is the same.” She laughed. I didn’t know she could.
    “What’s funny?”
    “All of ’em—judges, jailers, juke-boxes—people. Do you know it wouldn’t have saved me a minute’s trouble if I’d told ’em the whole thing at the very beginning?”
    “No?”
    “No. They wouldn’t have believed me. What they wanted was a new weapon. Super-science from a super-race, to slap hell out of the super-race if they ever got a chance, or out of our own if they don’t. All those brains,” she breathed, with more wonder than scorn, “all that brass. They think ‘super-race’ and it comes out ‘super-science.’ Don’t they ever imagine a super-race has super-feelings, too—super-laughter, maybe, or super-hunger?” She paused. “Isn’t it time you asked me what the saucer said?”
    “I’ll tell you,” I blurted.
    ‘There is in certain living souls
    A quality of loneliness unspeakable,
    So great it must be shared
    As company is shared by lesser beings.
    Such a loneliness is mine; so know by this
    That in immensity
    There is one lonelier than you
.”
    “Dear Jesus,” she said devoutly, and began to weep. “And how is it addressed?”
    “To the loneliest one
 …”
    “How did you know?” she whispered.
    “It’s what you put in the bottles, isn’t it?”
    “Yes,” she said. “Whenever it gets to be too much, that no onecares, that no one ever did … you throw a bottle into the sea, and out goes a part of your own loneliness. You sit and think of someone somewhere finding it … learning for the first time that the worst there is can be understood.”
    The moon was setting and the surf was hushed. We looked up and out to the stars. She said, “We don’t know what loneliness is like. People thought the saucer was a saucer, but it wasn’t. It was a bottle with a message inside. It had a bigger ocean to cross—all of space—and not much chance of finding anybody. Loneliness? We don’t know loneliness.”
    When I could, I asked her why she had tried to kill herself.
    “I’ve had it good,” she said, “with what the saucer told me. I wanted to … pay back. I was bad enough to be helped; I had to know I was good enough to help. No one wants me? Fine. But don’t tell me no one, anywhere, wants my help. I can’t stand that.”
    I took a deep breath. “I found one of your bottles two years ago. I’ve been looking for you ever since. Tide charts, current tables, maps and … wandering. I heard some talk about you and the bottles hereabouts. Someone told me you’d quit doing it, you’d taken to wandering the dunes at night. I knew why. I ran all the way.”
    I needed another breath now. “I got a club foot. I think right, but the words don’t come out of my mouth the way they’re inside my head. I have this nose. I never had a woman. Nobody ever wanted to hire me to work where they’d have to look at me. You’re beautiful,” I said. “You’re beautiful.”
    She said nothing, but it was as if a light came from her, more light and far less shadow than ever the practiced moon could cast. Among the many things it meant was that even to loneliness there is an end, for those who are lonely enough, long enough.

The Touch of Your Hand
    “D IG THERE ,” SAID O SSER, POINTING .
    The black-browed man pulled back. “Why?”
    “We must dig deep to build high, and we are going to build high.”
    “Why?” the man asked again.
    “To keep the enemy out.”
    “There are no