Mickey D’s, or under a leaking tranny on somebody’s Yugo, or working the stockroom at a K-Mart or Target, and you have to do it for the dough, and you hate the job, and you hate the hours, and you hate the fact that you can’t be out hanging with the posse, well tough sh-t, Joker; you signed on to do the job, and they pay you to do it, so DO THE DAMNED JOB! If you don’t like the gig, quit. Give ‘em notice promptly, don’t leave ‘em in the lurch suddenly, don’t trash the area out of baby-spite, and don’t start shoplifting. Just DO THE DAMN JOB! That’s how somebody with strength does it. Don’t whine, don’t piss’n’moan, don’t jerk ‘em around, just hang in there as long as it’s ethically necessary, and then get in the wind. But if you sign on to do the job, no matter how onerous the chore, DO THE DAMNED JOB, just do it.
D arkness seeped in around the little Quonset. It oozed out of the deeps of space and swirled around Ferreno’s home. The automatic scanners turned and turned, whispering quietly, their message of wariness unconsciously reassuring the old man.
He bent over and plucked momentarily at a bit of lint on the carpet. It was the only speck of foreign matter on the rug, reflecting the old man’s perpetual cleanliness and almost fanatical neatness.
The racks of book spools were all binding-to-binding, set flush with the lips of the shelves; the bed was made with a military tightness that allowed a coin to bounce high three times; the walls were free of fingerprints-dusted and wiped clean twice a day; there was no speck of lint or dust on anything in the one-room Quonset.
When Ferreno had flicked the single bit of matter from his fingers, into the incinerator, the place was immaculate.
It reflected twenty-four years of watching, waiting, and living alone. Living alone on the edge of Forever, waiting for something that might never come. Tending blind, dumb machines that could say Something is out here, but also said, We don’t know what it is.
Ferreno returned to his pneumo-chair, sank heavily into it, and blinked, his deep-set gray eyes seeking into the farthest rounded corner of the Quonset’s ceiling. His eyes seemed to be looking for something. But there was nothing there he did not already know. Far too well.
He had been on this asteroid, this spot lost in the darkness, for twenty-four years. In that time, nothing had happened.
There had been no warmth, no women, no feeling, and only a brief flurry of emotion for almost twenty of those twenty-four years.
Ferreno had been a young man when they had set him down on The Stone. They had pointed out there and said to him:
“Beyond the farthest spot you can see, there’s an island universe. In that island universe there’s an enemy, Ferreno. One day he’ll become tired of his home and come after yours.
“You’re here to watch for him.”
And they had gone before he could ask them.
Ask them: who were the enemy? Where would they come from, and why was he here, alone, to stop them? What could he do if they came? What were the huge, silent machines that bulked monstrous behind the little Quonset? Would he ever go home again?
All he had known was the intricate dialing process for the inverspace communicators. The tricky-fingered method of sending a coded response half across the galaxy to a waiting Mark LXXXII brain-waiting only for his frantic pulsations.
He had known only that. The dialing process and the fact that he was to watch. Watch for he-knew-not-what!
There at first he had thought he would go out of his mind. It had been the monotony. Monotony intensified to a frightening degree. The ordeal of watching, watching, watching. Sleeping, eating from the self-replenishing supply of protofoods in the greentank, reading, sleeping again, rereading the book spools tin their casings crackled, snapped, and lost panes. Then
D arkness seeped in around the little Quonset. It oozed out of the deeps of space and swirled around Ferreno’s home. The automatic scanners turned and turned, whispering quietly, their message of wariness unconsciously reassuring the old man.
He bent over and plucked momentarily at a bit of lint on the carpet. It was the only speck of foreign matter on the rug, reflecting the old man’s perpetual cleanliness and almost fanatical neatness.
The racks of book spools were all binding-to-binding, set flush with the lips of the shelves; the bed was made with a military tightness that allowed a coin to bounce high three times; the walls were free of fingerprints-dusted and wiped clean twice a day; there was no speck of lint or dust on anything in the one-room Quonset.
When Ferreno had flicked the single bit of matter from his fingers, into the incinerator, the place was immaculate.
It reflected twenty-four years of watching, waiting, and living alone. Living alone on the edge of Forever, waiting for something that might never come. Tending blind, dumb machines that could say Something is out here, but also said, We don’t know what it is.
Ferreno returned to his pneumo-chair, sank heavily into it, and blinked, his deep-set gray eyes seeking into the farthest rounded corner of the Quonset’s ceiling. His eyes seemed to be looking for something. But there was nothing there he did not already know. Far too well.
He had been on this asteroid, this spot lost in the darkness, for twenty-four years. In that time, nothing had happened.
There had been no warmth, no women, no feeling, and only a brief flurry of emotion for almost twenty of those twenty-four years.
Ferreno had been a young man when they had set him down on The Stone. They had pointed out there and said to him:
“Beyond the farthest spot you can see, there’s an island universe. In that island universe there’s an enemy, Ferreno. One day he’ll become tired of his home and come after yours.
“You’re here to watch for him.”
And they had gone before he could ask them.
Ask them: who were the enemy? Where would they come from, and why was he here, alone, to stop them? What could he do if they came? What were the huge, silent machines that bulked monstrous behind the little Quonset? Would he ever go home again?
All he had known was the intricate dialing process for the inverspace communicators. The tricky-fingered method of sending a coded response half across the galaxy to a waiting Mark LXXXII brain-waiting only for his frantic pulsations.
He had known only that. The dialing process and the fact that he was to watch. Watch for he-knew-not-what!
There at first he had thought he would go out of his mind. It had been the monotony. Monotony intensified to a frightening degree. The ordeal of watching, watching, watching. Sleeping, eating from the self-replenishing supply of protofoods in the greentank, reading, sleeping again, rereading the book spools tin their casings crackled, snapped, and lost panes. Then
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