THE FLOATER

BY KENNETH O'HARA

Barton was unique—an absolutely self-sufficient human being. The biggest problem he had in space was holding on to his sanity. And he solved it by altering time itself to suit his needs....

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, February 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

As a Watchman in a man-made kind of observational meteor floating millions of miles from nowhere out among the planets, Barton had two main duties. To keep his sanity and to keep the watch. The second was simple. The gadgets all took care of themselves. All Barton did was send in a report in case an alarm went off indicating something was wrong with some gadget or other.

Staying sane was supposed to be a watcher's big problem. Barton couldn't figure out why they were so concerned, especially the neuropsychologist or whatever he was, Von Ulrich, who was always coming around in his clinical space boat, studying Barton, asking him questions, giving him all kinds of tests.

Once something glinted like a mote in sunlight past the observation port and Von Ulrich said, "That's Collins out there. Collins was here only a week and he put on a pressure suit and jumped into space. He's still rotating round and round out there."

"Poor devil," Barton said.

"Most of them don't even last a week out here, Barton. Six months is the maximum. You've been here almost a year and you're liable to start cracking any minute. I don't like the way things look."

"I feel fine, sir."

Several months later, Von Ulrich dropped by again. "How are things going, Barton?"

"Great, sir. Just swell."

"You feel comfortable, no anxiety?"

"I feel fine."

"You've done a fine job, Barton—so far."

"Thank you, sir."

"You manage to keep occupied?"

"I just take it easy, sir."

"I see."

A few months later, Von Ulrich was back, watching Barton moulding something out of clay, a sort of human shape without a face. There were other self-amusement gimmicks, wood-working, soap-carving, movies and the like, but Barton preferred moulding things haphazardly out of clay, and sometimes reading one of the books he wasn't supposed to have brought along because books were no longer popular.

"What were you thinking about when you moulded this thing?" Von Ulrich asked.

"Nothing much, sir."

"You must have been thinking of something?"

"I guess I was thinking of a man sleeping beside a river in green grass with nobody for miles around. Something like that."

"You weren't by any chance thinking about a dead man?"

"I don't like death much."

Later on sometime, Von Ulrich dropped around again on his therapeutic tour of basketballs, and Martian bases, and other bases even more remote. Barton wondered how anyone could find the basketball drifting in all that blackness. Just a little ragged spheroid like a piece of dead slag, something like a cork bobbing in a black ocean too big even to bother thinking about. If no one ever found the basketball Barton would have been happier, because the basketball was self-sustaining and could go on and on for years without supplies or any human contact.

"Getting a little lonely maybe?" Von Ulrich asked.

"No sir."

"Don't miss having people around. Your wife, your son?"