The Ultrad message-receiver chirped. 

Cliff looked up from the desk where he rested his head on his arms, 
trying to stay awake. The printer was unrolling a sheet of paper. Low- 
priority green words from Base appeared on his console monitor and were 
scrolling down the screen. 

Wearily, he arose and moved over to the screen. As his half-lidded 
eyes scanned the lines, his mind rebelled at the inappropriateness of 
the message.... It was a long order for special maintenance on one 
of the subarrays. He watched, exhausted, until the end-of-message 
line was displayed. 

He mustered enough strength to rip the paper from the serrated slot, 
ball it up, and throw it against a bulkhead. 

"I've performed enough `special maintenance' lately," he croaked. 

He had one more thing to do before he surrendered the day. He typed 
in a command at the console keyboard and, with a smile, noted the 
display on the monitor screen. Then, he cleared the screen and walked 
slowly toward his quarters. When he got there, he disabled the alarms 
on the bunkside panel and collapsed into his bunk.... He was soon 
fast asleep. 

                          Assisted Decision 

"Cliffy?... Son?..." 

He opened his eyes and blinked. His mother was standing at the foot 
of his bunk. He stared at her, uncomprehendingly. 

"Wake up, sleepyhead," she said in that maternal way he recalled so 
well. "It's time to get busy." 

Of course, in the logical part of his mind, Cliff knew his mother 
couldn't be here at Outer Array 74. But oddly, he found it easy to 
accept her "presence." He felt no compulsion to accuse her of being 
false, even though her image somehow wasn't quite right. He felt 
relaxed and confident for the first time in days. 

"What do I have to do, Mom?" 

"Now, Cliffy, you know what to do. Haven't you had enough of this 
awful place?" 

"Yeah, I sure have." 

"Well, then... you have to get it all out of your mind." 

"How do I do that, Mom?" 

"Just turn on that thing you have -- destructor? -- and the nightmare 
of this place will stop, son. Then, you can come home with me." She 
smiled, benevolently. "Morty's waiting.... He wants to go hunting 
with you." 

The mention of his old hound, long dead, pleased Cliff. 

"I want to go hunting again, Mom -- fishing, too." 

"Well, then, I want you to bring back some rainbow trout for supper 
tomorrow when your father gets back from Beckley." 

"Okay, Mom." 

"Good, Cliffy... You just go along and set your destructor, then come 
back here. I'll be back for you later." 

With that promise, she disappeared without a sound. 

S/1c Harman arose and splashed his face with cold water. Although he 
was still logy, he knew just what he had to do. 

When he arrived at Control Central, he picked up his toolkit and left 
the compartment without checking the console. 

He strolled down the corridor toward the Destructor Chamber. He con- 
tinued past the red door and down to the end of the tube, where he 
found himself facing a door he had entered only twice -- once during 
his initial orientation, and more recently, when he had taken the 
visiting supply tech on a tour of the station.... It was the Lifeboat 
Access Compartment. 

He entered the chamber and walked over to the lifeboat. He opened 
its hatch and squeezed in. He moved up to the pilot's control panel 
and opened the access door, below. He pulled up his toolkit and set 
to work on the circuit boards. He even whistled while he worked. It 
was a child's melody he knew from his early days at home in the green 
mountains of West Virginia, on Old Earth. 

Blue-white flashes illuminated the lifeboat's cockpit -- and through 
the viewshield, the Lifeboat Compartment -- as Cliff used his electro- 
cutter. Thin smoke curled from the hatch, and was pulled into the 
ventilator grilles of the room. 

His modifications completed, Cliff crawled out the hatch and closed 
it behind him. Then, he left the room and walked back down the cor- 
ridor to the Destructor Chamber. 

He keyed open the door and entered the small room. He pulled open 
the door below the control panel and began to work on the circuits, 
whistling -- over and over -- the tune he had begun in the lifeboat. 
Finally, he backed out of the cabinet, closed the door, and stood 
at the actuator. 

He keyed in his personal code, then the lengthy -- but memorable --  
sentence which would allow him to start the destructor sequence. At 
the confirmatory beep, he pulled up the hinged cover in the center 
of the panel and brought his fist down on the large, rounded red 
button marked "DESTRUCT ENABLE." 

He returned to his quarters, whistling as he walked amid the clangor 
and flashing of the destructor alarm.... He knew, with satisfaction, 
that it would be the next-to-last alarm he would have to listen to. 

He keyed a command into the bunkside monitor panel. Then, he lay back 
on the bunk and put his arms across his chest like a mortuary corpse. 

"I'm ready to go home, Mom," he said to the empty room. 

There was no reply. 
 

                          Revelation 

Despite the loud destructor alarm, Cliff had almost fallen asleep, 
when the monitor panel began beeping a new note. 

Wearily, he sat up to verify what he knew it was telling him. He 
turned off the panel alarm and sat quietly until he felt a tremor 
through his feet on the deck. Then he arose and walked, whistling a 
new melody, to Control Central. There, he turned off the destructor 
alarm with a coded command. The resulting silence felt so, so good. 

He knew it would last for a long time. 

At the commpanel, he keyed the station-to-spacecraft radio channel. 

"Lifeboat, this is Array Control calling.... Please reply." 
He heard only the slight hiss of the VHF-AM radio receiver. 

"I know you're there -- `Mom.' By now, you're having trouble control- 
ling the lifeboat.... Right?" 

There was no reply. 

"I took a chance that you couldn't tell exactly what I was doing. I 
modified your controls.... Don't bother to check. I guarantee you'll 
never fix them, `Mom.'" 

He guessed "Mom" was deciding whether or not to reply. After more 
silence, "she" decided. The voice was high-pitched and accented in an 
alien way Cliff couldn't place. 

"I wondered what you were doing, Custodian. I've always been better 
at telemitting than teleceiving.... I suppose you `modified' the 
station's destructor, also?" 

"Of course. After I arranged for *your* good-riddance, there was no 
need for me to die, `Mom.' This place doesn't seem so `awful,' now. 
I guess I'll hang around.... Give my regards to Dad and Morty." 

There was a pause, as if the alien were formulating a clever reply to 
Cliff's sarcasm. 

"When did you realize what I was doing?" 

"For certain?... When a special security program told me someone was 
accessing the computer from outside Control Central." 

"So, you played along with my little fantasies. I admit you had me 
fooled." 

"You were impatient. You should have run me down some more. Then, 
maybe, I would have believed it all. I guess you were in a hurry to 
get the gold the Varmits're paying you for this job.... Just for the 
record, what kind of alien are you? They'll want to know, back at 
Base." 

"Me?... You're the `alien,' here, Specialist.... I did leave you a 
bag of something you can analyze, though." He managed a guffaw, in 
his piping voice. Cliff almost laughed, with him. "But I'll take the 
rest of my secrets with me as I go... where?" 

"Into a sector of ours where your corpse may be found someday -- if 
it doesn't fall into a star, first. But I do know that the Varmint 
ship that'll be looking for you won't have much luck -- unless its 
long-range sensors are better than I think they are." 

"If you knew, why didn't you just capture me and hold me for interro- 
gation? I'm unarmed.... Was it because I'm an `alien'? Are you that 
prejudiced?... Or, was it because I played with your cherished little 
memories?..." The alien's voice was sinking into the hiss of the 
short-range radio channel. 

Cliff thought for a moment, then replied. 

"It's because I want to be alone."   *   
 

Illustrations copyright ©1997-98 by Romeo Esparrago <romedome@aol.com>