He chuckled, the chuckle rolling through the darkness.
"It was a masterpiece, West, that broadcast. I was the last man alive and I told them what had happened. I told them the spacetime continuum had ruptured and things were coming through. And I gurgled ... I gurgled just before I died."
"You didn't really die, of course," West said, innocently.
"Hell, no. But they think I did. And they still wake up screaming, thinking how I must have died."
Ham, thought West. Pure, unadulterated ham. A jokester who would maroon a man to die on a lonely moon. A man who held a gun in his fist while he bragged about the things he'd done ... about how he had outwitted Earth.
"You see," said Cartwright, "I had to make them believe that it really happened. I had to make it so horrible that the government would never make it public, so horrible they'd close the planet with an iron-tight ban."
"You had to be alone," said West.
"That's right, West. We had to be alone."
"Well," said West. "You've almost got it now. There's only two of you alive."
"The two of us," Cartwright said, "and you."