I sat on the edge of the desk jauntily, confidently, and tried to let the domino mask up a father image.
"You may as well get it straight, Stan. The government needs you and it's pointless for you to say that need is unconstitutional or anything. Bring it up and it won't be long. When survival is outside the rules, the rules change."
The eyes of Johnson were strikingly like Meyverik's, dark and unsettled. Only this boy, younger, smaller than the Nordic, had an appropriate skin tone, stained by the tropical sun somewhere in his ancestral past. He dropped his gaze, expelled his breath mightily and pounded one angular knee with a half-closed fist.
"I'm not complaining about conscription without representation, Doctor, but I can't make any sense out of these fool questions you keep firing at me. What in blazes are you trying to get at? What kind of reason are you after for my staying by myself? I just do it because I like it that way."
With a galvanic jolt, I realized he was telling the painfully simple truth. I groaned at the realization.
Meyverik had convinced all of us that in our well-adjusted or at any rate well-conditioned world somebody had to have some purposeful reason in loneliness, solitude, so on that one instance our thinking had already been patterned, discarding all the other evidence of generations that the lonely man was only a personality type, like Johnson.
I felt I had achieved at least the quantum state of a fool.
Johnson silently studied the half-cupped hands laying in his lap.
"The hunting lodge in the Andes seemed as good a place as any to live after mother and father were killed. You might think it was lonesome at night in the mountains, but it isn't at all. You aren't alone when you can watch the burning worlds shadow the bow of God...."
I cleared my throat. The poor kid sounded like he would begin spouting something akin to poetry next.