How to Make Friends, Jim Harmon [epub e ink reader .txt] 📗

some higher price from him for the Modifier, which was clearly missing from the kit.

Or to get even more for simply repossessing the kit.

But Trader Tom would not be back. He came this way only once.

Manet thumbed through the manual in mechanical frustration. As he did so, the solid piece of the last section parted sheet by sheet.

He glanced forward and found the headings: The Final Model.

There seemed something ominous about that finality. But he had paid a price for the kit, hadn't he? Who knew what price, when it came to that? He had every right to get everything out of the kit that he could.

He read the unfolding page critically. The odd assortment of ill-matched parts left in the box took a new shape in his mind and under his fingers....

Manet gave one final spurt from the flesh-sprayer and stood back.

Victor was finished. Perfect.

Manet stepped forward, lifted the model's left eyelid, tweaked his nose.

"Move!"

Victor leaped back into the Lifo kit and did a jig on one of the flesh-sprayers.

As the device twisted as handily as good intentions, Manet realized that it was not a flesh-sprayer but the Modifier.

"It's finished!" were Victor's first words. "It's done!"

Manet stared at the tiny wreck. "To say the least."

Victor stepped out of the oblong box. "There is something you should understand. I am different from the others."

"They all say that."

"I am not your friend."

"No?"

"No. You have made yourself an enemy."

Manet felt nothing more at this information than an esthetic pleasure at the symmetry of the situation.

"It completes the final course in socialization," Victor continued. "I am your adversary. I will do everything I can to defeat you. I have all your knowledge. You do not have all your knowledge. If you let yourself know some of the things, it could be used against you. It is my function to use everything I possibly can against you."

"When do you start?"

"I've finished. I've done my worst. I have destroyed the Modifier."

"What's so bad about that?" Manet asked with some interest.

"You'll have Veronica and Ronald and me forever now. We'll never change. You'll get older, and we'll never change. You'll lose your interest in New York swing and jet combat and Daniel Boone, and we'll never change. We don't change and you can't change us for others. I've made the worst thing happen to you that can happen to any man. I've seen that you will always keep your friends."

The prospect was frightful.

Victor smiled. "Aren't you going to denounce me for a fiend?"

"Yes, it is time for the denouncement. Tell me, you feel that now you are through? You have fulfilled your function?"

"Yes. Yes."

"Now you will have but to lean back, as it were, so to speak, and see me suffer?"

"Yes."

"No. Can't do it, old man. Can't. I know. You're too human, too like me. The one thing a man can't accept is a passive state, a state of uselessness. Not if he can possibly avoid it. Something has to be happening to him. He has to be happening to something. You didn't kill me because then you would have nothing left to do. You'll never kill me."

"Of course not!" Victor stormed. "Fundamental safety cut-off!"

"Rationalization. You don't want to kill me. And you can't stop challenging me at every turn. That's your function."

"Stop talking and just think about your miserable life," Victor said meanly. "Your friends won't grow and mature with you. You won't make any new friends. You'll have me to constantly remind you of your uselessness, your constant unrelenting sterility of purpose. How's that for boredom, for passiveness?"

"That's what I'm trying to tell you," Manet said irritably, his social manners rusty. "I won't be bored. You will see to that. It's your purpose. You'll be a challenge, an obstacle, a source of triumph every foot of the way. Don't you see? With you for an enemy, I don't need a friend!"

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of How to Make Friends, by Jim Harmon