THE RECLUSE By MIKE CURRY _The human voice! Had there even been so sweet a sound? Arak Miller ached for it--too eagerly; too swiftly._ [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Twenty-five years later a ship appeared, on an afternoon in the planet's summer. Arak Miller watched it from the mesa. _From Earth_, he thought. _From Earth!_ But Arak Miller was an ordered man. Even now, in the face of resurging visions of his wife, and his sons, and his work, and the mighty civilization from which he had been cut adrift, his thoughts were ordered: probably the ship had arrived from Earth to resurvey one of the Class II uninhabitable planets of the Alpha Centaurus System. Tomorrow its scout ships would whip along the day sides at five thousand feet. Tomorrow atop the mesa he must light his pyres, some hundred-odd gigantic piles of pine trees and brush that would burn with billowing smoke. He must signal the presence of a lone Earthman. With a hypnotic intensity he stood watching the ship until, toward evening, it merged into the gray sky over the horizon. Then he ran across the clearing and down to his house by the river that wound through the valley a thousand feet below. "Come on, you fool!" he shouted to Marbach, sitting beneath a tree. Arak Miller threw the figure over his shoulder and carried him to the house. He sat Marbach on a chair and went into the kitchen to eat. Arak Miller had been nomadic the first few years after he crashed and had been abandoned for dead, until he found in the planet's narrow temperate zone one of the few arable regions capable of sustaining him. There was sufficient small game, the river was cool, and because the rain fell mainly in the valley, his pyres were safe. In recent years he was always building. He had added a front porch to the cabin he had started with, then more rooms which he had never used, then an attic into which he never went. Now it was a house. It had chairs and tables, a bed, a rug of vines, a garden for vegetables and tobacco, and a garden for flowers. He ate a leisurely meal of potatoes and corn and meat of the rabbit-like creatures which he trapped. Miss Gormeley was sitting on the porch as he went out. "A ship's come," he shouted. "I may be saved, you understand?" He recalled he had intended to do something about Miss Gormeley's nostril. With one of his knives he scraped a little against the wall of her left nostril. Then he stood back, satisfied. "Now you look better," he said. With a wry grin he added, "You can smell better, too." * * * * *