Rogue Moon

1

Late on a day in 1959, three men sat in a room.

Edward Hawks, Doctor of Science, cradled his long jaw in his outsize hands and hunched forward with his sharp elbows on the desk. He was a black-haired, pale-skinned, gangling man who rarely got out in the sun. Compared to his staff of tanned young assistants, he always reminded strangers of a scarecrow. Now he was watching a young man who sat in the straight chair facing him.

The young man stared unblinkingly. His trim crewcut was wet with perspiration and plastered by it to his scalp. His features were clean, clear-skinned and healthy, but his chin was wet. “An dark…” he said querulously, “an dark and nowhere starlights” His voice trailed away suddenly into a mumble, but he still complained.

Hawks looked to his right.

Weston, the recently hired psychologist, was sitting there in an armchair he’d had brought down to Hawks’ office. Weston, like Hawks, was in his early forties. But he was chunky where Hawks was gaunt; he was self-possessed, urbane behind his black-rimmed glasses and, now, a little impatient. He frowned slightly back toward Hawks and arched one eyebrow.

“He’s insane,” Hawks said to him like a wondering child.

Weston crossed his legs. “I told you that, Dr. Hawks; I told you the moment we pulled him out of that apparatus of yours. What had happened to him was too much for him to stand.”

“I know you told me,” Hawks said mildly. “But I’m responsible for him. I have to make sure.” He began to turn back to the young man, then looked again at Weston. “He was young. Healthy. Exceptionally stable and resilient, you told me. He looked it.” Hawks added slowly, “He was brilliant.”

“I said he was stable,” Weston explained earnestly. “I didn’t say he was inhumanly stable. I told you he was an exceptional specimen of a human being. You’re the one who sent him to a place no human being should go.”

Hawks nodded. “You’re right, of course. It’s my fault.”

“Well, now,” Weston said quickly, “he was a volunteer. He knew it was dangerous. He knew he could expect to die.”

But Hawks was ignoring Weston. He was looking straight out over his desk again.

“Rogan?” he said softly. “Rogan?”

He waited, watching Rogan’s lips move almost soundlessly. He sighed at last and asked Weston, “Can you do anything for him?”

“Cure him,” Weston said confidently. “Electroshock treatments. They’ll make him forget what happened to him in that place. He’ll be all right.”

“I didn’t know electroshock amnesia was permanent.”

Weston blinked at Hawks. “He may need repetitive treatment now and then, of course.”

“At intervals for the remainder of his life.”

“That’s not always true.”

“But often.”

“Well, yes…”

“Rogan,” Hawks was whispering. “Rogan, I’m sorry.”

“An dark… an dark It hurt me and it was so cold… so quiet I could hear myself.”

Edward Hawks, D.Sc., walked alone across the main laboratory’s concrete floor, his hands at his sides. He chose a path among the generators and consoles without looking up, and came to a halt at the foot of the matter transmitter’s receiving stage.

The main laboratory occupied tens of thousands of square feet in the basement of Continental Electronics’ Research Division building. A year ago, when Hawks had designed the transmitter, part of the first and second floors above it had been ripped out, and the transmitter now towered up nearly to the ceiling along the far wall. Catwalks interlaced the adjoining airspace, and galleries had been built for access to the instruments lining the walls. Dozens of men on Hawks’ staff were still moving about, taking final checks before closing them down for the day. Their shadows on the catwalks, now and then occluding some overhead light, mottled the floor in shifting patterns of darkness.

Hawks stood looking up at the transmitter, his eyes puzzled. Someone abruptly said, “Ed!” and he turned his head in response.

“Hello, Sam.” Sam Latourette, his chief assistant, had walked up quietly. He was a heavy-boned man with loose, papery flesh and dark-circled, sunken eyes. Hawks smiled at him wanly. “The transmitter crew just about finished with their post-mortem, are they?”

“You’ll find the reports on your desk in the morning. There was nothing wrong with the machinery. Nothing anywhere.” Latourette waited for Hawks to show interest. But Hawks only nodded his head. He was leaning one hand against a vertical brace and peering into the receiving stage. Latourette growled, “Ed!”

“Yes, Sam?”

“Stop it. You’re doing too much to yourself.” He again waited for some reaction, but Hawks only smiled into the machine, and Latourette burst out, “Who do you think you’re kidding? How long have I been working with you now? Ten years? Who gave me my first job? Who trained me? You can keep up a front with anybody else, but not with me!” Latourette clenched his fist and squeezed his fingers together emptily. “I know you! But — damn it, Ed, it’s not your fault that thing’s out there! What do you expect — that nobody’ll ever get hurt? What do you want — a perfect world?”

Hawks smiled again in the same way. “We tear a gateway where no gate has ever been,” he said, nodding at the mechanisms, “in a wall we didn’t build. That’s called scientific investigation. Then we send men through the gate. That’s the human adventure. And something on the other side — something that never bothered mankind; something that’s never done us any harm before or troubled us with the knowledge that it was there — kills them. In terrible ways we can’t understand, it kills them. So I keep sending in more men. What’s that called, Sam?”

“Ed, we are making progress. This new approach is going to be the answer.”

Hawks looked curiously at Latourette.

Latourette said uncomfortably, “Once we get the bugs out of it. That’s all it needs. It’s the thing that’ll do the trick, Ed — I know it.”

Hawks did not change his expression or turn his face away. He stood with his fingertips forced against the machine’s gray crackle finish. “You mean — we’re no longer killing them? We’re only driving them insane with it?”

“All we have to do, Ed,” Latourette pressed him, “all we have to do is find a better way of cushioning the shock when the man feels his death. More sedatives. Something like that.”

Hawks said, “They still have to go into that place. How they do it makes no difference; it won’t tolerate them. It was never made for human beings to have anything to do with. It was never made for the human mind to measure in human terms. We have to make a new language for describing it, and a new way of thinking in order to be able to understand it. Only when we’ve finally got it apart, whatever it is, and seen, and felt, and touched and tasted all its pieces, will we ever be able to say what it might be. And that will only be after we’ve been through it, so what good will our new knowledge do these men who have to die, now? Whatever put it there, no matter why, no human being will ever be able to live in it until after human beings have lived through it. How are you going to describe that in plain English so a sane man can understand it? It’s a monstrous thing we’re dealing with. In a sense, we have to think like monsters, or stop dealing with it, and let it just sit there on the Moon, no one knows why.”

Latourette reached out sharply and touched the sleeve of his smock. “Are you going to shut the program down?”

Hawks looked at him.

Latourette was clutching his arm. “Cobey. Isn’t he ordering you to cancel it?”

“Cobey can only make requests,” Hawks said gently. “He can’t order me.”

“He’s company president, Ed! He can make your life miserable. He’s dying to get Continental Electronics off this hook.”

Hawks took Latourette’s hand away from his arm and moved it to the transmitter’s casing. He put the flats of his own palms into his back pockets, nicking up his white laboratory smock. “The Navy originally financed the transmitter’s development only because it was my idea. They wouldn’t have vouchered that kind of money for anyone else in the world. Not for a crazy idea like this.” He stared into the machine. “Even now, even though that place we found is the way it is, they still won’t let Cobey back out on his own initiative. Not as long as they think I can keep going. I don’t have to worry about Cobey.” He smiled softly and a little incredulously. “Cobey has to worry about me.”

“Well, how about you? How much longer can you keep this up?”

Hawks stepped back. He looked at Latourette thoughtfully. “Are we worrying about the project now, or are we worrying about me?”

Latourette sighed. “All right, Ed, I’m sorry,” he said. “But what’re you going to do?”

Hawks looked up and down at the matter transmitter’s towering height. In the laboratory space behind them, the technicians were now shutting off the lights in the various subsections of the control array. Darkness fell in horizontal chunks along the galleries of instruments and formed black diagonals like jackstraws being laid upon the catwalks overhead. It advanced in a proliferating body toward the solitary green bulb shining over the “NOT Powered” half of the “Powered/NOT Powered” red-and-green legend painted on the transmitter’s lintel.

“We can’t do anything about the nature of the place to which they go,” Hawks said. “And we’ve reached the limit of what we can do to improve the way we send them there. It seems to me there’s only one thing left to do. We must find a different kind of man to send. A man who won’t go insane when he feels himself die.” He looked quizzically into the machine’s interior.

“There are all sorts of people in the world,” he said. “Perhaps we can find a man who doesn’t fear Death, but loves her.”

Latourette said bitterly, “Some kind of psycho.”

“Maybe that’s what he is. But I think we need him, nevertheless.” All the other laboratory lights were out, now. “What it comes down to is that we need a man who’s attracted by what drives other men to madness. And the more so, the better. A man who’s impassioned by Death.” His eyes lost focus, and his gaze extended itself to infinity. “So now we know what I am. I’m a pimp.”

2

Continental Electronics’ Director of Personnel was a broad-faced man named Vincent Connington. He came briskly into Hawks’ office and pumped his hand enthusiastically. He was wearing a light blue shantung suit and russet cowboy boots, and as he sat down in the visitors’ chair, puckering the corners of his eyes in the mid-afternoon sunshine streaming through the venetian blinds, he looked around and remarked, “Got the same office layout myself, upstairs. But it sure looks a lot different with some carpeting on the floor and some good paintin’s on the walls.” He turned back to Hawks, smiling. “I’m glad to get down here and talk to you, Doctor. I’ve always had a lot of admiration for you. Here you are, running a department and still getting in there and working right with your crew. All I do all day is sit behind a desk and make sure my clerks handle the routine without foulin’ up.”

“They seem to do rather well,” Hawks said in a neutral voice. He was beginning to draw himself up unconsciously in his chair and to slip a mask of expressionlessness over his face. His glance touched Connington’s boots once and then stayed away. “At least, your department’s been sending me some excellent technicians.”

Connington grinned. “Nobody’s got any better.” He leaned forward. “But that’s routine stuff.” He took Hawks’ interoffice memo out of his breast pocket. “This, now — This request, I’m going to fill personally.”

Hawks said carefully, “I certainly hope you can. I expect it may take some time to find a man fitting the outlined specifications. I hope you understand that, unfortunately, we don’t have much time. I—”

Connington waved a hand. “Oh, I’ve got him already. Had him in mind for a long time.”

Hawks’ eyebrows rose. “Really?”

Connington grinned shrewdly across the plain steel desk. “Hard to believe?” He lounged back in his chair. “Doctor, suppose somebody came to you and asked you to do a particular job for him — design a circuit to do a particular job. Now, suppose you reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a piece of paper and said, ‘Here it is.’ What about that? And then when he was all through shaking his head and saying how it was hard to believe you’d have it right there, you could explain to him about how electronics was what you did all the time. About how when you’re not thinking about some specific project, you’re still thinking about electronics in general. And how, being interested in electronics, you kept up on it, and you knew pretty much where the whole field was going. And how you thought about some of the problems they were likely to run into, and sometimes answers would just come into your head so easily it couldn’t even be called work. And how you filed these things away until it was time for them to be brought out. See? That way, there’s no magic. Just a man with a talent, doing his work.”

Connington grinned again. “Now I’ve got a man who was made to work on this machine project of yours. I know him inside out. And I know a little bit about you. I’ve got a lot to learn about you, yet, but I don’t think any of it’s goin’ to surprise me. And I’ve got your man. He’s healthy, he’s available, and I’ve had security clearances run on him every six months for the last two years. He’s all yours, Doctor. No foolin’.

“You see, Doctor—” Connington folded his hands in his lap and bent them backward, cracking his knuckles, “you’re not the only mover in the world.”

Hawks frowned slightly. “Mover?” Now his face betrayed nothing.

Connington chuckled softly to himself over some private joke that was burgeoning within him. “There’re all kinds of people in this world. But they break down into two main groups, one big and one smaller. There’s the people who get moved out of the way or into line, and then there’s the people who do the moving. It’s safer and a lot more comfortable to go where you’re pushed. You don’t take any of the responsibility, and if you do what you’re told, every once in a while you get thrown a fish.

“Being a mover isn’t safe, because you may be heading for a hole, and it isn’t comfortable because you do a lot of jostling back and forth, and what’s more, it’s up to you to get your own fish. But it’s a hell of a lot of fun.” He looked into Hawks’ eyes. “Isn’t it?”

Hawks said, “Mr. Connington—” He looked directly back at the man. “I’m not convinced. This individual I requested would have to be a very rare type. Are you sure you can instantly give him to me? Do you mean to say your having him ready, as you say, isn’t a piece of conspicuous forethought? I think perhaps you may have had some other motive, and that you’re seizing on a lucky coincidence.”

Connington lolled back, chuckled, and unwrapped a greenleaved cigar from the tooled leather case in his breast pocket. He snipped open the end with a pair of gold nippers attached to the case by a golden chain, and used a gold-cased lighter set with a ruby. He puffed, and let the smoke writhe out between his large, well-spaced teeth. His eyes glinted behind the drift of smoke that hung in the air in front of his face.

“Let’s keep polite, Dr. Hawks,” he said. “Let’s look at it in the light of reason. Continental Electronics pays you to head up Research, and you’re the best there is.” Connington leaned forward just a little, shifted the cigar just a little in his fingers, and changed the curve of his smile. “Continental Electronics pays me to run Personnel.”

Hawks thought for a minute and then said, “Very well. How soon can I see this man?”

Connington lolled back and took a satisfied puff on the cigar. “Right now. He lives right nearby, on the coast — up on the cliffs there?”

“I know the general location.”

“Good enough. If you’ve got an hour or so, what say we run on down there now?”

“I have nothing else to do if he turns out not to be the right man.”

Connington stretched and stood up. His belt slipped below the bulge of his stomach, and he stopped to hitch up his trousers. “Use your phone,” he muttered perfunctorily around the cigar, reaching across Hawks’ desk. He called an outside number and spoke to someone briefly — and, for a moment, sourly — saying they were coming out. Then he called the company garage and ordered his car brought around to the building’s main entrance. When he hung up the phone, he was chuckling again. “Well, time we get downstairs, the car’ll be there.”

Hawks nodded and stood up.

Connington grinned at him. “I like it when somebody gives me enough rope. I like people who stay suspicious when I’m offerin’ them what they want.” He was still laughing over the secret joke. “The more rope I get, the more operating room it gives me. You don’t figure that way. You see someone who may give you trouble, and you close up. You get into a shell, and you stay there, because you’re afraid it may be trouble you can’t handle. Most people do that. That’s why, one of these days, I’m goin’ to be president of this corporation, and you’ll still be head of the Research Division.”

Hawks smiled. “How will you like it, then, going to the Board of Directors, telling them my salary has to be higher than yours?”

“Yeah,” Connington said reflectively. “Yeah, there’d be that.” He cocked an eye at Hawks. “You mean it, too.”

He tapped his cigar ash off into the middle of Hawks’ desk blotter. “Get hot, sometimes, inside your insulated suit, does it?”

Hawks looked expressionlessly down at the ash and up at Connington’s face. He reached into a desk drawer, took out a small manila envelope, and put it in his jacket. He dosed the drawer. “I think your car is waiting for us,” he said quietly.

They drove along the coastal highway in Connlngton’s new Cadillac, until the highway veered inland away from the cliffs facing onto the ocean. Then, at a spot where a small general store with two gasoline pumps stood alone, Connington turned the car into a narrow sand road that ran along between palmetto scrub and pine stands toward the water. From there the car swayed down to a narrow gravel strip of road that ran along the foot of the rock cliffs only a few feet above the high-water mark.

The cliffs were sheer and composed of some rough, crumbling stone that had fissured vertically, leaving narrow guts whose bottoms were filled with the same detritus that had been used to form the road. The car murmured forward with one fender overhanging the water side and the other perhaps a foot from the cliffs. They moved along in this manner for a few minutes, Connington humming to himself in a tenor drone and Hawks sitting erect with his hands on his knees.

The road changed into an incline blasted out of the cliff face, with the insecure rock overhanging it in most places, and crossed a narrow, weatherworn timber bridge three car-lengths long across the face of a wider gut than most. The wedge-shaped split in the cliff was about a hundred feet deep. The ocean reached directly into it with no intervening beach, and even now at low tide solid water came pouring into the base of the cleft and broke up into fountaining spray. It wet the car’s windshield. The timber bridge angled up from fifty feet above water level, about a third of the way up the face of the cliffs, and its bottom dripped.

The road went on past the bridge, but Connington stopped the car with the wheels turned toward a galvanized iron mailbox set on a post. It stood beside an even narrower driveway that climbed steeply up into the side of the cleft and went out of sight around a sharp break in its wall.

“That’s him,” Connington grunted, pointing toward the mailbox with his cigars “Barker. Al Barker.” He peered slyly sideward. “Ever hear the name?”

Hawks frowned and then said, “No.”

“Don’t read the sports pages? No — I guess not.” Connington backed the car a few inches until he could aim the wheels up the driveway, put the transmission selector in Low, and hunched forward over the wheel, cautiously depressing the accelerator. The car began forging slowly up the sharp slope, its inside fender barely clearing the dynamited rock, its left side flecked with fresh spray from the upsurge in the cleft.

“Barker’s quite a fellow,” Connington muttered with the soggy butt of his cigar clenched between his teeth. “Parachutist in World War Two. Transferred to the OSS in 1944. Specialized in assassination. Used to be an Olympic skijumper. Bobsled crewman. National Small Arms Champion, 1950. Holds a skin-diving depth record. Used to mountain climb. Cracked an outboard hydroplane into the shore at Lake Mead, couple of years ago. ’S where I met him, thne I was out there on vacation. Right now, he’s built a car and entered it in Grand Prix competition. Plans to do his own drivin’.”

Hawks’ eyebrows drew together and then relaxed.

Connington grinned crookedly without taking his eyes completely off the road. “Begin to sound like I knew what I was doin’?”

Before Hawks could answer, Connington stopped the car. They were at the break in the cleft wall. A second, shallower notch turned into the cliff here, forming a dogleg that was invisible from the road over the bridge below. The driveway angled around it so acutely that Connington’s car could not make the turn. The point of the angle had been blasted out to make the driveway perhaps eighty inches wide at the bend of the dogleg, but there were no guard rails; the road dropped off directly into the cleft, and either leg was a chute pointing to the water a hundred feet below.

“You’re gonna have to help me here,” Connington said. “Get out and tell me when my wheels look like they’re gonna go over.”

Hawks looked at him, pursed his lips, and got out of the car. He squeezed out between it and the cliff, and walked to the point of the dogleg. Standing with the tips of his black oxfords projecting a little way over the edge, he looked down. The spray veiled the bottom of the gut. Hanging from two of the projections in the rough walls were a small automobile fender and a ragged strip of fabric from a convertible top. The fabric was bleached and raveled. The paint on the aluminum fender was rotten with corrosion. Hawks looked at them with intent curiosity.

Connington let down his window with a quick whirr. “Barker’s,” he said loudly over the sound of the surf in the cleft. “He put it in there last month. Almost went with it.”

Hawks ran the tip of his tongue over his front teeth, under his lip. He turned back to the road.

“O.K., now,” Connington said, “I’m gonna have to saw around this turn. You tell me how much room I’ve got.”

Hawks nodded. Connington swung the car as far around the dogleg as he could, backed, stopped at Hawks’ signal and moved forward again. He continued to repeat the maneuver, grinding his front tires from side to side over the road, until the car was pointed up the other leg of the driveway. Then he waited while Hawks got back in.

“We should have parked at the bottom and walked up,” Hawks said.

Connington started up the remaining incline and pointed to his feet. “Not in these boots,” he grunted. He paused, then said, “Barker takes that turn at fifty miles an hour.” He looked sidelong at Hawks.

Hawks looked back at him. “Sometimes.”

“Every time but one. He hasn’t slowed down since then.” Connington chuckled. “You see, Doc? I rub you the wrong way. I know I do. But, even so, you’ve got to learn to trust me, even if you don’t like or understand me. I do my job. I’ve got your man for you. That’s what counts.” And his eyes sparkled with the hidden joke, the secret knowledge that he still kept to himself.

3

At the top of the incline, the driveway curved over the face of the cliff and became an asphalt strip running beside a thick, clipped, dark green lawn. Automatic sprinklers kept the grass sparkling with moisture. Cactus and palmetto grew in immaculate beds, shaded by towering cypress. A low, cedar-planked house faced the wide lawn, its nearer wall of glass looking out over the cliff at the long blue ocean. A breeze stirred the cypress.

There was a swimming pool in the middle of the lawn. A thin blonde woman with extremely long legs, who was deeply suntanned and wearing a yellow two-piece suit, was lying face-down on a beach towel, listening to music from a portable radio. An empty glass with an ice cube melting in its bottom sat on the grass beside a thermos jug. The woman raised her head, looked at the car, and drooped forward again.

Connington lowered a hand half raised in greeting. “Claire Pack,” he said to Hawks, guiding the car around to the side of the house and stopping on a concrete apron in front of the double doors of a sunken garage.

“She lives here?” Hawks asked.

Connington’s face had lost all trace of pleasure. “Yeah… Come on.”

They walked up a flight of flagstone steps to the lawn, and across the lawn toward the swimming pool. There was a man swimming under the blue-green water, raising his head to take an occasional quick breath and immediately pushing it under again. Beneath the rippling, sun-dappled surface, he was a vaguely man-shaped, flesh-colored creature thrashing from one end of the pool to the other. An artificial leg, wrapped in transparent plastic sheeting, lay between Claire Pack and the pool, near a chrome-plated ladder going down into the water. The radio played Glenn Miller.

“Claire?” Connington asked tentatively.

She hadn’t moved in response to the approaching footsteps. She had been humming to the music, and tapping softly on the towel with the red-lacquered tips of two long fingers. She turned over slowly and looked at Connington upside down.

“Oh,” she said flatly. Her eyes shifted to Hawks’ face. They were clear green, flecked with yellow-brown, and the pupils were contracted in the sunlight.

“This is Dr. Hawks, Claire,” Connington told her patiently. “He’s vice president in charge of the Research Division, out at the main plant. I called and told you. What’s the good of the act? We’d like to talk to Al.”

She waved a hand,. “Sit down. He’ll be out of the pool in a little while.”

Connington lowered himself awkwardly down onto the grass. Hawks, after a moment, dropped precisely into a tailor-fashion seat on the edge of the towel. Claire Pack sat up, drew her knees under her chin, and looked at Hawks. “What kind of a job have you got for Al?”

Connington said shortly, “The kind he likes.” As Claire smiled, he looked at Hawks and said, “You know, I forget. Every time. I look forward to coming here, and then when I see her I remember how she is.”

Claire Pack paid him no attention. She was looking at Hawks, her mouth quirked up in an expression of intrigued curiosity. “The kind of work Al likes? You don’t look like a man involved with violence, Doctor. What’s your first name?” She threw a glance over her shoulder at Connington. “Give me a cigarette.”

“Edward,” Hawks said softly. He was watching Connington fumble in an inside breast pocket, take out a new package of cigarettes, open it, tap one loose, and extend it to her. Without looking at Connington, she said softly, “Light it.” A dark, arched eyebrow went up at Hawks. Her wide mouth smiled. “I’ll call you Ed.” Her eyes remained flat, calm.

Connington, behind her, wiped his lips with the back of his hand, closed them tightly on the filtered tip, and lit the cigarette with his ruby-studded lighter. The tip of the cigarette was bound in red-glazed paper, to conceal lipstick marks. He puffed on it, put it between her two upraised fingers, and returned the remainder of the pack to his inside breast pocket.

“You may,” Hawks said to Claire Pack wtih a faint upward lift of his lips. “I’ll call you Claire.”

She raised one eyebrow again, puffing on the cigarette. “All right.”

Connington looked over Claire’s shoulder. His eyes were almost tearfully bitter. But there was something else in them as well. There was something almost like amusement in the way he said, “Nothing but movers today, Doctor. And all going in different directions. Fast company. Keep your dukes up.”

Hawks said, “I’ll do my best.”

“I don’t think Ed looks like a very soft touch, Connie,” Claire said, watching Hawks.

Hawks said nothing. The man in the pool bad stopped swimming and was treading water with his hands. Only his head was above the surface, with short sandy hair streaming down from the top of his small, round skull. His cheekbones were prominent. His nose was thin-bladed and he had a clipped mustache. His eyes were unreadable at the distance, with the reflected sunlight rippling over his face.

“That’s the way his life’s arranged,” Connington was now mumbling to Claire Pack spitefully, not seeing Barker watching them. “Nice and scientific. Everything balances. Nothing gets wasted. Nobody steals a march on Dr. Hawks.”

Hawks said, “Mr. Connington met me personally for the first time this afternoon.”

Claire Pack laughed with a bright metallic ripple. “Do people offer you drinks, Ed?”

“I don’t think that’ll work either, Claire,” Connington growled.

“Shut up,” she said. “Well, Ed?” She lightly held up the thermos jug, which seemed to be nearly empty. “Scotch and water?”

“Thank you, yes. Would Mr. Barker feel more comfortable about getting out of the pool, if I were to turn my back while he was fastening his leg?”

Connington said, “She’s never this blatant after she’s made her first impression. Watch out for her.”

She laughed again, throwing her head back. “He’ll come out when he’s good and ready. He might even like it if I sold tickets to the performance. Don’t you worry about Al, Ed.” She unscrewed the top of the jug, pulled the cork, and poured a drink into the plastic top. “No spare glasses or ice out here, Ed. It’s pretty cold, anyhow. All right?”

“Perfectly, Claire,” Hawks said. He took the cup and sipped at it. “Very good.” He held the cup in his hands and waited for her to fill her glass.

“How about me?” Connington said. He was watching the hair stir at the nape of Claire Pack’s neck, and his eyes were shadowed.

“Go get a glass from the house,” she said. Leaning forward, she touched the side of her glass to Hawks’ cup. “Here’s to a well-balanced life.”

Hawks smiled fleetingly and drank. She reached out and put her hand on his ankle. “Do you live near here, Ed?”

Connington said, “She’ll tease you and dig at you, and then she’ll chew you up and spit you out, Hawks. Give her half a chance, and she will. She’s the biggest bitch on two continents. But you’ve got to figure Barker would have somebody like her around.”

Claire turned her head and shoulders and looked squarely at Connington for the first time. “Are you trying to egg me on to something, Connie?” she asked in a mild voice.

Something flickered in Connington’s face. But then he said, “Dr. Hawks is here on business, Claire.”

Hawks looked up at Connington curiously over the rim of his cup. His black eyes were intent for a moment, then shifted to Claire Pack, brooding.

Claire said to Connington, “Everybody’s everywhere on some kind of business. Everybody who’s worth a damn. Everybody has something he wants. Something more important than anything else. Isn’t that right, Connie? Now, tend to your business, and I’ll manage mine.” Her look came back to Hawks, catching him off guard. Her eyes held his momentarily. “I’m sure Ed can take care of his own,” she said.

Connington flushed, twisted his mouth to say something, turned sharply, and marched away across the grass. In a flash of brief expression, Claire Pack smiled enigmatically to herself.

Hawks sipped his drink. “He’s not watching any longer. You can take your hand away from my ankle.”

She smiled sleepily. “Connie? I torment him to oblige him. He’s forever coming up here, since he met Al and myself. The thing is — he can’t come up alone, you understand? Because of the bend in the driveway. He could do it if he gave up driving those big cars, or he could bring a woman along to help him make it. But he never brings a woman, and he won’t give up either that car or those boots. He brings a new man almost every time.” She smiled. “He asks for it, don’t you see? He wants it.”

“These men he brings up,” Hawks asked. “Do you chew them up and spit them out?”

Claire threw her head back and laughed. “There are all kinds of men. The only kind that’re worth anyone’s time are the ones I can’t mangle the first time out.”

“But there are other times after the first time? It never stops? And I didn’t mean Connington was watching us. I meant Barker. He’s pulling himself out of the pool. Did you deliberately place his artificial leg so he’d have to strain to reach it? Simply because you knew another new man was coming and would need to be shown how fierce you were? Or is it to provoke Barker?”

For moment, the skin around her lips seemed crumpled and spongy. Then she said, “Are you curious to find out how much of it is bluff?” She was in complete control of herself again.

“I don’t think any of it is bluff. But I don’t know you well enough to be sure,” Hawks answered mildly.

“And I don’t know you well enough yet, either, Ed.”

Hawks said nothing to this for a moment. “Are you a long-time friend of Mr. Barker’s?” he asked at last.

Claire Pack nodded. She smiled challengingly.

Hawks nodded, checking off the point. “Connington was right.”

Barker had long arms and a flat, hairy stomach, and was wearing knitted navy-blue, European-style swimming trunks without an athletic supporter. He was a spare, wiry man with a tight, clipped voice, saying “How d’you do?” as he strode briskly across the grass. He snatched up the thermos and drank from it, throwing his head back and holding the jug upraised. He gasped with great pleasure, thumped the jug down beside Claire, wiped his mouth, and sat down. “Now, then!” he exclaimed “What’s all this?”

“Al, this is Dr. Hawks,” Claire said evenly. “Not an M.D. He’s from Continental Electronics. He wants to talk to you. Connie brought him.”

“Delighted to meet you,” Barker said, heartily extending a hand. There were burn scars on the mottled flesh. One side of his face had the subtle evenness of plastic surgery. “I’ve heard of your reputation. I’m impressed.”

Hawks took the hand and shook it. “I’ve never met an Englishman who’d call himself Al.”

Barker laughed in a brittle voice. His face changed subtly. “Matter of fact, I’m nearly as English as Paddy’s pig. Amerind’s the nationality.”

“Al’s grandparents were Mimbreno Apaches,” Claire said, with some sort of special intonation. “His grandfather was the most dangerous man alive on the North American continent. His father found a silver lode that assayed as high as any deposit ever known. Does it still hold that record, darling?” She drawled the question. Without waiting for an answer, she said, “And Al has an Ivy League education.”

Barker’s face was tightening, the small, prominent cheekbones turning pale. He reached abruptly for the thermos. Claire smiled at Hawks. “Al’s fortunate he isn’t on the reservation. It’s against federal law to sell an Indian liquor.”

Hawks waited for a moment. He watched Barker finish the jug. “I’m curious, Mr. Barker,” he said then. “Is that your only reason for exploiting a resemblance to something you’re not?”

Barker stopped with the jug half lowered. “How would you like shaving your head to a Lenape scalp lock, painting your face and body with aniline dyes, and performing a naked war dance on the main street of a New England town?”

“I wouldn’t join the fraternity.”

“That would never occur to Al,” Claire said, leaning back on her elbows. “Because, you see, at the end of the initiation he was a full-fledged fraternity brother. At the price of a lifelong remembrance, he gained a certain status during his last three undergraduate years. And a perpetual flood of begging letters from the fund committee.” She ran one palm up the glossy side of Barker’s jaw and let the fingers trail down his shoulder and arm. “But where is Delta Omicron today? Where are the snows of yesteryear? Where is the Mimbreño boy?” She laughed and hilled back against Barker’s good thigh.

Barker looked down at her in twisted amusement. He ran the fingers of one hand into her hair. “You mustn’t let Claire put you off, Doctor,” he said. “It’s only her little way.” He seemed unaware that his fingers were clenched around the sun-bleached strands of hair, and that they were twisting slightly and remorselessly. “Claire likes to test people. Sometimes she does it by throwing herself at them. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Yes,” Hawks said. “But I came here to see you.”

Barker seemed not to have heard. He looked at Hawks with a level deadliness. “It’s interesting how Claire and I met. Seven years ago, I was on a mountain in the Alps. I rounded a sheer face — it had taken a courte échelle from another man’s shoulders, and a piton traverse, to negotiate it — and she was there.” Now his hand was toying tenderly. “She was sitting with one leg over a spur, staring down into the valley and dreaming to herself. Like that. I had no warning. It was as if she’d been there since the mountain was made.”

Claire laughed softly, lying back against Barker and looking up at Hawks. “Actually,” she said, “I’d come ’round by an easier route with a couple of French officers. I’d wanted to go down the way Al had come up, but they’d said it was too dangerous, and refused.” She shrugged. “So I went back down the mountain with Al. I’m really not very complicated, Ed.”

“Before she went, I had to knock the Frenchmen about a little bit,” Barker said, and now his meaning was clear. “I believe one of them had to be taken off by helicopter. And I’ve never forgotten how one goes about keeping one’s hold on her.”

Claire smiled. “I’m a warrior’s woman, Ed.” Suddenly she moved her body, and Barker let his hand fall. “Or at least we like to think so.” Her nails ran down Barker’s torso. “It’s been seven years, and nobody’s taken me away yet.” She smiled fondly up at Barker for an instant, and then her expression became challenging again. “Why don’t you tell Al about this new job, Ed?”

“New job?” Barker smiled in a practiced way. “You mean Connie actually came up here on business?”

Hawks studied Claire and Barker for a moment. Then he made up his mind. “All right. I understand you have clearance, Mr. Barker?”

Barker nodded. “I do.” He smiled reminiscently. “I’ve worked for the government off and on before this.”

“I’d like to speak to you privately, in that case.”

Claire stood up lazily, smoothing her swim suit over her hips. “I’ll go stretch out on the diving board for a while. Of course, if I were an efficient Soviet spy, I’d have microphones buried all over the lawn.”

Hawks shook his head. “No. If you were a really efficient spy, you’d have one directional microphone-perhaps on the diving board. You wouldn’t need anything better. I’d be glad to show you how to set one up, sometime, if you’re interested.”

Claire laughed. “Nobody ever steals a march on Dr. Hawks. I’ll have to remember that.” She walked slowly away, her hips swaying.

Barker turned to follow her with his eyes until she had reached the far end of the pool and arranged herself on the board. Then he turned back to Hawks. “’She walks in beauty, like the night’ — even in blaze of day, Doctor.”

“I assume that’s to your taste,” Hawks said.

Barker nodded. “Oh, yes, Doctor — I meant what I said earlier. Don’t let anything she does or says let you forget. She’s mine. And not because I have money, or good manners, or charm. I do have money, but she’s mine by right of conquest.”

Hawks sighed. “Mr. Barker, I need you to do something very few men in the world seem to be qualified to do. That is, if there are any at all besides yourself. I have very little time in which to look for others. So would you mind just looking at these photographs?”

Hawks reached into his inside breast pocket and brought out the small manila envelope. He undid the clasp, turned back the flap, and pulled out a thin sheaf of photographs. He looked at them carefully, on edge so that only he could see what they showed, selected one, and passed it to Barker.

Barker looked at it curiously, frowned, and, after a moment, handed it back to Hawks. Hawks put it behind the other pictures. It showed a landscape that at first seemed to be heaped up of black obsidian blocks and clouds of silver. In the background there were other clouds of dust, and looming asymmetric shadows. New complexities continued to catch the eye, until the eye could not follow them all and had to begin again.

“What is it?” Barker asked. “It’s beautiful.”

“It’s a place,” Hawks answered. “Or perhaps not. Perhaps it’s an artifact — or else a living thing. But it’s in a definite location, readily accessible. As for beauty, please bear in mind that this is a still photograph, taken at one five-hundredth of a second, and, furthermore, eight days ago.” He began handing more photographs to Barker. “I’d like you to look at these others. These are of men who have been there.”

Barker was looking oddly at his face. Hawks went on. “That first one is the first man who went in. At the time, we were taking no more precautions than any hazardous expedition would require. That is, he had the best special equipment we could provide.”

Barker looked in fascination at the photograph, now. His fingers jerked, and he almost dropped it. He tightened his grip until the edge of the paper was bent, and when he handed it back the damp imprint of his fingers was on it.

Hawks handed Barker the next. “Those are two men,” he said remorselessly. “We thought that perhaps a team might survive.” He took the picture back and handed over another. “Those are four.” He took it back and paused. “We changed our methods thereafter. We devised a piece of special equipment, and after that we didn’t lose a man. Here’s the most recent one.” He passed Barker the remaining photograph. “That’s a man named Rogan.” He waited.

Barker looked up from the photograph. His eyes were intent. “Have you a suicide guard over this man?”

Hawks shook his head. He watched Barker. “He’d rather do anything than die again.” He gathered up the photographs and put them back into his pocket. “I’m here to offer you the job he had.”

Barker nodded. “Of course.” He frowned. “I don’t know. Or, rather, I don’t know enough. Where is this place?”

Hawks stopped to think. “I can tell you that much, before you agree to take the assignment. But nothing further. It’s on the Moon.”

“Moon? So we do have man-carrying rockets, and all this Sputnik panic is a blind?”

Hawks said nothing, and after a moment Barker shrugged and said, “How long do I have to reach a decision?”

“As long as you like. But I’ll be asking Connington to put me in touch with any other prospects tomorrow.”

“So I have until tomorrow.”

Hawks shook his head. “I dn’t think he’ll be able to deliver. He wants it to be you. I don’t know why.”

Barker smiled. “Connie’s always making plans for people.”

“You don’t take him very seriously.”

“Do you? There are the people in this world who act, and the people who scheme. The ones who act get things done, and the ones who scheme try to take credit for it. You must know that as well as I do. A man doesn’t arrive at your position without delivering results.” He looked knowingly and, for a moment, warmly, at Hawks. “Does he?”

“Connington is also a vice president of Continental Electronics.”

Barker spat on the grass. “Personnel recruiting. An expert at bribing engineers away from your competitors. Something any other skulker could do.”

Hawks shrugged.

“What is he?” Barker demanded. “A sort of legitimate confidence man? A mumbo-jumbo spouter with a wad of psychological tests in his back pocket? I’ve been mumbled at by experts, Doctor, and they’re all the same. What they can’t do themselves, they label abnormal. What they’re ashamed of wanting to do, they condemn others for. They cover themselves with one of those fancy social science diplomas, and talk in educated phrases, and pretend they’re actually doing something of value. Well, I’ve got an education too, and I know what the world is like, and I can give Connington cards and spades, Doctor — cards and spades — and still beat him out. Where has he been? What has he seen? What has he done? He’s nothing, Hawks — nothing, compared to a real man.”

Barker’s lips were pulled back from his glistening teeth. The skin of his face was stretched by the taut muscles at the hinges of his jaws. “He thinks he’s entitled to make plans for me. He thinks to himself: ‘There’s another clod I can use wherever I need him, and get rid of when I’m done with him.’ But that’s not the way it is. Would you care to discuss art with me, Doctor? Western or Oriental. Or music? Pick your slice of civilized culture. I know ’em all. I’m a whole man, Hawks—” Barker got clumsily up to his feet. “A better man than anybody else I know. Now let’s go join the lady.”

He began walking away across the lawn, and Hawks slowly got to his feet and followed him.

Claire looked up from where she lay flat on the diving board, and leisurely turned her body until she was sitting upright. She extended her anns behind her, bracing her back, and said, “How did it work out?”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Barker answered her. “You’ll be the first to know.”

Claire smiled. “Then you haven’t made up your mind yet? Isn’t the job attractive enough?”

Hawks watched Barker frown in annoyance.

The kitchen door of the house sighed shut on its air spring, and Connington broke into a chuckle behind them. None of them had heard him come across the strip of grass between the house and this end of the pool.

He dangled a used glass from one hand, and held a partially emptied bottle in the other. His face was flushed, and his eyes were wide with the impact of a great deal of liquor consumed over a short period of time. “Gonna do it, Al?”

Instantly, Barker’s mouth flashed into a bare-toothed, fighting grimace. “Of course!” he exclaimed in a startlingly desperate voice. “I couldn’t let it pass — not for the world!”

Claire smiled faintly to herself.

Hawks watched all three of them.

Connington chuckled again. “What else could you’ve said?” he laughed at Barker. His arm swept out in irony. “Here’s a man famous for split-second decisions. Always the same ones.” The secret was out. The joke was being delivered. “You don’t understand, do you?” he said to the three at the edge of the pool. “Don’t see things the way I do. Let me explain.

“A technician — like you, Hawks — sees the whole world as cause an’ effect. And the world’s consistent, explained that way, so why look for any further? Man like you, Barker, sees the world moved by deeds of strong men. And your way of lookin’ at it works out, too.

“But the world’s big. Complicated. Part-answer can look like the whole answer and act like the whole answer for a long time. For instance, Hawks can think of himself as manipulating causes an’ producing effects he wants. ’N you, Barker, you can think of Hawks and you as s’perior, Overman types. Hawks can think of you as specified factor t’ be inserted in new environment, so Hawks can solve new ’vironment. You can think of yourself as indomitable figure slugging it out with th’ unknown. And so it goes, roun’ and roun’, an’ who’s right? Both of you? Maybe. Maybe. But can you stan’ to be on the same job together?”

Connington laughed again, his high heels planted in the lawn. “Me, I’m personnel man. I don’t look cause and effect. I don’t look heroes. Explain the world in a different way. People — that’s all I know. ’S enough. I feel ’em. I know ’em. Like a chemist knows valences. Like a physicist knows particle charges. Positive, negative. Atomic weight, ’tomic number. Attract, repel. I mix ’em. I compound ’em. I take people, an’ I find a job for them, the co-workers for ’em. I take a raw handful of people, and I mutate it, and make isotopes out of it — I make solvents, reagents — an’ I can make ’splosives, too, when I want. That’s my world!

“Sometimes I save people up — save ’em for the right job to make ’em react the right way. Save ’em up for the right people.

“Barker, Hawks — you’re gonna be my masterpiece. ’Cause sure as God made little green apples, he made you two to meet An’ me, me, I found you, an’ I’ve done it, I’ve rammed you two together an’ now it’s done, an’ nothing’ll ever take the critical mass apart, and sooner, later, it’s got to ’splode, and who’re you gonna run to then, Claire?”

4

Hawks broke the silence. He reached out, pulled the bottle out of Connington’s hand, and swung toward the cliff. The bottle flailed away and disappeared over the edge. Then Hawks turned to Barker and said quietly, “There are a few more things I ought to tell you before you definitely accept the job.”

Barker’s face was strained. He was looking at Connington. His head snapped around in Hawks’ direction and he growled, “I said I’d do the damned job!”

Claire reached out and took hold of his hand, pulling him down beside her. She thrust herself forward to kiss the underside of Barker’s jaw. “That’s the ol’ fight, Hardrock.” She began nibbling the skin with its faint stubble of beard, gradually inching her mouth down his throat, leaving a row of regularly spaced marks: wet, round, red parentheses of her lipstick, enclosing the sharper, pinker blotches where her incisors had worried his flesh. “He’ll do it, Ed,” she murmured sidelong. “Or at least he’ll give it as much of a try as any man could.”

“Don’t the three of you care?” Connington blurted, his head jerking back and forth. “Didn’t you hear?”

“We heard you,” Hawks said.

“Well, what about it?” Connington challenged them incredulously.

“Tell me something, Connington,” Hawks said. “Did you make your little speech so we’d stop now? Or could anything make us stop, now things are in motion the way you hoped?”

“Not hoped,” Connington said. “Planned.”

Hawks nodded. “All right, then,” he said in a tired voice. “I thought so. All you wanted to do was make a speech. I wish you’d chosen another time.”

Claire chuckled, a silvery ladder of sound. “Isn’t it too bad, Connie? You were so sure we’d all fall down. But it’s just like it always was. You still don’t know where to push.”

Connington backed away incredulously, his arms spread as if to knock their heads together. “Are you three crazy? Do you think I made this stuff up out of my head? Listen to yourselves — even when you tell me it’s all malarkey, you have to say it each a certain way. You can’t shake loose from yourselves even for a second; you’ll go where your feet take you, no matter what — and you’re laughing at me? You’re laughin’ at me?”

He lurched around suddenly. “Go to hell, all of you!” he cried. ’G’wan!” He began to run clumsily across the grass to his car.

Hawks looked after him. “He’s not fit to drive back.”

Barker grimaced. “He won’t. He’ll cry himself to sleep in the car for a few hours. Then he’ll come in the house, looking for Claire’s comfort.” He looked down at Claire with a jerk of his head that broke the chain of nibbles. “Isn’t that right? Doesn’t he always do that?”

Claire’s lips pinched together. “I can’t help what he does.”

“No?” Barker said. “It’s me he’s after?”

In a vicious, throaty snarl, Claire said, “Maybe he’s had you. He’s never had me.”

Barker’s hand cracked over, and Claire fell back, holding her cheek. Then she grinned. “You’ve done better than that. You used to do a lot better. But that wasn’t bad,” she admitted.

“Barker,” Hawks said, “I want to tell you what you’re going to have to face.”

“Tell me when I get there!” Barker snapped. “I’m not going to back out now.”

Claire said, “Maybe that’s what he wants you to say, Al. Putting it that way.” She smiled up toward Hawks. “Who says Connington’s the only schemer?”

“What’s the simplest way for me to get back to town?” Hawks said.

“I’ll drive you,” Barker said coldly. His eyes locked on Hawks. “If you want to try it.”

Claire murmured a chuckle and suddenly rubbed her cheek down the length of Barker’s thigh. She did this with a spasm of her entire body; an undulant motion that was completely serpentine. She stared up at Hawks through wide, pleasurably moist eyes, her upstretched arms curled around Barker’s waist. “Isn’t he grand?” she said huskily to Hawks. “Isn’t he a man?”

5

Barker trotted stiffly down to the garage apron and flung up the overhead doors with a crash, as Hawks waited at the head of the flagstone steps. Claire said murmurously behind him, “Look at him move — look at him do things. He’s like a wonderful machine made out of gut and hickory wood. There aren’t any other men like him, Ed — nobody’s as much of a man as he is!” Hawks’ nostrils widened.

An engine came to waspish life in the garage, and then a short, broad, almost square-framed sports car came out in a glower of sound. “This is my new roadster,” Barker shouted up from behind the wheel.

Hawks came around, stepped over the doorless flank of the car, and cramped himself into the passenger side. He settled his lower back into the unpadded metal seat, which was slewed around to leave more room for the driver. The entire machine stood perhaps thirty inches high at the peak of its sharply curved dash.

“Hasn’t been really wrung out, yet!” Barker shouted into Hawks’ ear. Claire stood watching, her eyes ashine. Connington, slumped over the wheel of his Cadillac, facing them at an angle, lifted his swollen face and contorted his lips in a sad grimace.

“Ready?” Barker shouted, running up the engine and edging his right foot away from the center of the brake pedal until only the edge of his cheap shower slipper’s cardboard sole was holding it down. “Not frightened, are you?” He stared piercingly into Hawks’ face. “Are you?”

Hawks reached over and pulled out the ignition key. “I see,” he said quietly.

Barker’s hand flashed out and crushed his wrist. “I’m not Connington and that’s no bottle — hand over those keys.”

Hawks relaxed his fingers until the keys barely kept from falling. He put out his other arm and blocked Barker’s awkward, left-handed reach for them. “Use the hand that’s holding my wrist,” he said.

Barker slowly took the keys. Hawks climbed out of the car.

“How are you going to get to the city?” Claire asked as he walked past the steps.

Hawks said, “I walked long distances when I was a boy. But not to prove my physical endurance.”

Claire licked her lips. “No one manages you worth a damn, do they?” she said.

Hawks turned and paced steadily toward the sloped driveway.

He had barely set foot on the downslope when Barker shouted something strained and unintelligible behind him, and the car sprang into life again and hurtled by him. Barker stared intently out over the short hood, and threw the car into a broadside. Spuming up dust and gravel, engine roaring, clutch in, rear wheels slack, it skidded down sideward, its nose toward the cliff wall. The instant its left front fender had cleared the angle of the cliff, Barker banged the clutch up. The right side hovered over the edge of the gut for an instant. Then the rear wheels bit and the car shot down the first angle of the drive, out of sight. There was an instant scream of brakes and a great, coughing scuff of tires.

Hawks walked steadily down, through the turbulent, knee-high swale of dust that gradually settled into two smoking furrows leading from the broad swathes that scarred the bend of the dogleg. Barker was staring out to sea, sitting with his hands clenched over the top of the steering wheel, his sweated face plastered with yellow dust. The car was begrimed, still shivering a little from spring tension as it stood beside the mailbox, separated from the ocean by only the width of the access road. As Hawks came up parallel to him, Barker, without moving his head, said distinctly, “That’s the fastest I’ve ever done it.”

Hawks turned into the access road and began walking down over the wooden bridge.

“Are you going to walk all the way back into town?” Barker bawled out hoarsely. “You chicken-hearted son of a bitch!”

Hawks turned around. He came back and stood with his hands on the edge of the passenger side, looking down at Barker. “I’ll expect you at the main gate tomorrow at nine in the morning, sharp.”

“What makes you think I’ll be there? What makes you think I’ll take orders from a man who won’t do what I would?” Barker’s eyes were sparkling with frustration. “What’s the matter with you?”

“I’m one kind of man. You’re another.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Barker began beating one palm against the steering wheel. What began as a gentle insistent nudge became a mechanical hammering. “I can’t understand you!”

“You’re a suicide,” Hawks said. “I’m a murderer.” Hawks turned to go. “I’m going to have to kill you over and over again, in various unbelievable ways. I can only hope that you will, indeed, bring as much love to it as you think. Nine sharp in the morning, Barker. Give my name at the gate. I’ll have your pass.”

He walked away.

Barker muttered, “Yeah.” He rose up in his seat and shouted down the road, “He was right, you know it? He was right! We’re a great pair!”

Sunlight danced into his face from the shattered reflections of the whisky bottle on the edge of the road. His expression changed abruptly and he threw the car into reverse, whining up the driveway as quickly as a chameleon drawing its tongue around and in out of sight beyond the dogleg.