Rogue Moon

1

Barker was leaning against a cabinet when Hawks came into the laboratory in the morning and walked up to him.

“How do you feel?” Hawks asked, looking sharply at him. “All right?”

Barker smiled faintly. “What do you want to do? Touch gloves before we start the last round?”

“I asked you a question.”

“I’m fine. Full of piss and vinegar. O.K., Hawks? What do you want me to tell you? That I’m all choked up with pride? That I know this is an enormous step forward in science, in which I am honored to find myself participating on this auspicious day? I already got the Purple Heart, Doc — just gimme a coupla aspirin.”

Hawks said earnestly, “Barker, are you quite sure you’ll be able to come out through the other side of the formation?”

“How can I be sure? Maybe part of its logic is that you can’t win. Maybe it’ll kill me out of simple spite. I can’t tell about that. All I can promise you is that I’m a move away from the end of the only safe pathway. If my next move doesn’t get me outside, then there isn’t any way out. It is a tomato can, and I’ve hit bottom. But if it’s something else, then, yes, today is the day; the time is now.”

Hawks nodded. “That’s all I can ask of you. Thank you.” He looked around. “Is Gersten at the transmitter?”

Barker nodded. “He told me we’d be ready to shoot in about half an hour.”

Hawks nodded. “All right. Fine. You might as well get into your undersuits. But there’ll be some delay. We’re going to have to take a preliminary scan on myself, first. I’m going along with you.”

Barker ground out his cigarette under his heel. He looked up. “I suppose I should say something about it. Some kind of sarcastic remark about wading intrepidly into the hostile shore after the troops have already taken the island. But I’ll be damned if I thought you’d do it at all.”

Hawks said nothing, and walked away across the laboratory floor toward the transmitter.

“You knew we had extra suits,” he said to Gersten, as he lay down in the opened armor. The Navy men worked around him, adjusting the set-screws on the pressure plates. The ensign stood watching closely, an uncertain frown on his face.

“Yes, but that was only in case we lost one in a bad scan,” Gersten argued, his eyes stubborn.

“We’ve always had a stock of equipment, in all sizes.”

“Hawks, being able to do something, and doing it, are two different things. I—”

“Look, you know the situation. You know what we’re doing here as well as I do. Once we have a safe pathway, the probing and the study really begin. We’re going to have to disassemble that thing like a bomb; I’m in charge of the project. Up to now, if I were lost to the project, it would have been too much of an expenditure. But now the risk is acceptable. I want to see what that thing’s like. I want to be able to give intelligent directions. Is that so hard to undersand?”

“Hawks, any number of things could still go wrong up there today.”

“Suppose they don’t. Suppose Barker makes it. Then what? Then he stands there, and I’m down here. Do you think I wasn’t planning to do this, from the very beginning?”

“Even before you knew Barker?”

“I wish I’d never known Barker. Stand aside and let them close the armor.” He fitted his left hand carefully into its gauntlet inside its tool cluster.

He was wheeled into the chamber. The magnets took hold, and the table was pulled out. The door closed and was dogged shut. He floated in mid-air, his legs and arms outspread, surrounded by the hundred thousand glittering eyes of the scanner faces. He lay looking up through the circle of glass in his helmet, his face expressionless. “Any time, Ted,” he said sleepily into his microphone, and the chamber lights winked out.

The lights came on in the receiver. He opened his eyes, blinking gently. The receiver door was opened, and the table was slipped under him. The lateral magnets slacked off as their rheostats were turned down, and he drifted into contact with the plastic surface. “I feel normal,” he said. “Did you get a good file tape?”

“As far as we know,” Gersten said into his microphone. “The computers didn’t spot any breaks in the transmission.”

“Well, that’s as well as we can do,” Hawks said. “All right — put me back in the transmitter, and hold me there. Get Barker into his suit, jack down the legs on the table, and slide him in under me. Today,” he said, “marks another precedent in the annals of exploration. Today, we’re going to send a sandwich to the Moon.”

Fidanzato, wheeling the table across the laboratory floor, laughed nervously. Gersten jerked his head to the side and looked at him.

2

Hawks and Barker climbed slowly to their feet in the Moon receiver. The Navy specialists waiting outside now opened the door, and stood aside to let them clamber out. The Moon station was bare and gray, with triangular plastic geodesic girders webbing the semiflexible sheet roof of the dome. Lights were hung from it at intervals, like stalactites, and the floor was a sieve of pressed matting over a ground sheet. Hawks looked around him curiously, the helmet of his armor swiveling with a faint grating sound that was instantly taken up by the fabric of the dome and ainpilfled, so that every move each man made was followed by its larger echo. The interior of the building was never still. It creaked and groaned constantly, shivering the lights on their hangers; the group of men — the Navy crew in their undersuits and Hawks and Barker in their armor — were bathed in shifting reflections as though they were at the bottom of a sea beset by a powerful storm above them. At the airlock, the Navy men got back into their own rubberized canvas suits, and then, one by one, they all stepped out onto the open surface of the Moon.

Starlight shone down upon them with cold, drab intensity, stronger than anything falling from a moonless sky upon the Earth at night, but punched through with sharp rents of shadow at every hump and jag of the terrain. From ground level, it was possible to make out the vague shapes of the working naval installation, each dome and burrow with its latticework of overhead camouflage, lying like the wreck of a zeppelin to Hawks’ right, looking vaguely graygreen in color, with no lights showing.

Hawks took a deep breath. “All right, thank you,” he said to the Navy men, his voice distant, mechanical, and businesslike over the radiotelephone circuit. “Are the observer teams ready?”

A Navy man, with lieutenant’s bars painted on his helmet, nodded and gestured toward the left. Hawks turned his head slowly, his expression reluctant, and looked to where the humps of the observation bunker clustered as though huddled in the lee of a cliff, at the foot of the looming black and silver formation.

“The walkway’s over here,” Barker said, touching Hawks’ forearm with the tool cluster at the end of his right sleeve. “Let’s go — we’ll run out of air if we wait for you to dip your toe in the water.”

“All right.” Hawks moved to follow Barker under the camouflage roofing which followed, like a pergola on which no vines would climb, above the track which had been smoothed for a footpath between the receiver dome and the formation.

The Navy lieutenant made a hand signal of dismissal and began to walk away, followed by his working party, taking the other path which led back to their station and their workaday concerns.

“All set?” Barker asked when they reached the formation. “Flash your light toward the observers, there, so they’ll know we’re starting.”

Hawks raised one of his hands and winked its work light. An acknowledging point of light appeared upon the featureless black face of the bunker.

“That’s all there is to it, Hawks. I don’t know what you’re waiting for. Just do what I do, and follow me. Let’s hope this gizmo doesn’t mind my not being alone.”

“That’s an acceptable risk,” Hawks said.

“If you say so, Doctor.” Barker put his arms out and placed the inner faces of his sleeves against the rippling, glossy wall at which the walkway came to a dead end. He shuffled sideways and there was a sharp spang! inside Hawk’s armor, cracking up through his bootsoles, as the wall accepted Barker and sucked him through.

Hawks looked down at the loose gravel of the walkway, covered with bootprints as though an army had marched past. He came up to the wall and raised his arms, perspiration running down his cheeks faster than the suit’s dehumidifiers could dry it.

3

Barker was scrambling up a tilting plane of glittering blue-black, toward where two faces of coarse dull brown thudded together repeatedly. Curtains of green and white swirled around Hawks. He broke into a run, as shafts of crystal transparency opened through the folds of green and white, with flickering red light dimly visible at their far ends and blue, green, yellow heaving upward underfoot.

Hawks ran with his arms pressed to his sides. He came to where he had seen Barker dive forward, rolling over as he skittered to the side along the running stream of yielding, leaflike pale fringes. As he dove, he passed over a twisted body in a type of armor that had been discarded.

Barker’s white armor suddenly bloomed with frost which scaled off as he ran and lay in Hawks’ way like molds of the equipment, in a heap of previous sleeves, legs, and torsos, to which Hawks’ armor added its own as he passed.

Hawks followed Barker down the spiraling funnel whose walls smeared them with light gray powder which fell from their armor slowly, in long, delicate strands, as they swung themselves out to pass Rogan’s body, which lay half out of sight in a heap of glazed semicircles like a shipment of broken saucers that had been discarded.

Barker held up his hand, and they stopped at the edge of the field of crosshatched planes, standing together, looking into each other’s faces below the overhang of the polished tongue of blue-black metal which jutted out above them, rusted a coarse dull brown where an earlier Barker had once crawled out on it and now lay sprawled with one white sleeve dangling, a scrap of green surfacing clutched in the convulsively jammed pincers of his tool cluster. Barker looked up at it, back at Hawks, and winked. Then be took hold of one of the crystalline, transparent projections jutting out from the flickering red wall and swung himself out toward the next one, passing out of sight around the bend where blue, green, yellow light could be seen streaming.

Hawks’ armored feet pattered at the empty air as he followed around the corner. He went hand-over-band, carefully keeping his’ body strained upward to keep his shoulders above the level of his hands as he moved sideward along the high, scalloped coaming of pale yellow, each half-curved leaf yielding waxily to his weight and twisting down almost to where his pincers lost their grip on the surface, which their needle points could not penetrate. He had to cross his arms and shift his weight from each scallop to the next before it had time to drop him, and as he moved along he had to twist his body to avoid the spring-back of each halfsaucer from which his grip had been discarded. Down below lay a tangle of broken armor; twisted sleeves and legs and torsos.

Hawks came, eventually, to where Barker lay on his back, resting. He began to sit down beside him, lowering himself awkwardly. Suddenly he threw a glance at his wrist, where the miniaturized gyrocompass pointed at lunar north. He twisted his body, trying to regain his balance, and finally stood panting, on one foot like a water bird, while Barker steadied him. Overhead, orange traceries flickered through a glassy red mass shaped like a giant rat’s head, and then reluctantly subsided.

They walked along an enormous, featureless plain of panchromatic grays and blacks, following a particular line of footprints among a fan of individual tracks. All of them ended in a huddle of white armor except for this one, on which Barker would stop, now and then, just short of his own corpse each time, and step to one side, or simply wait a bit, or shuffle by to the side. Each time he did so, the plain would suddenly flicker back into color from Hawks’ point of view. Each time he followed Barker’s lead, the color would die, and his suit would thrum with a banging, wooden sound.

At the end of the plain was a wall. Hawks looked at his wrist watch. Their elapsed time inside the formation was four minutes, fifty-one seconds. The wall shimmered and bubbled from their feet up into the black sky with its fans of violet light. Flowers of frost rose up out of the plain where their shadows fell, standing highest where they were farthest from the edges and so least in contact with the light. The frost formed humped, crude white copies of their armor, and, as Hawks and Barker moved against the wall, it lay for one moment open and exposed, then burst silently from steam pressure, each outflying fragment of discard trailing a long, delicate strand of steam as it ate itself up and the entire explosion reluctantly subsided.

Barker struck the wall with a sharp rock-hammer, and a glittering blue-black cube of its substance sprang away from it, exposing a coarse brown flat surface. Barker tapped lightly, and it changed color to a glittering white alive with twisting green threads. The facing of the wall turned crystalline and transparent, and disappeared. They stood on the lip of a lake of smoking red fire. On its shore, halfburied, the white paint sooted yellow, charred and molten so that it had run like a cheap crockery glaze, lay Barker’s armor. Hawks looked at his wrist watch. Their elapsed time inside the formation was six minutes, thirty-eight seconds. He turned and looked back. On the open, panchromatic plain lay a featureless cube of metal, glittering blue-black. Barker turned back, picked it up, and threw it down on the ground. A coarse brown wall rose up into the air between them and the plain, and behind them the fire snuffed out. Where Barker’s burnt armor had been was a heap of crystals at the edge of a square, perhaps a hundred meters to one side, of lapis lazuli.

Barker stepped out on it. A section of the square tilted, and the crystals at its edge slid out across it in a glittering fan. Barker walked down carefully among them, until he was at the other edge of the section, steadying it with his weight. Hawks climbed up onto the slope and walked down to join him. Barker pointed. Through the crack between the section and the remainder of the square, they could see men from the observation team, peering blindly in at them. Hawks looked at his wrist watch. Their elapsed time inside the formation was six minutes, thirty-nine seconds. Lying heaped and barely visible between them and the observation team was Barker. The crystals on their section were sliding off into the crack and falling in long, delicate strands of snow upon the dimly-seen armor.

Barker clambered up onto the lazuli square. Hawks followed him, and the section righted itself behind them. They walked out for several meters, and Barker stopped. His face was strained. His eyes were shining with exhilaration. He glanced sideward at Hawks, and his expression grew wary.

Hawks looked pointedly down at his wrist watch. Barker licked his lips, then turned and began to run in a broadening spiral, his boots scuffing up heaps of crystals, at each of which he ducked his head as waves of red, green, yellow light dyed his armor. Hawks followed him, the lazuli cracking out in great radiations of icy fractures that crisscrossed into a network under his feet as he ran around and around.

The lazuli turned steel-blue and transparent, and then was gone, leaving only the net of fractures, on which Barker and Hawks ran, while below them lay the snowed armor and the observing team standing oblivious a few inches from it, and the stars and jagged horizon of the Moon behind them, a broken face against which the arc of the sky was fitted.

Their elapsed time inside the formation was nine minutes, nineteen seconds. Barker stopped again, his feet and pincers hooked in the network, hanging motionless, looking back over his shoulder as Hawks came up. Barker’s eyes were desperate. He was breathing in gasps, his mouth working. Hawks clambered to a stop beside him.

The net of fractures began to break into dagger-pointed shards, falling away, leaving great rotten gaps through which swirled clouds of steel-gray, smoky particles which formed knife-sharp layers and hung in the great open space above the footing to which Hawks and Barker clung, and whose fringes whirled up and across to interlock the layers into a grid of stony, cleavage-planed crosshatchings which advanced toward them.

Barker suddenly closed his eyes, shook his head violently in its casque, blinked, and, with a tearful grimace, began to climb up the net, holding his left arm pressed against his side, clutching above him for a new handhold with his right as soon as his weight was off each toehold which his left foot discarded.

When Hawks and Barker emerged at the rim of the net, beside the drifted armor which lay under its crust of broken dagger-points, their elapsed time inside the formation was nine minutes, forty-two seconds. Barker faced the observing team through the wall, and stepped out onto the open Moon. Hawks followed him. They stood looking at each other through their faceplates, the formation directly behind them.

Barker looked at it. “It doesn’t look as if it knows what we’ve done,” he said over the radiotelephone circuit.

Hawks cast a glance behind him. “Did you expect it to?” he shrugged. He turned to the men of the observer team who were standing, waiting, in their moonsuits, their faces patient behind the transparent plastic bubbles of their helmets.

“Did you gentlemen see anything new happen while we were in there?”

The oldest man on the team, a gray-faced, drawn individual whose steel-rimmed spectacles were fastened to an elastic headband, shook his head. “No.” His voice came distorted through his throat microphone. “The formation shows no outward sign of discriminating between one individual and another, or of reacting in any special way to the presence of more than one individual. That is, I suppose, assuming all its internal strictures are adhered to.”

Hawks nodded. “That was my impression, too.” He turned toward Barker. “That very likely means we can now begin sending technical teams into it. I think you’ve done your job, Al. I really think you have. Well, let’s come along with these gentlemen, here, for a while. We might as well give them our verbal reports, just in case Hawks and Barker L had lost contact with us before we came out.” He began to walk along the footpath toward the observation bunker, and the others fell in behind him.

4

Gersten knelt down and bent over the opened faceplate. “Are you all right, Hawks?” he asked.

Hawks L looked muzzily up at him. There was a trickle of blood running out of the corner of his mouth. He licked at it, running his tongue over the bitten places in his lower lip. “Must have been more frightened than I thought, after M drifted away from me and I realized I was in the suit.” He rolled his head from side to side, lying on the laboratory floor. “Barker all right?”

“They’re getting him out of the receiver now. He seems to be in good shape. Did you make it, all right?”

Hawks L nodded. “Oh, yes, that went well. The last I felt of M, he was giving the observation team a verbal report.” He blinked to clear his eyes. “That’s quite a place, up there. Listen — Gersten—” He looked up, his face wrinkled into an expression of distaste as he looked at the man. When he was a boy, and suffering from a series of heavy colds, his father had tried to cure them by giving him scalding baths and then wrapping him in wet sheets, drawing each layer tight as he wound it around Eddie Hawks’ body and over his arms, leaving the boy, in this manner, pinned in overnight. “I — I hate to ask this,” he said, not realizing that his face was turned directly up at Gersten, “but do you suppose the crew could get me out of my suit before they do Barker?”

Gersten, who had at first been watching Hawks with interest and concern, had by now become completely frigid and offended. “Of course,” he said and stalked away, leaving Hawks L alone on the floor, like a child in the night. He lay that way for several moments before one of the technicians who stood in a ring around him realized he might want company and knelt down beside him, in range of the restricted field of vision through the faceplate opening.

5

Hawks M watched the chief observer close his notebook. “I think that does it, then,” he said to the man. Barker, who was sitting beside him at the steel table, nodded hesitantly.

“I didn’t see any lake of fire,” he said to Hawks.

Hawks shrugged. “I didn’t see any jagged green glass archway in its place.” He stood up and said to the observer team, “If you gentlemen would please refasten our faceplates for us, we’ll be on our way.”

The observers nodded and stepped forward. When they were done they turned and left the room through the airtight hatch to the bunker’s interior, so that Hawks and Barker were left alone to use the exterior airlock. Hawks motioned impatiently as the demand valve in his helmet began to draw air from his tanks again, its sigh filling his helmet. “Come along, Al,” he said. “We don’t have much time.”

Barker said bitterly as they cycled through the lock, “It sure is good to have people make a fuss over you and slap you on the back when you’ve done something.”

Hawks shook his head. “These people, here, have no concern with us as individuals. Perhaps they should have had, today, but the habit would have been a bad one to break. Don’t forget, Al — to them, you’ve never been anything but a shadow in the night. Only the latest of many shadows. And other men will come up here to die. There’ll be times when the technicians slip up. There may be some reason why even you or perhaps even I, will have to return here. These men in this bunker will watch, will record what they see, will do their best to help pry information out of this thing—” He gestured toward the obsidian hulk, toppling perpetually, perpetually re-erecting itself, shifting in place, looming over the bunker, now reflecting the light of the stars, now dead black and lusterless. “This enormous puzzle. But you and I, Al, are only a species of tool, to them. It has to be that way. They have to live here until one day when the last technician takes the last piece of this thing apart. And then, when that happens, these people in this bunker will have to face something they’ve been trying not to think about all this time.”

Hawks and Barker moved along the footpath.

“You know, Hawks,” Barker said uncomfortably, “I almost didn’t want to come out.”

“I know.”

Barker gestured indecisively. “It was the damnedest thing. I almost led us into the trap that caught me last time. And then I almost just stayed put and waited for it to get us. Hawks, I just — I don’t know. I didn’t want to come out. I had the feeling I was going to lose something. What, I don’t know. But I stood there, and suddenly I knew there was something precious that was going to be lost if I came back out onto the Moon.”

Hawks, walking steadily beside Barker, turned his head to look at him for the first time since they had left the bunker. “And did’ you lose it?”

“I — I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it for a long time, I think. I feel different. I can tell that much.” Barker’s voice grew animated. “I do.”

“Is this the first time you’ve ever done somettung no other man has done before? Done it successfully, I mean?”

“I — well, no, I’ve broken records of one kind or another, and—”

“Other men had broken records at the same things, Al.”

Barker stopped, and looked at Hawks. “I think that’s it,” he frowned. “I think you’re right. I’ve done something no other man has ever done before. And I didn’t get killed for it.”

“No precedent and no tradition, Al, but you did it anyway.” Hawks, too, had stopped. “Perhaps you’ve become a man in your own right?” His voice was quiet, and sad.

“I may have, Hawks!” Barker said excitedly. “Look — you can’t — That is, it’s not possible to take in something like this all at once — but—” He stopped again, his face looking out eagerly through his faceplate.

They had come almost to the point where the footpath from the bunker joined the system of paths that webbed the terrain between the formation, the receiver, the Navy installation, and the motor pool where the exploration halftracks stood. Hawks waited, motionless, patiently watching Barker, his helmet bowed as he peered.

“You were right, Hawks!” Barker said in a rush of words. “Passing initiations doesn’t mean a thing, if you, go right back to what you were doing before; if you don’t know you’ve changed! A man — a man makes himself. He — Oh, God damn it, Hawks, I tried to be what they wanted, and I tried to be what I thought I should be, but what am I? That’s what I’ve got to find out — that’s what I’ve got to make something of! I’ve got to go back to Earth and straighten out all those years! I — Hawks, I’m probably going to be damned grateful to you.”

“Will you?” Hawks began walking again. “Come with me, Al.”

Barker trotted after him. “Where are you going?”

Hawks continued to walk until he was on the track that led toward the motor pool, and that continued past it for a short distance before the camouflaging stopped and the naked terrain lay nearly impassable to an armored man on foot. He waved shortly with one arm. “Out that way.”

“Aren’t you taking a chance? How much air is there in these suits?”

“Not much. A few minutes’ more.”

“Well, let’s get back to the receiver, then.”

Hawks shook his head. “No. That’s not for us, Al.”

“What do you mean? The return transmitter’s working, isn’t it?”

“It’s working. But we can’t use it.”

“Hawks—”

“If you want to go to the transmitter and have the Navy crew go through the same procedure that sends samples and reports back to Earth, you can. But first I want you to understand what you’d be doing.”

Barker looked at him in bewilderment through the thick glass. Hawks reached out and awkwardly touched his right sleeve to the man’s armored shoJder. “Long ago, I told you I’d kill you in many ways, Al. When each Barker L came back to consciousness on Earth after each Barker M died, I was letting you trick yourself. You thought then you’d already felt the surest death of all. You hadn’t. I have to do it once more.

“There was always a continuity. Barker M and L seemed to be the same man, with the same mind. When M died, L simply went on. The thread was unbroken, and you could continue to believe that nothing, really, had happened. I could tell you, and you could believe, that in fact there was only a succession of Barkers whose memories dovetailed perfectly. But that’s too abstract a thing for a human being to really grasp. At this moment, I think of myself as the Hawks who was born, years ago, in the bedroom of a farm home. Even though I know there’s another Hawks, down in the laboratory on Earth, who’s been living his own life for some moments, now; even though I know I was born from the ashes of this world twenty minutes ago, in the receiver. All that means nothing to the me who has lived in my mind all these years. I can look back. I can remember.

“That’s the way it was with you, too. I told you. Long ago, I told you that the transmitter sends nothing but a signal. That it destroys the man it scans to derive that signal. But I knew as I told you that all the talk in the world wouldn’t make you feel it that way, as long as you could wake up each morning in your own skin. So I suppose I was wasting all that talk. I often feel that I do. But what could I say to myself, now, if I hadn’t tried to tell you?”

Barker said, “Get to the point!”

Hawks burst out in exasperation, “I’m trying to! I wish people would get it through their heads, once and for all, that the short answer is only good for familiar questions! What do you think we’re dealing with, here — something Leonardo da Vinci could have handled? If he could have, he would have, and we would have had the Twentieth Century in Fifteen Hundred! If you want the answer at all, then you’d better let me put it in context.”

“All right, Hawks.”

“I’m sorry,” Hawks said, the flare dying down. “I’m sorry. A man has things bottled up inside him, and they come out, in the end. Look, Barker — it’s simply that we don’t have the facilities here for accurately returning individuals to Earth. We don’t have the computing equipment, we don’t have the electronic hardware, we don’t have any of the elaborate safeguards. We will have. Soon we’ll have hollowed out a chamber large enough to hold them underground, where they’ll be safe from accidents’ as well as observation. Then we’ll either have to pressurize the entire chamber or learn to design electronic components that’ll work in a vacuum. And if you think that’s not a problem, you’re wrong. But we’ll solve it. When we have time.

“There’s been no time, Al. These people here-the Navy men, the observers — think of them. They’re the best people for their jobs. Competent people. Competent people have families, careers, interests, properties of one kind or another; it’s a fallacy to think that a man who makes a good astronomer, or a good cartographer, isn’t good at many other areas of life. Some of them aren’t. Most of them are. And all of them here know that when they came up here, counterparts of theirs stayed behind on Earth. They had to. We couldn’t drain men like those away from their jobs. We couldn’t risk having them die-no one knew what might happen up here. Terrible things still might. They all volunteered to come up here. They all understood. Back on Earth, their counterparts are going on as though nothing had happened. There was one afternoon in which they spent a few hours in the laboratory, of course, but that’s already a minor part of their past, for them.

“All of us up here are shadows, Al. But they’re a particular kind. Even if we had the equipment, they couldn’t go back. When we do get it, they still won’t be able to. We won’t stop them if they want to try, but think, Al, about that man who leads the observation team. Back on Earth, his counterpart is pursuing a complicated scientific career. He’s accomplished a lot since the day he was duplicated. He has a career, a reputation, a whole body of experience which this individual, up here, no longer shares. And the man here has changed, too — he knows things the other doesn’t. He has a whole body of divergent experience. If he goes back, which of them does what? Who gets the career, who gets the family, who gets the bank account? They can try to work it out, if they want to. But it’ll be years, up here, before this assignment is over. There’ll have been divorces, births, deaths, marriages, promotions, degrees, jail sentences, diseases — No, most of them won’t go back. But when this ends, where will they go? We’d better have something for them to do. Away from Earth — away from the world that has no room for them. We’ve created a whole corps of men with the strongest possible ties to Earth, and no future except in space. But where will they go? Mars? Venus? We don’t have rockets that will drop receivers for them there. We’d better have — but suppose some of them have become so valuable we don’t dare not duplicate them again? Then what?

“You called them zombies, once. You were right. They’re the living dead, and they know it. And they were made, by me, because there wasn’t time. No time to do this systematically, to think this out in all its aspects, to comb the world for men we could use without subjecting them to this disruption. And for you and me, now, Al, there’s the simple fact that we have a few minutes’ air left in our suits and we can’t go back, at all.”

“For Pete’s sake, Hawks, we can walk into any one of these bubbles, here, and get all the air we want!”

Hawks asked slowly, “And settle down and stay here, you mean, and go back in a year or two? You can if you want to, I suppose. What will you do, in that time? Learn to do something useful, here, wondering what you’ve been doing meanwhile, on Earth?”

Barker said nothing for a moment. Then he said, “You mean, I’m stuck here.” His voice was quiet. “I’m a zombie. Well, is that bad? Is that worse than dying?”

“I don’t know,” Hawks answered. “You could talk to these people up here about it. They don’t know, either. They’ve been thinking about it for some time. Why do you think they shunned you, Barker? Because there was nothing about you that frightened them more than they could safely bear? We had our wave of suicides after they first came up. The ones who’re left are comparatively stable on the subject. But they stay that way because they’ve learned to think about it only in certain ways. But go ahead. You’ll be able to work something out.”

“But, Hawks, I want to go back to Earth!”

“To the world in your memories, that you want to remake?”

“Why can’t I use the return transmitter?”

Hawks said, “I told you. We only have a transmitter up here. We don’t have a laboratory full of control equipment The transmitter here pulses signals describing the typewritten reports and rock samples the Navy crew put in the receiver. It isn’t used much for anything, but when it is, that’s what it carries. From here-without dead-accurate astronomical data, without our power supply — the signals spread, they miss our antenna down there, they turn to hash in the ionization layers — you just can’t do, from the surface of an uninhabited, unexplored, airless satellite, what we can do from there. You can’t just send up, from a world with Terrestrial gravity, with an atmosphere, with air pressure, with a different temperature range, equipment that will function here. It has to be designed for here and better yet, built here. Out of what? In what factory? It doesn’t matter, with marks on paper and lumps of rock, that we’ve got the bare minimum of equipment we had to have time to adapt. By trial and error, and constant repetition, we push the signals through, and decipher them on Earth. If they’re hashed up, we send a message to that effect, and a Navy yeoman types up a new report from his file carbon, and a geologist chips off another rock of the same kind. But a man, Barker — I told you. A man is a phoenix. We simply don’t have the facilities here to take scan readings on him, feed them through differential amplifiers, cross-check, and make a file tape to recheck against.

“You can try it, Al. You can get into the return transmitter, and the Navy men will pull the switches. They’ve done it before, for other men who had to try it. As always, the scanner will destroy you painlessly and instantaneously. But what arrives on Earth, Al — what arrives on Earth is also not the man you’ve become since you were last put in the laboratory transmitter. I guarantee you that, Al.”

Hawks raised his arms and dropped them. “Now do you see what I’ve done to you? Do you see what I’ve done to poor Sam Latourette, who’ll wake up one day in a world full of strangers, never knowing what I did to him after I put him into the amplifiers, only knowing that now he’ll be cured but his old, good friend, Ed Hawks, has died and gone to dust? I haven’t played fair with any of you. I’ve never once shown any of you mercy, except now and then by coincidence.”

He turned and began to walk away.

“Wait! Hawks — You don’t have to—”

Hawks said, without stopping or turning his head, walking steadily, “What don’t I have to? There’s an Ed Hawks in the universe who remembers all his life, even the time he spent in the Moon formation, up to this very moment as he stands down in the laboratory. What’s being lost? There’s no expenditure. I wish you well, Al — you’d better hurry and get to that airlock. Either the one at the return transmitter or the one at the naval station. It’s about the same distance, either way.”

“Hawks!”

“I have to get out of these people’s way,” Hawks said abstractedly. “It’s not part of their job to deal with corpses on their grounds. I want to get out there among the rocks.”

He walked to the end of the path, the camouflaging’s shadows mottling his armor, cutting up the outlines of his body until he seemed to become only another jagged, broken portion of the place through which he walked.

Then he emerged into the starlight, and his armor flashed with the clear, cold reflection.

“Hawks,” Barker said in a muffled voice, “I’m at the airlock.”

“Good luck, Barker.”

Hawks clambered over the rocks until he began to pant. Then he stood, wedged in place. He turned his face up, and stars glinted on the glass. He took one shallow breath after another, more and more quickly. His eyes watered. Then he blinked sharply, viciously, repeatedly. “No,” he said. “No, I’m not going to fall for that.” He blinked again and again. “I’m not afraid of you,” he said. “Someday I, or another man, will hold you in his hand.”

6

Hawks L pulled off the orange undershirt over his head, and stood beside the dressing table, wearing nothing but the bottom of the suit, brushing at the talcum on his face and in his hair. His ribs stood out sharply under his skin.

“You ought to get out in the sun, Hawks,” Barker said, sitting on the edge of the table, watching him.

“Yes,” Hawks said abstractedly, thinking he had no way of knowing whether there really had been a plaid blanket on his bed in the farmhouse, or whether it had been a quilted comforter. “Well, I may. I should be able to find a little more time, now that things are going to be somewhat more routine. I may go swimming with a girl I know, or something. I don’t know.”

There was a note in his left hand, crumpled and limp with perspiration, where he had been carrying it since before he was’ put into his armor the first time. He picked at it carefully, trying to open the folds without tearing them.

Barker asked, “Do you remember, anything much about what happened to us on the Moon after we got through the formation?”

Hawks shook his head. “No, I lost contact with Hawks M shortly. And please try to remember that we have never been on the Moon.”

Barker laughed. “All right. But what’s the difference between being there and only remembering being there?”

Hawks mumbled, working at the note, “I don’t know. Perhaps the Navy will have a report for us on what Hawks M and Barker M did afterward. That might tell us something. I rather think it will.”

Barker laughed again. “You’re a peculiar duck, Hawks.”

Hawks looked at him sidelong. “That sums me up, does it? Well, I’m not Hawks. I remember being Hawks, but I was made in the receiver some twenty-five minutes ago, and you and I have never met before.”

“All right, Hawks,” Barker chuckled. “Relax!” Hawks was no longer paying any attention to him. He opened the note, finally, and read the blurred message with little difficulty, since it was in his own handwriting and, in any case, he knew what it said. It was:

“Remember me to her.”