“First, the good news—as little as there is of it. Lucky came through the war okay, too. We’re both alive and well—or we are when I’m recording this. I’m not so sure what our status will be by the time you get it.
“Now, the rest of the news… and it’s not very good.” Hawker listened, feeling himself growing numb. While they slept, a big scandal broke out in Washington over paying soldiers for not doing anything. Most of the sleepers had had the same idea, to invest their pay. A lot of people thought it was unfair to pay soldiers for lying in a coffin while the army took care of all their needs. They raised a big stink in Congress, and, after much hand-wringing, the sleepers had all their assets confiscated. Naturally, the sleepers were informed of this only after they came back from Antarctica—those who did. Some went a little crazy and ended up in the stockade. Some others were trying to fight it in the courts as being ex post facto, but, in Green’s opinion, they didn’t have a prayer the way the country was going.
“We thought things were bad in the United States after the China war,” Green went on. “Let me tell you, that was nothing compared to what’s happening right now. The place is an armed camp. Nobody goes anywhere without travel papers—and it hardly matters if you’ve got the papers, because travel is so expensive you probably can’t afford it anyway. If you’re lucky enough to get a job—the unemployment rate has stabilized at twenty percent or so—you’re practically stuck in it for the rest of your life. If you can’t get a job, you get stuck on the welfare rolls, and I’m told almost nobody ever gets off them once they’re on. The government does give you free dope to help you forget your troubles, but frankly I think almost anything is better than sitting around doped to the eyeballs day after day.
“The government is as close to a dictatorship as we’ve ever come. They still hold elections, apparently, but from the looks of things the candidates are all preselected for you. The news is heavily censored, so I couldn’t see much of what was really happening.
Hawker stared at the screen. Deep in his bones, he felt a kind of cold he’d never felt even in Antarctica.
“Lucky and I wanted to wait until you got back,” Green said, “so the three of us could decide together what we should do. But the army doesn’t want to keep us on salary and they won’t let us wait for you. We’ve got an ultimatum: either we sign up for this new process they’ve got or they kick us out into the real world and we have to fend for ourselves. Between the two, I don’t really think there’s much choice. We’re fucked any way we look at it.”
Green looked uneasy, and glanced away for a moment before looking back at the camera. “Lucky and I are going for it. I mean, for another jump into the future. I wish we could have waited for you, but they’re getting pushy. If you do decide to go that way, things won’t be so bad—we’ll simply come out of the machine and there you’ll be, only a few hours from when I’m recording this. If you decide to stick it out in the real world, I’ll understand that, too. This new process of theirs sounds scary.”
Green hesitated and Hawker thought that would be the end of the recording, but after a few seconds of silence, the image spoke again. “I don’t know, Hawk. Maybe we should get off the merry-go-round now, while we still have the chance. We’ve already tried escaping into the future twice in search of something better, and look how that worked out for us. If we don’t get out now, I don’t think we ever will. To be honest, I don’t really believe things will get better by the next time we wake up. The pace of human existence is accelerating all the time. Have you ever heard the legend of the Flying Dutchman? That would be us, lost souls doomed to repeat our mistakes forever through history.”
Green briefly closed his eyes. “Damn, but I’m getting philosophical in my old age,” he said with a bitter laugh. “I’d almost forgotten all my doubts until I started this letter to you. If I don’t stop now, maybe I’ll talk myself right out of it.
“That’s all I have to say, I guess. Be careful, and don’t let them railroad you into anything you don’t want to do. Whatever you decide is fine with us—and Lucky and I both wish you an eternity of good luck. Take care of yourself, Hawk; you matter more than you know.”
Hawker stared at the screen for many minutes after the message had finished playing, unable to move for fear the tears would spill out and drown him. Eventually, he returned to his bunk and spent the night staring at the ceiling.
The next day, he was called into the administration building for a “counseling session.” The counselor—a civilian, Hawker noted—tried to break the news about the seizure of sleepers’ money as gently as possible, and Hawker did nothing to make it easier for him. Hawker acted properly indignant when the facts were explained to him, and the counselor rushed to mollify him by showing the alternatives. The regular army had no room for him, the man said, but Hawker could always sign up for another hitch of suspended time, this time as a recorded pattern in the army’s computer. “What if I don’t want to do that?” Hawker asked. “Who knows what you’d steal from me this time.”
The counselor blushed and turned away to his computer. He typed quickly and had Hawker’s dossier on the screen within seconds. He did a double-take at Hawker’s age, until he saw the note that Hawker was a two-time sleeper. He mentioned that Hawker’s high school diploma would be virtually useless in the modern world because it had been granted so long ago. He grimaced when he noticed Hawker possessed no specialized skills that would stand him in good stead in civilian life.
“You mean there’s nothing out there for me,” Hawker said.
“I didn’t say that,” the counselor hurried to correct him. “We’ll find something for you, I know it. You’ll have triple veteran’s preference, which puts you at the head of the line. You may have to settle for some general type of job, like shoe salesman or supermarket clerk, but we’ll get you something, I’m sure of it. The army always looks after its own.”
Hawker had to suppress the strong urge to spit.
The counselor cleared his throat and continued, “Now, as to where you’ll be relocated. Let’s see, it says here you’re from Kansas City. Let me check… no, Kansas City has no openings. I’ll spread the search out a little—ah, there we are: Topeka. I’m sure you’ll like it there. We can settle you in there and find some sort of job for you, I promise. What do you say to that?”
“Go fuck yourself,” Hawker said, and walked out of the office.
The next day he was stripped naked and facing the molecular scanner. He was frightened, more so than he’d ever been in his life—more than he was during his first combat with an enemy, more than when he first contemplated leaving the army, more even than when he’d first faced the prospect of being frozen for an indefinite period. All the doubts Green had voiced came back to him, with a few of his own added.
The army said the process was painless, but how could they really tell? They’d lied to him before, why wouldn’t they do it again? And even if it was painless, even if it was foolproof, how safe was it? He would exist only as a pattern inside a computer. What if something happened to the computer? Would he die, then? Without ever knowing he was dead? He’d been raised very strongly to believe in the immortal soul, but where did his soul go during this process? The questions were terrifying.
Then the technician called his name. Closing his eyes and uttering a short, silent prayer, Jerry Hawker entered the molecular scanner.
INTERLUDES
The process was indeed painless and seemingly instantaneous. Scarcely had Hawker stepped into the scanner when he found himself lying in a small tub of liquid. It was a bad disorientation, to be standing one moment and lying down the next; he gasped, and accidentally swallowed some of the salty water around him. He choked a bit, just as two men grabbed his arms and helped lift him out of the tank. Something felt odd about him. His stomach was queasy, and his body felt extraordinarily light. “I think there’s something wrong with me,” he managed to gasp between chokes. “I feel kind of funny.”
“
Perfectly normal,” one of the men replied. “You’re on the Moon now.”
He was led into a room with other resurrectees, without being given much chance to think about the predicament. His steps were light and bouncy, and he felt almost drunk, except that his mind was absolutely clear. He was given some clothing, a one-piece jumpsuit that zipped all the way up the front, and told to wait for instructions. He mingled with the other soldiers—there were at least fifty of them so far—and listened to their amazed conversations about how they never expected to go to the Moon, and how fantastic this new process was compared to the old freezing method. Hawker, as usual, did not join in any of the conversations; he merely wandered around the room idly, observing.
The room kept filling up as more and more people were resurrected from their shady half-lives, and eventually Hawker saw some familiar faces. Bounding across the room, oblivious to the startled looks of the other soldiers, he threw his arms around Green and Symington and hugged them for all he was worth. The other two were startled, but equally enthusiastic.
“What do you think of the process, Hawk?” Green asked when the glad noises of reunion had died down.
Hawker shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t feel any different. It sure beats the freezing and waking up in a hospital bed.”
“Yeah, and it’s all so sudden,” Symington added. “It seems like just this afternoon Dave sent you that email, and now here we all are—on the Moon, for Christ’s sake!”
Their conversation was interrupted by the appearance of a lieutenant who called them to attention for his briefing. First, he told them, they were no longer a part of the United States Army. The United States had been incorporated three years ago into a union with Canada and Mexico, called the North American Complex, or Nacom. They would still be fighting to preserve the land of their births, but it had undergone a change.
The reason they were on the Moon was more difficult to explain. Nacom, along with several other major world factions, was building a series of space colonies, using material mined from the Moon for construction. Nacom’s intelligence service had learned, however, that the Russian-Arab bloc was intending to use its space colony as a military base, from which it hoped to dominate the world. To guarantee their base would be built first, they’d started sabotaging Nacom’s mining efforts on the Moon—and that, in turn, led to the outbreak of hostilities here.
This was a silent, dirty war. For intricate political reasons too complex to explain, neither side wanted the conflict known to the general public; to do so would be to invoke chains of alliances that could have every nation in the world at war in a matter of hours. So the war was being limited to outer space, and particularly to the Moon. The fighting was likely to be on a small scale, but very intense, and the soldiers’ bravery here would be unheralded—but much appreciated by their government.
Over the next few days, they discovered that a few more people had joined Norquist’s Rangers. No one talked much about it as they went through a series of exercises—not to get their muscles back into shape, as had been the case before, but to get them used to the one-sixth gravity of the Moon. They also had to learn quickly how to move in the bulky spacesuits they’d wear on the lunar surface. The instructors repeatedly reminded the soldiers that the suits would be the only things keeping them alive outside; even a single rip could prove fatal. The suits, Hawker noticed, were not very well made, and fit them poorly.
During their five days of training in the crowded underground base, the soldiers felt frequent tremors in the walls and floor. These, they were told, were enemy bombing runs. The Russians were sitting snugly inside their well-fortified base, throwing large rocks at the Nacom base using a device called a “mass driver,’’ which acted as an enormous slingshot to hurl objects hundreds, or hundreds of thousands, of kilometers. Nacom Base had its own mass driver, which figured prominently in the Nacom strategy.
So far, neither side had been able to do much more than throw rocks at the other. Nacom assumed the Russians didn’t have a comparable system for recreating soldiers, and was incapable of transporting large numbers of troops to the Moon. Nacom, too, lacked enough troop carriers to ship its soldiers to a position near the Russian base—but there was the mass driver, and Nacom intended to use it.
Having received the training, the soldiers suited up and were placed within their individual padded “buckets.” They were told to keep their heads down well between their knees and press themselves as tightly against the back padding as they could; Hawker stood in line with the rest as, one by one, they were loaded into the slingshot and fired off toward enemy territory.
When his turn came, Hawker obediently tucked his head down and pressed back against his padding, nervously wondering what new nightmares technology had cooked up for him. He didn’t have to wait long to find out. As his bucket shifted into position, he was suddenly rammed against the back wall as though hit full strength by a giant flyswatter. The force lasted only a few seconds, but it was brutal enough to make him black out for several minutes.
When he came to, he was floating free in space. He felt sick to his stomach and bruised from head to foot, but he was alive and breathing—and in space, those were the crucial factors. He’d been fired like a circus performer out of a cannon, and now he was on a trajectory that would place him down on a plain barely a hundred klicks from the Russian base. From there, he and his companions were to launch a full-scale assault on the base itself and—hopefully—overwhelm its defenders.
This operation had been in the planning stage for the past month, ever since the decision was first made to resurrect the recorded soldiers, and had been laid with the highest secrecy. Working under cover of the two-week-long lunar night, teams of Nacom construction personnel had built an enormous “net” in the target area to catch the spacesuited figures as they plummeted back to the surface of the Moon after their flight; without the net, the soldiers would have crashed into the lunar soil with roughly the same velocity at which they’d been launched. The mass driver’s aim was computer-accurate, but Hawker later heard horror stories about soldiers who had missed the two-kilometer-square net and whose bodies were permanently splattered across the lunar landscape.
Hawker landed safely in the net. The shock of his landing bruised him still more, and he was hurriedly helped off to make room for the next incoming soldier. It was unlikely that two would land back to back in the same exact place, but the consequences of that were so ghastly that no one wanted to contemplate them.
The Russians realized belatedly what was happening, and took steps to hinder the Nacom forces. The landing area was inside the effective minimum range of their own mass driver, but what they did was shoot off a heavy barrage of rocks in a long, complicated trajectory that eventually came raining down on the target field. The hail of moon rocks tore through the netting, but most of Nacom’s damage had been done—eighty-three percent of the assault force had been delivered within striking distance of the Russian base. Food, water and oxygen had already been stockpiled there during the nighttime activities, and there were several large tractors to act as tanks and lead the attack. All that remained was to cross the hundred kilometers and destroy the base.
The troops began what was later to be called the Moon March. Each of the men was in peak condition, yet even so they found the trek across the lunar plain the most arduous of their careers, surpassing any tortures devised by drill sergeants. There was no shade, no relief from the damnably bright sun overhead. The spacesuits, constructed hastily, showed the pressure. Twenty-seven soldiers died when their suits overheated; another suit simply exploded for no known reason, instantly killing its wearer; and eleven more people died of tiny rips in the fabric of the suits. The troops rested every few hours and the weak lunar gravity helped keep them from becoming too tired. Nevertheless, by the time they were within thirty klicks of their objective, they were all disconsolate.
Inside this range, the Russians joined nature in working to kill them. The enemy
began lobbing “grenades” that were little more than buckets of scrap metal set to explode on impact. On the Moon—where a small rip in one’s suit meant instant death—they took on deadly proportions. All the men could do when they saw the grenades coming was hit the ground, presenting as small a target as possible, and pray that none of the shrapnel found them. In far too many cases, however, those prayers were denied.
Green died during one grenade attack. He and Hawker had been marching together, trying to keep one another’s courage up, when word came that another grenade was about to hit. Both dove to the ground, as was now standard operating procedure, and lay still. After a few minutes, when the all clear came, Hawker rose to his feet and Green didn’t. Looking down at his friend’s prostrate form, Hawker could see no shrapnel tears in the suit; only when he turned the body over did he see what had happened. The shrapnel had missed Green, but in falling to the ground he’d torn his suit open on a sharp projection of rock.
For the first time since his grandmother’s funeral when he was twelve, Hawker cried. His sergeant came over and helped him to his feet, and Symington put an arm around his shoulder. Between them, the two men helped get Hawker moving again—but something of himself had been left behind there on the surface of the Moon, beside Green’s still body. It was the last traces of innocence, the final vestige of any part of him that could claim enjoyment of life. All that was left now was a cold callousness, a machine, existing only for its continued survival.
Hawker remembered little of the rest of the conflict. He marched through a blue haze that few things could penetrate. He fought with the rest when the Russians finally sent troops against them, after they’d gotten within five klicks of the base. He was there in the mob that stormed through the actual base, taking it room by sealed-off room in hand-to-hand fighting that killed eighty percent of the remaining assault team, including Symington. He was standing within three meters of Colonel Gonsalves when the latter announced the base had been secured by Nacom, but he did not celebrate with the rest of the men. Laconically he stood apart, a machine turned off until it received further orders.
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