Rogue Moon

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Rogue Moon Page 15

by Algis Budrys


  "That's very apt, Hawks," Cobey said.

  "I was trying to explain —"

  "Go ahead, Reed."

  "Well —" Reed leaned forward earnestly. "I don't want you to think I'm some kind of ogre, Dr. Hawks. But, let's face it, there's a lot of money tied up in that equipment, and as far as I can see, there's no reason why, if we've got a duplicating machine in the first place, we can't just —" he shrugged — "run off as many copies as we need. I can't see why they have to be built in our manufacturing division, or purchased from outside suppliers. Now, we've got a situation here where I can't even calculate a fixed operating cost. And —"

  "Mr. Reed," Hawks said.

  Reed stopped. "Yes?"

  Hawks rubbed his face. "I appreciate your position. And I can see that what you've just proposed is completely reasonable, from that point of view. However —"

  "All right, Hawks," Cobey said drily. "Get to the 'however.' "

  "Well," Hawks said to Reed, "do you know the principles on which the scanner works — the duplicator?"

  "Pretty roughly, I'm afraid," Reed said patiently.

  "Well, pretty roughly, the duplicator takes a piece of matter and reduces it to a systematic series of electron flows. Electricity. A signal, like the signal that comes out of a radio sending set. Now, that signal is fed into these components — the same way, you might say, that it came in from the antenna of a radio receiver and was passed into the circuit inside it. When it comes out the other end of the circuit, it doesn't go into a loudspeaker but is retransmitted to the Moon, having meanwhile been cross-checked for its accuracy. Now that's essentially what these components do — they inspect the signal for consistency. Now, the point is that the accuracy with which the original piece of matter is reconstructed — duplicated — — depends on the consistency of the electron flows which arrive at the receiver. Therefore, if we were to use duplicated components to check the consistency of the signal with which we duplicate highly complicated objects, such as a living human being, we would be introducing an additional possibility for error which, in the case of a human being, works out higher than we can safely permit. Do you follow that?"

  Reed frowned.

  Cobey quirked his mouth up at one corner, looking down the table at Hawks.

  Hedge picked up his cap and began adjusting the wire stiffening inside its white cover.

  Finally, Reed said, "Is that all, Dr. Hawks?"

  Hawks nodded.

  Reed shrugged in embarrassment. "Well, look," he said, "I'm afraid I still don't see it. I can see that maybe your original equipment couldn't be duplicated, because your scanner wouldn't work without it, but —"

  "Oh, it would work without it," Hawks interjected. "As I said, it's a control circuit. It's not primary."

  Reed put his hands down sharply and looked at Cobey. He shook his head.

  Cobey took a deep breath and let it out bitterly. "What do you say, Commander?"

  Hedge put his cap down. "I think what Dr. Hawks means is that if you have an automatic lathe making automatic lathes, and you use these automatic lathes you've made to make more lathes, all it takes is for one part in any one of these lathes to slip, and pretty soon you've got a zillion lathes that're just so much junk."

  "Well, God damn it, Hawks, why couldn't you put it that way?" Cobey demanded.

  The day the elapsed time reached nine minutes, thirty seconds, Hawks said to Barker, "I'm worried. If your elapsed time grows much longer, the contact between M and L will become too fragile. The navigating team tells me your reports are growing measurably less coherent."

  "Let 'em try going up there, then. See how much sense they can make out of it." Barker licked his lips. His eyes were hollow.

  "That's not the point."

  "I know what the point is. There's another point. You can stop worrying. I'm almost out the other side."

  "They didn't tell me that," Hawks said sharply.

  "They don't know. But I've got a feeling."

  "A feeling."

  "Doctor, all that chart shows is what I tell it after I've done a day's work. It has no beginning and no end, except when I put the end to it." He looked around the laboratory, his face bitter. "All this plumbing, Doctor, and in the end it comes down to all revolving around one man." He looked at Hawks. "One man and what's in his mind. Or maybe two of us. I don't know. What's in your mind, Hawks?"

  Hawks looked at Barker. "I don't pry into your mind, Barker. Don't set foot in mine. I have a telephone call to make."

  He walked away across the laboratory, and dialed an outside number. He waited for the answer, and as he waited, he stared without focusing at the old, familiar blank wall. Suddenly he moved in a spasm of action and smashed the flat of his free hand violently against it. Then the buzz in the earpiece stopped with a click, and he said eagerly, "Hello? Elizabeth? This — this is Ed. Listen — Elizabeth — Oh, I'm all right. Busy. Listen — are you free tonight? It's just that I've never taken you to dinner, or dancing, or anything… Will you? I —" He smiled at the wall. "Thank you." He hung up the telephone and walked away. He looked back over his shoulder, and saw that Barker had been watching him, and he started self-consciously.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  "Elizabeth —" he began, and then waved his arm in annoyance. "No. It was all going to come out in a rush. It does, so often."

  They were standing atop an arm of rock that thrust out seaward into the surf. Hawks' collar was turned up, and he held his jacket together with one hand. Elizabeth was wearing a coat, her hands in its pockets, a kerchief over her hair. The Moon, setting on the horizon, reflected its light upon the traceries of clouds overhead. Elizabeth smiled up at him, her wide mouth stretching. "This is a very romantic spot you've brought us to, Edward."

  "I — I was just driving. I didn't have any particular place in mind." He looked around. "I'm not full of cunning, Elizabeth — I'm full of logic, and reasoning, and God knows what else." He smiled self-consciously. "Though I suspect the worst — but that almost always comes afterward. I say to myself, 'Now, what am I doing here?' and then I have to know the answer. No, I have things —" He clutched at the air. "Things I want to say. Tonight. No later." He took a step forward, turned, and stood facing her, staring rigidly over her shoulder at the empty beach, the rise of the highway with his car parked on its shoulder, and the eastern sky beyond. "I don't know what shape they'll take. But they have to come out. If you'll listen."

  "Please."

  He shook his head at her, then forced his hands into his hip pockets and kept his body rigid.

  "You know — You know, during the war, the Germans refused to believe microwave radar was practical. Their submarines were equipped with radar search receivers, to detect antisubmarine radar in use. But they only received comparatively long wave lengths. When we put microwave radar on our patrol planes and convoy escorts, we began picking them off at night, when they surfaced to charge their batteries. But, before that, in the early part of the war, we had to get hold of one of their receivers, so we could determine their limitations. As it happened, I was given one to work on. A destroyer's boarding party had managed to recover one from a submarine that had been depth-charged and forced to the surface, and then shelled. Our people ripped the set out just before the submarine sank. The receiver was sent on to the laboratory where I was, by special courier plane from an escort carrier, and then by car. I had it within twelve hours.

  "Well, I put it down on my workbench and looked at it. The case was torn up by shrapnel, waterlogged … and terribly stained. There was smoke, there was oil, salt water corrosion, chemical fume contamination from the shellbursts — You know. And there were other kinds of debris on it. But I was a bright young man in those days, with a few commendations and my Reserve commission, and full of being a boy wonder —" Hawks grimaced. "I looked at the case, and in my mind, I said something spritely to myself on the order of, 'Hmm, shouldn't be too much trouble unravelling this. Just get some of this mess off the surface and �
�� ' And so forth. And all that time, the diluted blood I could see dried out in a smudge around the largest hole was just another part of the 'mess.' Some seaman, I thought to myself, very professionally, never having been to sea, some seaman was standing near it when the shells hit the conning tower. But when I pried the sheet-metal casing away, Elizabeth, there was a human heart in there, Elizabeth — in among the tubes and the wires."

  After a while, Elizabeth said, "What did you do?"

  "Well, after a while I came back and studied the receiver, and built a replica. And after that we used microwave radar and won the war.

  "Listen — the thing is, people say when a man dies, 'Well, he had a full life, and when his time came, he went peacefully.' Or they say, 'Poor boy — he'd barely begun to live.' But the thing is, dying isn't an incident. It isn't something that happens to a man on one particular day of his life, soon or late. It happens to the whole man — to the boy he was, to the young man he was — to his joys, to his sorrows, to the times he laughed aloud, to the times he smiled. Whether it's soon or late, how can the dying man possibly feel it was enough of a life he lived, or not enough? Who measures it? Who can decide, as he dies, that it was time? Only the body reaches a point where it can't move any more. The mind — even the senile mind, fogged by the strangling cells of its body's brain — rational or irrational, broad or narrow; that never stops; no matter what, as long as one trickle of electricity can seep from one cell to another, still it functions; still it moves. How can any mind, ever, say to itself, 'Well, this life has reached its logical end,' and shut itself down? Who can say, 'I've seen enough'? Even the suicide has to blow his brains out, because he has to destroy the physical thing to evade whatever it is in his mind that will not let him rest. The mind, Elizabeth — intelligence; the ability to look at the universe; to care where the foot falls, what the hand touches-how can it help but go on, and on, drinking in what it perceives around it?"

  His arm swept out in a long, stiff arc that swept over the beach and the sea. "Look at this! All your life, you'll have this, now! And so will I. In our last moments, we will still be able to look back, to be here again. Years away from here, and thousands of miles away from here, we would still have it. Time, space, entropy — no attribute of the universe can take this from us, except by killing us, by crushing us out.

  "The thing is, the universe is dying! The stars are burning their substance. The planets are moving more slowly on their axes. They're falling inward toward their suns. The atomic particles that make it all up are slowing in their orbits. Bit by bit, over the countless billions of years, it's slowly happening. It's all running down. Some day, it'll stop. Only one thing in the entire universe grows fuller, and richer, and. forces its way uphill. Intelligence — human lives — we're the only things there are that don't obey the universal law. The universe kills our bodies; it drags them down with gravity; it drags, and drags, until our hearts grow tired with pumping our blood against its pull, until the walls of our cells break down with the weight of themselves, until our tissues sag, and our bones grow weak and bent. Our lungs tire of pulling air in and pushing it out. Our veins and capillaries break with the strain. Bit by bit, from the day we're conceived, the universe rasps and plucks at our bodies until they can't repair themselves any longer. And in that way, in the end, it kills our brains.

  "But our minds … There's the precious thing; there's the phenomenon that has nothing to do with time and space except to use them — to describe to itself the lives our bodies live in the physical Universe.

  "Once my father took me out for a walk, late one night after a snowfall. We walked along, down a road that had just been ploughed. The stars were out, and so was the Moon. It was a cold, clear night, with the snow drifted and mounded, sparkling in the light. And on the corner where our road met the highway, there was a street lamp on a high pole. And I made a discovery. It was cold enough to make my eyes water, and I found out that if I kept them almost closed, the moisture diffused the lights, so that everything — the Moon, the stars, the street lamp — seemed to have halos and points of scattered light around it. The snowbanks seemed to glitter like a sea of spun sugar, and all the stars were woven together by a lace of incandescence, so that I was walking through a universe so wild, so wonderful, that my heart nearly broke with its beauty.

  "For years, I carried that time and place in my mind. It's still there. But the thing is, the universe didn't make it. I did. I saw it, but I saw it because I made myself see it. I took the stars, which are distant suns, and the night, which is the Earth's shadow, and the snow, which is water undergoing a state-change, and I took the tears in my eyes, and I made a wonderland. No one else has ever been able to see it. No one else has ever been able to go there. Not even I can ever return to it physically; it lies thirty-eight years in the past, in the eye-level perspective of a child, its stereoscopic accuracy based on the separation between the eyes of a child. In only one place does it actually exist. In my mind, Elizabeth — in my life. But I will die, and where will it be, then?"

  Elizabeth looked up at him. "In my mind, a little? Along with the rest of you?"

  Hawks looked at her. He reached out, and bending forward as tenderly as a child receiving a snowflake to hold, gently enclosed her in his arms. "Elizabeth, Elizabeth," he said. "I never realized what you were letting me do."

  "I love you."

  They walked together down the beach. "When I was a little girl," she said, "my mother registered me with Central Casting and tried to get me parts in the movies. I remember, one day there was a call for someone to play the part of a Mexican sheepherder's daughter, and my mother very carefully dressed me in a little peasant blouse and a flowered skirt, and bought a rosary for me to hold. She braided my hair, and darkened my eyebrows, and took me down to the studio. When we got back to the house that afternoon, my aunt said to my mother, 'Didn't get it, huh?' And my mother, who was in a tearful fury, said, 'It was the lousiest thing I've ever seen! It was terrible! She almost had it, but she got beaten out by some little Spic brat!'

  Hawks tightened the arm he held around her shoulders. He looked out to sea, and at the sky. "This is a beautiful place!" he said. "You know, this is a beautiful place."

  CHAPTER NINE

  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 i
sland. 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 understand?"

  "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.

 

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