Rogue Moon

by Algis Budrys

  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 semi-flexible 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 amplified, 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 he 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-hand, 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 d
ie, 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, half-buried, 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."