The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 2 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Judith Merril

  Thirty miles beyond, its belly skids touched the packed New Mexican sand. An immense dust cloud stirred into life at the rear of the ship and spread slowly across the desert.

  As soon as the ship touched, the three helicopters took off to meet it. The helicopters were ten miles away when the ship halted and lay motionless. The dust began to dissipate rearward. The late afternoon sun distorted the flowing lines of the ship and made it look like some outlandish beast of prey crouched on the desert.

  As the lead helicopter drew within a mile of the ship, its television camera caught the ship clearly for the first time. Telephoto lenses brought it in close, and viewers once again watched closely. They looked admiringly at the stubby swept-back wings and at the gaping opening at the rear from which poured the fires of hell itself. But most of all they looked to the area amidship where the door was.

  And as they watched, the door swung open. The sun slanted in and showed two figures standing there. The figures moved to a point just inside the door and stopped. They stood there looking out, motionless, for what seemed an interminable period. Then the two figures looked at each other, nodded, and jumped out the door.

  Though the sand was only four feet below the sill of the door, both men fell to their knees. They quickly arose, knocked the dust from their clothes, and started walking to where the helicopters were waiting. And all over the country people watched that now-familiar moon walk—the rocking of the body from side to side to get too-heavy feet off the ground, the relaxed muscles on the down step where the foot just seemed to plop against the ground.

  But the cameras did not focus on the general appearance or action of the men. The zoom lenses went to work and a close-up of the faces of the two men side by side flashed across the country.

  The faces even at first glance seemed different. And as the cameras lingered, it became apparent that the difference was in the eyes: a level-eyed expression, undeviating, penetrating, probing, yet laden with compassion. There was a look of things seen from deep inside, and of things seen beyond the range of normal vision. It was a far look, a compelling look, a powerful look set in the eyes of normal men. And even when those eyes were closed, there was something different. A network of tiny creases laced out from both corners of each eye. The crinkled appearance of the eyes made each man appear older than he was, older and strangely wizened.

  The cameras stayed on the men’s faces as they awkwardly walked toward the helicopters. Even though several dignitaries hurried forward to greet the men, the camera remained on the faces, transmitting that strange look for all to see. A nation crammed forward to watch.

  In Macon, Georgia, Mary Sinderman touched a wetted finger to the bottom of the iron. She heard it pop as she stared across her ironing board at the television screen with the faces of two men on it.

  “Charlie. Oh, Charlie,” she called. “Here they are.”

  A dark, squat man in an undershirt came into the room and looked at the picture. “Yeah,” he grunted. “They got it all right. Both of ‘em.”

  “Aren’t they handsome?” she said.

  He threw a black look at her and said, “No, they ain’t.” And he went out the door he had come in.

  In Stamford, Connecticut, Walter Dwyer lowered his newspaper and peered over the top of it at the faces of two men on the television screen. “Look at that, honey,” he said.

  His wife looked up from her section of the paper and nodded silently. He said, “Two more, dear. If this keeps up, we’ll all be able to retire and let them run things.” She chuckled, and nodded and continued to watch the screen.

  In Boise, Idaho, the Tankard Saloon was doing a moderate business. The television set was on up over one end of the bar. The faces of two men flashed on the screen. Slowly a silence fell over the saloon as one person after another stopped what he was doing to watch. One man sitting in close under the screen raised his drink high in tribute to the two faces.

  * * * *

  In a long, low building on the New Mexican flats, the wall TV set was on. A thin young man wearing heavy glasses sat stiffly erect on a folding chair, watching the two faces. “Dr. Scott,” he said, “they both have the look.”

  The older man nodded wordlessly.

  “Do you think you’ll be able to find out anything this time, Dr. Scott?” young Webb asked.

  A slight urge to tell this young man to keep his big fat mouth shut rose up in Dr. Scott. He noted the urge and filed it away with other urges toward bright young men who believe everything they learned at college, and no more.

  “I don’t know, Dr. Webb,” he said. “We’ve examined sixteen of these fellows without finding out anything so far.”

  The two men boarded a helicopter. The screen faded to a blare of martial music, and then came to life on a toothy announcer praising the virtues of a hair shampoo. Webb snapped the set off, turned to Scott, and said, “Of course, you’ve isolated all the factors resulting from your system of selection?”

  Scott clamped his teeth down on the bit of his cold pipe. He took time to strike a match and puff it back to life, and then he was able to answer calmly, “Yes, of course. The first ten men we chose were not selected by the same standards we use now. Two of them died on the Moon, but the same ratio of those who returned developed the far look. The change in the selection system seems to effect survival— but not the ‘far look.’ “

  “Then it must be something that happens to them. Don’t all these men go through some experience in common?”

  “All the men go through a great many experiences in common,” Scott answered. “They go through two years of intensive training. They make a flight through space and land on the Moon. They spend twenty-eight days of hell reading instruments, making surveys, and collecting samples. They suffer loneliness such as no human being has ever known before. Their lives are in constant peril. Each pair has had at least one disaster during their stay. Then they get their replacements and come back to Earth. Yes, they have something in common all right. But a few come back without the far look. They’ve improved; they’re better than most men here on Earth. But they are not on a par with the rest.”

  Webb was at the window, watching for the first sign of the helicopter. He shook his head, unconvinced. “We’re missing something. Somewhere there’s an element that’s missing. And, consciously or unconsciously, these men know what it is.”

  Scott took the pipe from his mouth and said softly, “I doubt it. We’ve pumped them full of half a dozen truth drugs. We’ve doped them and subjected them to hypnosis. Maybe they’re concealing something but I doubt it very much.”

  Webb shook his head again, and turned from the window. “I don’t know. There’s something missing here. I certainly mean to put these subjects through exhaustive tests.”

  The anger in Scott brought a flush to his face. He crossed the room toward Webb and touched him on the lapel of the coat with the stem of his pipe as he said, “Look here, young fella, these ‘subjects’ as you call them are like no subjects you ever had or conceived of. These men can twist you and me up into knots if they want to. They understand more about people than the entire profession of psychiatrics will learn in the next hundred years.”

  He put the pipe in his mouth and said, more gently, “You are in for a shock, Dr. Webb. These two particular men are fresh from the Moon, and do not yet fully realize the impact they have on other . . .” The murmur of approaching motors stopped him. “You’d best get yourself ready for an experience, Dr. Webb,” he said. The murmur grew to a roar as the helicopters landed outside the building. In a moment footsteps sounded outside in the hall and the door opened.

  Two men walked into the room. The taller of the two looked at Webb and Webb felt as if struck by a hot blast of wind. The level eyes were brilliant blue and seemed to reach into Webb and gently strum on the fibers of his nervous system. A sense of elation swept through him. He felt as he had once felt standing alone at dusk in a wind-tossed forest. He could not speak. His breath stopped. His
muscles held rigid. And then the blue-eyed glance passed him and left him confused and restless and disappointed.

  He dimly saw Scott cross the room and shake hands with the shorter man. Scott said, “How do you do. We are very glad for your safe return. Was everything in order when you left the Moon?”

  The shorter man smiled as he shook Scott’s hand. “Thank you, doctor. Yes, everything was in order. Our two replacements are off to a good start.” He glanced at the taller man. They looked at each other, and smiled.

  “Yes,” said the taller man, “Fowler and Mcintosh will do all right.”

  * * * *

  Don Fowler and Al Mcintosh still had the shakes. After six days they still had the shakes whenever they remembered the first few moments of their landing on the Moon.

  The ship had let down roughly. Fowler awkwardly climbed out through the lock first. He turned to make sure Mcintosh was following him and then started to move around the ship to look for the two men they were to replace.

  The ship lay near a crevice. A series of ripples in the rock marred the black shiny basalt surface that surrounded the crevice. The surface was washed clean of dust by the jets of the descending ship. As Fowler walked around the base of the ship his foot stepped into the trough of one of the ripples in the rock. It threw him off balance, tilted him toward the crevice. He struggled to right himself. Under Earth gravity he would simply have fallen. Under Lunar gravity he managed to retain his feet, but he staggered toward the crevice, stumbling in the ripples, unable to recover himself.

  Mcintosh grabbed for him. But with arms flailing, body twisting, feet groping, Fowler disappeared down the crevice. Mcintosh staggered behind him; his feet skidded on the ripples in the hard, slick basalt. He, too, bobbled to the lip of the crevice and toppled in.

  Thirty feet down the crevice narrowed to a point where the men could fall no farther. Fowler was head down and four feet to Mcintosh’s left. They were unhurt but they began to worry when a few struggles showed them how firmly the slick rock gripped their spacesuits. The pilot of the spaceship, sealed in his compartment, could not help them. The two men they were to replace might be miles away. The radios were useless for anything but line-of-sight work. So they hung there, waiting for something—or nothing—to happen.

  Fowler spoke first. “Say, Mac, did you get a chance to see what the Moon looks like before you joined me down here?”

  “No. I had sort of hoped you’d noticed. Now we don’t have a thing to talk about.”

  Silence, then: “This is one for the books,” said Fowler. “Can you see anything? All I can see is the bottom of this thing and all I can tell you is it’s black down there.”

  “No. I can’t see out. I have a nice view of the wall, though. Dense, igneous, probably of basic plagioclose. Make a note of that, will you?”

  “Can you reach me?”

  “No. I can’t even see you. Can you—”

  “What are you fellows doing down there?” A new voice broke into the conversation. Neither Fowler nor Mcintosh could think of an answer. “Stay right there,” the voice continued, with something suspiciously like a chuckle in it. “We’ll be down to get you out.”

  The pinned men could hear a rock-scraping sound through their suits. Two pairs of hands rocked each man free of the walls. Mcintosh was the first to be freed and he watched with close interest the easy freedom of movement of the two spacesuited figures as they released Fowler, turned him right side up, and lifted him up to where he could support himself in the crevice. All four then worked their way up the slick walls by sliding their backs up one wall while bracing their feet against the opposite wall.

  The two men led Fowler and Mcintosh around to the other side of the spaceship and pointed westward across Mare Imbrium. One of them said, “About half a mile over there behind that rise you’ll find the dome. About eight miles south of here you’ll find the latest cargo rocket—came in two days ago. The terrain is pretty rough so you’d better wait a few days to get used to the gravity before you go after it. We left some hot tea for you at the dome. Watch yourselves now.”

  They all solemnly shook hands. The clunk of the metallic-faced palms of the spacesuit and the gritty sound of the finger, wrist, and elbow joints made hand-shaking a noisy business in a spacesuit.

  Both Fowler and Mcintosh tried to see the faces of the two men they were replacing, but they could not. It was daytime on the Moon and the faceplate filters were all in place. Their radio voices sounded the same as they had on Earth.

  Fowler and Mcintosh turned and carefully and awkwardly moved westward away from the ship. A quarter of a mile away they turned to watch it and for the first time the men had the chance to see the actual moonscape.

  * * * *

  Pictures are wonderful things and they are of great aid in conveying information. Words and pictures are often adequate to impart a complete understanding of a place or event. Yet where human emotions are intertwined with an experience mere words and pictures are inadequate.

  It might well be that on Earth there existed similar wild wastelands, but they were limited, and human beings lived on the fringes, and human beings had crossed them, and human beings could stand out on them unprotected and feel the familiar heat of day and the cold of night. Here there was only death for the unarmored man, swift death like nothing on Earth. And nowhere were there human beings, nor any possibility of human beings. Only the darker and lighter places, no color, black sky, white spots for stars, and the moonscape itself nothing but brilliant gray shades of tones between the white stars and the black sky.

  So Fowler and Mcintosh, knowing in advance what it would be like, still had to struggle to fight down an urge to scream at finding themselves in a place where men did not exist. They stared out through the smoked filters, wide-eyed, panting, fine drops of perspiration beading their foreheads. Each could hear the harsh breath of the other in the earphones, and it helped a little to know they both felt the same.

  A spot of fire caught their attention and they turned slightly to see. The spaceship stood ungainly and awkward with a network of pipes surrounding the base. The spot of fire turned into a column, and the ship trembled. The column produced a flat bed of fire, and the ship rose slowly. There was no dust. A small stream of fire reached out sideways as a balancing rocket sprang to life. The ship rose farther, faster now, and Fowler and Mcintosh leaned back to watch it. Once it cleared the Moon’s horizon it lost apparent motion. They watched it grow smaller until the fire was indistinguishable with the stars, then they looked around again.

  It was a little better this time, since they were prepared for an emotional response. But now they were truly alone. Without knowing what they were doing, they drew closer together until their spacesuits touched. The gentle thud registered in each consciousness and they pressed together for a moment while they fought to organize their thoughts.

  And then Mcintosh drew a long deep breath and shook his head violently. Fowler could feel the relief it brought. They moved apart and looked around.

  Mcintosh said, “Let’s go get that tea they mentioned.”

  “Right,” said Fowler. “I could use some. That’s the dome there.” And he pointed west.

  They headed for it. They could see the dome in every detail; and as they approached, the details grew larger. It was almost impossible to judge distances on the Moon. Everything stood out with brilliant clarity no matter how far away. The only effect of distance was to cause a shrinking in size.

  The dome was startling in its familiarity. It was the precise duplicate to the last bolt of the dome they had lived in and operated for months in the hi-vac chambers on Earth.

  The air lock was built to accommodate two men in a pinch. They folded back the antennas that projected up from their packs and they crawled into the lock together; neither suggested going in one at a time. They waited while the pump filled the lock with air from the inside; then they pushed into the dome itself and stood up and looked around.

  Automa
tically their eyes flickered from one gauge to another, checking to make sure everything was right with the dome. They removed their helmets and checked more closely. Air pressure was a little high, eight pounds. Fowler reached out to throw the switch to bring it down when he remembered that a decision had been made just before they left Earth to carry the pressure a little higher than had been the practice in the past. A matter of sleeping comfort.

  “How’s the pottet?” asked Mcintosh. His voice sounded different from the way it had on Earth.

  Fowler noted the difference—a matter of the difference in air density—as he crossed the twenty-foot dome and squatted to look into a bin with a transparent side. The bin bore the label in raised letters, Potassium Tetraoxide.

  * * * *

  On Earth, water is the first worry of those who travel to out-of-the-way places. Food is next, with comfort close behind depending on the climate. On the Moon, oxygen was first. The main source of oxygen was potassium tetraoxide, a wonderful compound that gave up oxygen when exposed to moisture and then combined with carbon dioxide and removed it from the atmosphere. And each man needed some one thousand pounds of the chemical to survive on the Moon for twenty-eight days. A cylinder, bulky and heavy, of liquid air mounted under the sled supplied the air make-up in the dome. And a tank of water, well insulated by means of a hollow shiny shell open to the Moon’s atmosphere, gave them water and served in part as the agent to release oxygen from the pottet when needed.