The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B (23 page)

"How am I to do that, Elizabeth? How am I to build that
sort of machine?"

She touched his hand at the door, and his fingers quivered
sharply. "Please call me again as soon as you can," she said.

"I don't know when that will be," he answered.
"This—this project I'm on is going to take up a lot of time, if it works
out."

"Call me when you can. If I'm not here, I'll be
home."

"I'll call." He whispered: "Good night,
Elizabeth." He was pressing his hand against the side of his leg. His arm
began to tremble. He turned before she could touch him again and went quickly
down the loft stairs to his car, the sound of his footsteps echoing clumsily
downward.

Hawks was sitting in his office the next morning when Barker
knocked on the door and came in. "The guard at the gate told me to see you
here," he said. His eyes measured Hawks' face. "Decided to fire me or
something?"

Hawks shook his head. He closed the topmost of the bundle of
file folders on his desk and pointed toward the other chair. "Sit down,
please. You have a great deal to think over before you go to the
laboratory."

"Sure." Barker's expression had relaxed just
enough to show that it had been touched by uncertainty. He walked over the
uncarpeted floor with sharp scuffs of his jodhpur boot heels. "And by the
way, good morning, Doctor," he said, sitting down and crossing his legs.
The shim plate bulged starkly under the whipcord fabric stretched across his
knee.

"Good morning," Hawks said shortly. He opened the
file folder and took out a large folded square of paper. He spread it out on
his desk facing Barker.

Without looking at it, Barker said: "Claire wants to
know what's going on."

"Did you tell her?"

"Did the FBI reports call me a fool?"

"Not in ways that concern them."

"I hope that's your answer. I was only reporting a fact
you might be interested in. It cost me my night's sleep."

"Can you put in five minutes' physical effort this
afternoon?"

"I'd say so if I couldn't."

"All right, then. Five minutes is all the time you'll
have." He touched the map. "This is a chart of the Moon formation.
You'll find it marked to show previous deaths, and the safe path. Attached to
it is the summary of actions that have proven safe, and actions that have
proven fatal. I want you to memorize it. You'll have one with you when you go
in, but there's no guarantee that having it won't prove fatal at some point we
haven't yet foreseen.

"And I want you to remember something, Barker—you are
going to die. There is no hope of your survival. You will feel yourself die.
Your only hope is in the fact that actually it will be Barker M, on the Moon,
who dies, and Barker L, down here in the receiver, whose physical being will be
perfectly safe. Let us hope Barker L will be able to remember that." Hawks
looked intently across the desk. "I'm speaking to both of you, now—to
Barker M and Barker L, not to the Al Barker who will be destroyed in the scan.
Remember what I'm telling you now. Because if you don't, this will be a useless
death, and Al Barker—all of Al Barker; all the Al Barkers who have ever
occupied this life which began with his conception—will have come to an end."

"Now, look," Barker said, slapping the folder
shut, "according to this, if I make a wrong move, they'll find me with all
my blood in a puddle outside my armor, and not a mark on me. If I make another
move, I'll be paralyzed from the waist down, which means I have to crawl on my
belly. But crawling on your belly somehow makes things happen so you get
squashed up into your helmet. And it goes on in that cheerful vein all the way.
If I don't watch my step as carefully as a tightrope walker, and if I don't
move on time and in position, like a ballet dancer, I'll never even get as far
as this chart reads."

"Even if you stood and did nothing," Hawks agreed,
"the formation would kill you at the end of two hundred thirty two
seconds. It will permit no man to live in it longer than some man has forced it
to. The limit will go up as you progress. Why its nature is such that it yields
to human endeavor, we don't know. It's entirely likely that this is only a
coincidental side-effect of its true purpose—if it has one.

"Perhaps it's the alien equivalent of a discarded
tomato can. Does a beetle know why it can enter the can only from one end as it
lies across the trail to the beetle's burrow? Does the beetle understand why it
is harder to climb to the left or right, inside the can, than it is to follow a
straight line? Would the beetle be a fool to assume the human race put the can
there to torment it—or an egomaniac to believe the can was manufactured only to
mystify it? It would be best for the beede to study the can in terms of the
can's logic, to the limit of the beetle's ability. In that way, at least, the
beetle can proceed intelligently. It may even grasp some hint of the can's
maker. Any other approach is either folly or madness."

Barker looked up at Hawks impatiently. "Horse manure.
Is the beetle happier? Does it get anything? Does it escape anything? Do other
beetles understand what it's doing, and take up a collection to support it
while it wastes time? A smart beetle walks around your tomato can, Doctor, and
lives its life contented."

"Certainly," Hawks said. "Go ahead. Leave
now."

"I wasn't talking about me! I was talking about
you." He put the folder under one arm and stood with his hands in his
pockets, his head to one side as he stared flatly up into Hawks' face.
"Men, money, energy—all devoted to the eminent Doctor Hawks and his toys.
Sounds to me like the other beetles
have
taken up a collection."

"Looking at it that way," Hawks said
dispassionately, "does keep it simple. And it explains why I continue to
send men into the formation. It satisfies my ego to see men die at my command.
Now it's your turn. What's this"—he touched a lipstick smudge around a
purple bruise on the side of Barker's neck—"a badge of courage? Whose
heart will break if you are brought home on your shield today?"

Barker knocked his hand away. "A beetle's heart,
Doctor." His strained face fell into a ghastly, reminiscent smile. "A
beetle's cold, cold heart."

The Navy crew pushed Barker into the transmitter. The
lateral magnets lifted him off the table, and it was pulled out from beneath
him. The door was dogged shut, and the fore-and-aft magnets came on to hold him
locked immobile for the scanner. Hawks nodded to Latourette, and Latourette
punched the Standby button on his console.

Up on the roof, there was a radar dish focussed in
approximate parallel with the transmitter antenna. Down in the laboratory, Ted
Gersten pointed a finger at a technician. A radar beep travelled to the Moon
and returned. The elapsed time and doppler progression were fed as data into a
computer which set the precise holding time in the delay deck. The matter
transmitter antenna fired a UHF pulse through the Moon relay tower into the
receiver there, tripping its safety lock so that it would accept the M signal.

Latourette looked at his console, turned to Hawks and said:
"Green board."

Hawks said: "Shoot."

The red light went on over the transmitter portal, and the
new file tape began roaring into the takeup pulleys of the delay deck. One and
a quarter seconds later, the leader of the tape began passing through the
playback head feeding the L signal to the laboratory receiver. The first beat
of the M signal had hit the Moon.

The end of the tape clattered into the takeup reel. The
green light went on over the laboratory receiver's portal. Barker L's excited
breathing came through the speaker, and he said: "I'm here, Doctor."

Hawks stood in the middle of the floor with his hands in his
pockets, his head cocked to one side, his eyes vacant.

After a time, Barker L said peevishly in a voice distorted
by his numb lips: "All right, all right, you Navy bastards, I'm
goin'
in!"
He muttered: "Won't even talk to me, but they're sure as hell on waving me
along."

"Shut up, Barker," Hawks muttered urgently to
himself.

"Going in now, Doctor," Barker said clearly. His
breathing cycle changed. Once or twice after that, he grunted, and once he made
an unconscious, high, keening noise.

Latourette touched Hawks' arm and nodded toward the
stopwatch in his hand. It showed two hundred forty seconds of elapsed time
since Barker had gone into the formation. Hawks nodded a nearly imperceptible
reply.

Barker screamed. Hawks' body jumped in reflex, and his
flailing arm sent the watch cartwheeling out of Latourette's hand.

Holiday, at the medical console, brought his palm down flat.
A hyposprayer fired adrenalin into Barker L's heart as the anesthesia cut off.

"Get him out quickly!" Weston was shouting.
"He's gone into panic."

"It's just that he's alone," Hawks said softly, as
if the psychologist were standing where he could hear him.

Barker sat hunched on the edge of the table, the opened
armor lying dismembered beside him, and wiped his gray face. Holiday was
listening to his heartbeat with a stethoscope, looking aside periodically to
take a new blood pressure reading as he squeezed the manometer bulb he kept in
his hand. Barker sighed: "If there's any doubt, just ask me if I'm alive.
If you get an answer, you'll know." He looked wearily over Holiday's
shoulder as the physician ignored him, and said to Hawks: "Well?"

Hawks glanced aside at Weston, who nodded imperturbably.
"He's made it, Doctor Hawks."

"Barker," Hawks said, "I'm-"

"Yeah, I know. You're happy everything worked out all
right." He looked around. His eyes were darting jerkily from side to side.
"Could some of you stare at me a little later, please?"

"Barker," Hawks said gently. "Do you really
feel all right?"

Barker looked at him expressionlessly. "I got up there,
and they wouldn't even talk to me. They just shoved me along and showed me how
to get to the thing. Bastards."

"They have problems of their own," Hawks said.

"I'm sure they do. Anyway, I got into the thing all
right, and I moved along O.K.—it's—" His face forgot its annoyance, and
his expression now was one of closely remembered bafflement. "It's—a
little like a dream, you know? Not a nightmare, now—it's not all full of
screams and faces, or anything like that—but it's . . . well,
rules,
and
the crazy logic; Alice in Wonderland with teeth." He gestured as though
wiping his clumsy words from a blackboard. "I'll have to find ways of
getting it into English, I guess. Shouldn't be too much trouble. Just give me
time to settle down."

Hawks nodded. "Don't worry. We have a good deal of
time, now."

Barker grinned up at him with a sudden flash of boyishness.
"I got quite a distance beyond Rogan M's body, you know. You'll never
believe what killed him. What finally got me was—was—was the— was—"

Barker's face began to flush crimson, and his eyes bulged
whitely. His lips fluttered. "The-the-" He stared at Hawks. "I
can't!" he cried out. "I can't—Hawks—" He struggled against
Holiday and Weston's trying to hold his shoulders, and curled his hands rigidly
on the edge of the table, his arms locked taut, quivering in spasms.
"Hawks!" he shouted as though from behind a thick glass wall.
"Hawks, it didn't care! I was
nothing
to it! I was—I was—" His
mouth locked partly open and the tip of his tongue fluttered against the backs
of his upper teeth. "N-n-n . . .
No—N-nothing!"
He searched
Hawks' face, desperate. He breathed as though there could never be enough air
for him.

Weston was grunting with the effort to force Barker over
backward and make him lie down. Holiday was swearing as he precisely and
steadily pushed the needle of a hypodermic through the diaphragm of an ampule
he had plucked out of his bag.

Hawks clenched his fists at his sides. "Barker! What
color was your first schoolbook?"

Barker's arms loosened slightly. His head lost its rigid
forward thrust. He shook his head and scowled down at the floor, concentrating
fiercely.

"I—I don't remember, Hawks," he stammered.
"Green—no, no, it was orange, with blue printing, and it had a story in it
about three goldfish who climbed out of their bowl onto a bookcase and then dived
back into it. I—I can see the page with the illustration: three fish in the
air, falling in a slanted tier, with the bowl waiting for them. The text was
set with three one-word paragraphs: 'Splash!' and then a paragraph indentation,
and then 'Splash!' and then once more. Three 'Splashl's in a tier, just like
the fish."

"Well, now, you see, Barker," Hawks said softly.
"You have been alive for as long as you can remember. You
are
something.
You've seen, and remembered."

Barker was slumped, now. Nearly doubled over, he swayed on
the edge of the table, the color of his face gradually returning to normal. He
whispered intently: "Thanks. Thanks, Hawks." Bitterly, he whispered:
"Thanks for everything." He mumbled suddenly, his torso rigid: "Somebody
get me a wastebasket, or something."

Latourette and Hawks stood beside the transmitter, watching
Barker come unsteadily back from the washroom, dressed in his slacks and shirt.

"What do you think?" Latourette growled.
"What's he going to do now? Is he going to pull out on us?"

"I don't know," Hawks answered absently, watching
Barker. "I thought he'd work out," he said under his breath.
"We'll simply have to wait and see. We'll have to think of a way to handle
it."

He said as though attacked by flies: "I have to have time
to think. Why does time run on while a man thinks?"

Barker came up to them. His eyes were sunken in their
sockets. He looked piercingly at Hawks. His voice was jagged and nasal.