Rogue Moon

by Algis Budrys

  "Women —" he said earnestly, "women have always fascinated me. As a kid I did the usual amount of experimenting. It didn't take me long to find out life wasn't like what happened in those mimeographed stories we had circulating around the high school. No, there was something else — what, I don't know, but there was something about women. I don't mean the physical thing. I mean some special thing about women: some purpose that I couldn't grasp. What bothered me was that here were these other intelligent organisms, in the same world with men, and there had to be a purpose for that intelligence. If all women were for was the continuance of the race, what did they need intelligence for? A simple set of instincts would have done just as well. And as a matter of fact, the instincts are there, so what was the intelligence for? There were plenty of men to take care of making the physical environment comfortable. That wasn't what women were for. At least, it wasn't what they had to have intelligence for… But I never found out. I've always wondered."

  Elizabeth smiled. "You still don't see that we're saying the same things about you."

  Hawks sighed and said, "Maybe we are. But that doesn't tell me what I want to know."

  Elizabeth said softly, "Maybe you'll find out some day soon. Meanwhile, why haven't you tried to make love to me?"

  Hawks stared at her. "For Heaven's sake, Elizabeth, I don't know you well enough!"

  "That's exactly what I mean about you," Elizabeth said, the blush fading from her face. "Now, Doctor, would you like another cup of tea?"

  Elizabeth had gone back to work at her drawing table, sitting with her heels hooked over the top rung of her stool, a curl of smoke rising from the ash tray held in place by two map pins on the edge of the board. Now and then a wisp would drift into her face and make her squint. She would curse softly and smile at Hawks, who was sitting on a low hassock beside the table, his hand cupping his jackknifed knees.

  "I was in love with a girl at college," he said. "A very attractive girl, from Chicago. She was intelligent; she was, most of all, tactful. And she had seen and done so many things I hadn't — plays, opera, concerts: all the things you can have, in a city. I envied her tremendously because of it, and I admired her very much. The thing is, I never tried to share any of these things with her. I had the idea, I think, that if I asked her to tell me about these things, I would be talking them away from her — getting something from her that she had earned and I had no business filching. But I thought to myself that as fine a person as that could judge whether I was anything worthwhile or not. At least, I imagine that's how I looked at it. At any rate, I tried to share everything with her. I talked her ear off, as a matter of fact."

  Elizabeth put her pencil down and raised her head to watch him.

  "There were times when we were very close, and other times when we weren't. I was always in despair of losing her. And one day, just before we graduated, she said to me, very tactfully, 'Ed, why don't you just relax and take me out someplace where we can get a drink or two? We could dance a little, and go for a drive, and we could just park somewhere and not talk at all.' And something came over me," Hawks said. "In the blink of an eye, I was out of love with her. And I never went near her again.

  "Why, exactly? I don't know. Just because I thought I was so wonderful that not being listened to was unimaginable? Hardly. I knew I was full of drivel. I knew that very little of what I had to say was either original or interesting. And I never talked to anyone but her. I could barely bring myself to keep up social conversations with other people. But I loved her, Elizabeth, and she had told me she didn't want to listen any longer, and I stopped loving her. It was as if she'd turned into a cobra. I began to tremble uncontrollably. I got away from her as fast as I could and went to my room — and sat there shaking. It must have been an hour before it stopped.

  "She tried to get in touch with me several times. And there were times when I almost went out looking for her again. But it never worked out. I was out of love. And I was frightened — Once, during the war, I was trapped in a lab fire and barely got out in time. For a few moments, I was convinced I was going to die. That's the only time I've ever felt that same fear… Oh, yes," he said, "I have trouble with women."

  "Maybe you just have trouble with dying."

  His expression grew infinitely distant. The set of his face and body changed. "Yes," he said, "I do."

  He stood up finally, his hands in his pockets, having sat without saying anything for a long time. "It's late. I'd better go," he said.

  Elizabeth looked up from her work. "You're still on this project of yours?"

  He smiled crookedly. "I suppose so. I'm assuming all the people I need on it will show up for work tomorrow."

  "Do some of them stay home Saturdays?"

  "Oh? Is tomorrow Saturday?"

  "I thought that was what you meant."

  "No. No, I didn't think of it. And the day after that will be Sunday."

  Elizabeth raised her eyebrows and said innocently, "It usually works out that way, yes."

  "Cobey'll be very upset," Hawks was saying, lost in thought. "He'll have to pay the technicians bonus-time rates."

  "Who's Cobey?"

  "A man, Elizabeth. Another man I know."

  She drove him home, to the stuccoed pastel apartment house, built in the mid-1920's; where he had his one-and-one-half-room efficiency flat.

  "I've never seen where you lived, before," she said, setting the parking brake.

  "No," he agreed. His face was drawn with fatigue. He sat with his chin on his chest, his knees against the dashboard. "It's —" He waved his hand vaguely at the looming, tile-roofed bulk, the walls vined by cracks which had been plastered over and repainted with brush-wide stripes of paint fresher than the original overall coat. "It's a place."

  "Don't you ever miss the farm country? Open fields? Woods? A clear sky?"

  "There weren't many open fields," he said. "It was mainly chicken farming, and everything was filled up with one and two-story lines of coops." He looked out the window. "Coops." He looked back at her. "You know, chickens are highly subject to respiratory ailments. They sigh and wheeze and snore, all night, by the thousands — a sound that hangs over entire townships, like the moaning of a distant crowd, weeping and deprived. Chickens. I used to wonder if they knew what we were — why we made them run in pens, and eat at feeding troughs, and drink at spigots. Why we kept the rain off them, and broke our backs carrying wet mash to them. Why we went into their coops, every week, and scraped their droppings out from under their roosts, and tried to keep the coops as clean of disease breeding areas as possible. I wondered if they knew, and if that was why they groaned in their sleep. But of course, chickens are abysmally stupid. Of all the living things in this world, only Man thinks like Man."

  He opened the car door, half turned to step out, and then stopped. "You know — You know," he began again, "I do talk a lot, when we're together." He looked at her apologetically. "You must get awfully bored with it."

  "I don't mind."

  He shook his head. "I can't understand you." He smiled gently.

  "Would you like to?"

  He blinked. "Yes. Very much."

  "Maybe I feel the same way about you?"

  He blinked again. "Well," he said. "Well. I've been sort of assuming that all along, haven't I? I never thought of that. I never did." He shook his head. He said ruefully, "Only Man thinks like Man." He got out of the car, and stood beside it looking in at her. "You've been very good to me tonight, Elizabeth. Thank you."

  "I want you to call me again as soon as you can." He frowned suddenly. "Yes. As soon as I can," he said in a troubled voice. He closed the door and stood tapping his fingers on the sill of the opened window. "Yes," he said. He grimaced. "Time runs on," he objected under his breath. "I'll — I'll call," he said to her, and walked away toward the apartment house, his head down, his arms hanging at his sides, the large hands opening and closing out of rhythm with his steps, his path a little erratic, so that he had wandered from one
side of the walk to the other before he reached the apartment-house door and began fumbling one-half-room efficiency flat.

  Finally, he got the door open. He turned, looked back, and waved stiffly, as if not sure he had really finished their conversation. Then he let the arm fall, and pushed the door open.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Barker came into the laboratory the next day with his eyes red-rimmed. His hands shook as he got into his undersuits.

  Hawks walked up to him. "I'm glad to see you here," he said awkwardly.

  Barker looked up and said nothing.

  Hawks said, "Are you sure you're all right? If you're not feeling well, we can cancel until tomorrow."

  Barker said, "Just stop worrying about me."

  Hawks put his hands in his pockets. "Well. Have you been to see the navigating specialists?"

  Barker nodded.

  "Were you able to give them a clear account of yesterday's results?"

  "They acted happy. Why don't you wait until they get it digested and put the reports on your desk? What does it matter to you what I find up there? Just as long as I keep making distance, and don't crack. Isn't that right? You don't care what happens to me; all I'm doing is blazing a trail so your smart technicians won't trip over anything when they go up to there to take it apart, right? So what's it to you, unless you lose me and have to go find a new boy, right? And how would you do that? How many people do you suppose Connington has plans for in the back of his head? Not plans that lead to this place, right? So why don't you just leave me alone?"

  "Barker —" Hawks shook his head. "No, forget it. There's no use talking."

  "I hope you can stick to that idea."

  Hawks sighed. "All right. There's one thing; this is going to go on day after day, now, astronomical conditions permitting. It won't stop until you've come out the other side of the formation. Once we start, it'll be difficult to interrupt our momentum. But if there's ever a time when you'd like to take a break — get some rest, work on your cars; anything — if it's at all possible, we'll do it. We —"

  Barker's lips curled back. "Hawks, I'm here to do something. I intend to do it. It's all I want to do. All right?"

  Hawks nodded. "All right, Barker." He took his hands out of his pockets. "I hope it doesn't take too long to do."

  Hawks walked down the corridor until he came to the navigating section. He knocked, and stepped in. The men of the specialist team looked up, then went back to huddling over the large-scale map of the formation which occupied the twelve-foot-square table in the center of the room. Only the Coast Guard officer in charge came over to Hawks as the others patiently made marks on the large plastic sheet with bits of red chalk on the ends of long wooden pointers. One of them was standing at a tape recorder, his head cocked as he listened to Barker's voice.

  The voice was low and strangled. "I told you!" it was saying. "There's a sort of blue cloud … and something that seems to be moving inside it. Not like something alive."

  "Yes, we have that," a team member's patient voice replied. "But how far from where you were standing on the white sand hill was it? How many steps?"

  "It's hard to say. Six or seven."

  "Uh-huh. Now, you say that was directly on your right, the way you were faced? All right, now, then what did you do?"

  "I walked about six feet out onto this ledge, and turned left to follow it around that red spire. Then I —"

  "Did you notice where the blue cloud was, in relation to you, as you made that turn?"

  "I was looking back over my right shoulder at it."

  "I see. Would you turn your head to that angle, now, so I can get a better idea? Thank you. About twelve degrees from dead right. And it was still six or seven steps away in straight-line distance?"

  The team member stopped the tape, ran it back, and began playing it again. He made a note on a work sheet.

  The Coast Guard officer asked Hawks, "Can I help you with anything, Doctor? We'll have all this written up and ready for you in a few hours. As soon as it's done, we'll shoot it right up to your office."

  Hawks smiled. "I didn't come here to chivvy you along or get underfoot. Don't worry, Lieutenant. I just wanted to know how it looks in general. Is he making enough sense to be of any help to you?"

  "Doing fine, sir. His descriptions of things in there don't agree with anything the other reports gave us — but then nobody seems to see the same things. What counts is that the hazards are always located in the same relative positions. So we know there's something there, and that's enough." The lieutenant, a lean, habitually gloomy man, smiled. "And this is a lot better than trying to make sense out of a few scribbles from a slate. He's given us a tremendous amount to work with, just in this one trip." The lieutenant rubbed the back of his neck. "It's kind of a relief. There was a while there when we were beginning to be pretty sure we'd be eligible for retirement before that thing —" he nodded toward the map — "got itself finished."

  Hawks smiled without amusement. "Lieutenant, if I weren't able to make the phone call to Washington that I can make, this job would have been all finished right now."

  "Oh. I guess we'd better take good care of him, then." The lieutenant shook his head. "I hope he lasts. He's a little on the hard-to-get-along-with side, for us. But you can't have everything. I guess if you've finally got a man who works out smoothly on the science part of this, that's the main thing, even if it's not all peaches and cream down here on the practical end. "

  "Yes," Hawks said. The man at the tape recorder shut the machine off, walked to the map table, tightened a piece of chalk in the socket of his pointer and, reaching out, made a delicate scarlet fleck-mark on the white plastic. He looked at it critically and then nodded with satisfaction.

  Hawks nodded, too. He said, "Thank you, Lieutenant," to the officer, and went up to his office.

  That day, the elapsed time Barker was able to survive within the formation was raised to four minutes, thirty-eight seconds.

  On the day that the elapsed time was brought to six minutes, twelve seconds, Connington came to see Hawks in his office.

  Hawks looked up curiously from behind his desk. Connington walked slowly across the office. "Wanted to talk to you," he mumbled as he sat down. "It seemed as if I ought to." His eyes searched restlessly back and forth.

  "Why?" Hawks asked.

  "Well — I don't know, exactly. Except that it wouldn't feel right, just sort of letting it drop. There's — I don't know, exactly, what you'd call it, but there's a pattern to life… Ought to be a pattern, anyhow: a beginning, a middle, and an end. Chapters, or something. I mean, there's got to be a pattern, or how could you control things?"

  "I can see that it might be necessary to believe that," Hawks said patiently.

  "You still don't give an inch, do you?" Connington said.

  Hawks said nothing, and Connington waited a moment, then let the matter drop. "Anyhow," he said, "I wanted you to know I was leaving."

  Hawks sat back in his chair and looked at him expressionlessly. "Where are you going?"

  Connington gestured vaguely. "East. I'll find a job there, I guess."

  "Is Claire going with you?"

  Connington nodded, his eyes on the floor. "Yes, she is." He looked up and smiled desperately. "It's a funny way to have it end up, isn't it?"

  "Exactly the way you planned it," Hawks pointed out. "All but the part about eventually becoming company president."

  Connington's expression set into a defiant grin. "Oh, I didn't really figure it was as sure a thing as that. I just wanted to see what happened when I put some salt on your tail." He stood up quickly. "Well, I guess that's that. I just wanted to let you know how it all came out in the end."

  "Well, no," Hawks said. "Barker and I are still not finished."

  "I am," Connington said defiantly. "I've got my part of it. Whatever happens from now on doesn't have anything to do with me."

  "Then you're the winner of the contest."

  "Sure," Conningt
on said.

  "And that's what it always is. A contest. And then a winner emerges, and that's the end of that part of everyone's life. All right. Goodbye, Connington."

  "Goodbye, Hawks." He turned away, and hesitated. He looked back over his shoulder. "I guess that was all I wanted to say."

  Hawks said nothing.

  "I could have done it with a note or a phone call." At the door, he said, "I didn't have to do it at all." He shook his head, puzzled, and looked to Hawks as if for an answer to a question he was asking himself.

  Hawks said gently, "You just wanted to make sure I knew who the winner was, Connington. That's all."

  "I guess," Connington said unsurely, and walked slowly out.

  The next day, when the elapsed time was up to six minutes, thirty-nine seconds, Hawks came into the laboratory and said to Barker, "I understand you're moving into the city, here."

  "Who told you?"

  "Winchell." Hawks looked carefully at Barker. "The new personnel director."

  Barker grunted. "Connington's gone East, someplace." He looked up with a puzzled expression on his face. "He and Claire went out to get her stuff yesterday, while I was here. They smashed all those windows looking from the living room out on the lawn. I'll have to have them all replaced before I can put the place up for sale. I never thought he was like that."

  "I wish you'd keep the house. I envy it."

  "That's none of your business, Hawks."

  But, nevertheless, the elapsed time had been brought up to six minutes, thirty-nine seconds.

  On the day that the elapsed time was brought up to seven minutes, twelve seconds, Hawks was in his office, tracing his fingertip down the crumpled chart, when his desk telephone rang.

  He glanced aside at it with a flicker of his eyes, hunched his shoulders, and continued with what he was doing. His fingertip moved along the uncertain blue line, twisting between the shaded black areas, each marked with its instruction and relative time bearing, each bordered by its drift of red X's, as if the chart represented a diagram of a prehistoric beach, where one stumbling organism had marked its labored trail up upon the littered sand between the long rows of drying kelp and other flotsam which now lay stranded under the lowering sky. He stared down raptly at the chart, his lips moving, then closed his eyes, frowned, repeated bearings and instructions, opened his eyes and leaned forward again.