The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B

by Ben Bova (Ed)

  Then he was around the corner. The quickest route to the edge of the city, as well as he could recall, was down the street he had just quitted, but that was now out of the question; he had no desire to be burned down. Whether or not he could get out of IMT in time by any alternate route remained to be seen.

  Doggedly, he kept running. He was fired on once more, by a man who did not really know on whom he was firing. Here, Amalfi was just a running man who failed to fit the categories; any first shot at him would be a reflex of disorientation, and consequently aimed badly.

  The ground shuddered, ever so delicately, like the hide of a monster twitching at flies in its sleep. Somehow, Amalfi managed to run still faster.

  The shudder came again, stronger this time. A long, protracted groan followed it, traveling in a heavy wave through the bedrock of the city. The sound brought Proctors and serfs alike boiling out of the buildings.

  At the third shock, something toward the center of the city collapsed with a sullen roar. Amalfi was caught up in the aimless, terrified eddying of the crowd, and fought, with hands, teeth and bullet head—

  The groaning grew louder. Abruptly, the ground bucked. Amalfi pitched forward. With him went the whole milling mob, falling in windrows like stacked grain. There was frantic screaming everywhere, but it was worse inside the buildings. Over Amalfi's head a window shattered explosively, and a woman's body came twisting and tumbling through the shuddering air.

  Amalfi heaved himself up, spitting blood, and ran again. The pavement ahead was cracked in great, irregular shards, like a madman's mosaic. Just beyond, the blocks were tilted all awry, reminding Amalfi irrelevantly of a breakwater he had seen on some other planet, in some other century-He was clambering over them before he realized that these could only mark the rim of the original city of IMT. There were still more buildings on the other side of the huge, rockfilled trench, but the trench itself showed where the perimeter of the ancient Okie had been sunk into the soil of the planet. Fighting for air with saw-edged rales, he threw himself from stone to stone toward the far edge of the trench. This was the most dangerous ground of all; if IMT were to lift now, he would be ground as fine as mincemeat in the tumbling rocks. If he could just reach the marches of the Barrens—

  Behind him, the groaning rose steadily in pitch, until it sounded like the tearing of an endless sheet of metal. Ahead, across the Barrens to the east, his own city gleamed in the last rays of the twin suns. There was fighting around it; little bright flashes were sputtering at its edge. The rockets Amalfi had heard, four of them, were arrowing across the sky, and black things dropped from them. The Okie city responded with spouts of smoke.

  Then there was an unbearably bright burst. After Amalfi could see again, there were only three rockets. In another few seconds there wouldn't be any: the City Fathers never missed.

  Amalfi's lungs burned. He felt sod under his sandals. A twisted runner of furze lashed across his ankle and he fell again.

  He tried to get up and could not. The seared turf, on which an ancient rebel city once had stood, rumbled threateningly. He rolled over. The squat towers of IMT were swaying, and all around the edge of the city, huge blocks and clods heaved and turned over, like surf. Impossibly, a thin line of light, intense and ruddy, appeared above the moiling rocks. The suns were shining under the city—

  The line of light widened. The old city took the air with an immense bound, and the rending of the long-rooted foundations was ear-splitting. From the sides of the huge mass, human beings threw themselves desperately toward the Barrens; all those Amalfi saw were serfs. The Proctors, of course, were still trying to control the flight of IMT--

  The city rose majestically. It was gaining speed. Amalfi's heart hammered. If Heldon and his crew could figure out in time what Amalfi had done to the controls, Karst's old ballad would be re-enacted, and the crushing rule of the Proctors made safe forever.

  But Amalfi had done his work well. The city of IMT did not stop rising. With a profound, visceral shock, Amalfi realized that it was already nearly a mile up, and still accelerating. The air would be thinning up there, and the Proctors had forgotten too much to know what to do—

  A mile and a half.

  Two miles.

  It grew smaller. At five miles it was just a wavery ink-blot, lit on one side. At seven miles it was a point of dim light..

  A bristle-topped head and a pair of enormous shoulders lifted cautiously from a nearby gully. It was Karst. He continued to look aloft for a moment, but IMT at ten miles was invisible. He looked down to Amalfi.

  "Can . . . can it come back?" he said huskily.

  "No," Amalfi said, his breathing gradually coming under control. "Keep watching, Karst. It isn't over yet. Remember that the Proctors had called the Earth cops—"

  At that same moment, the city of IMT reappeared—in a way. A third sun flowered in the sky. It lasted for three or four seconds. Then it dimmed and died.

  "The cops were warned," Amalfi said softly, "to watch for an Okie city trying to make a getaway. They found it, and they dealt with it. Of course they got the wrong city, but they don't know that. They'll go home now—and now we're home, and so are you and your people. Home on Earth, for good."

  Around them, there was a murmuring of voices, hushed with disaster, and with something else, too—something so old, and so new, that it hardly had a name on the planet that IMT had ruled. It was called freedom.

  "On Earth?" Karst repeated. He and the mayor climbed painfully to their feet. "What do you mean? This is not Earth—"

  Across the Barrens, the Okie city glittered—the city that had pitched camp to mow some lawns. A cloud of stars was rising behind it.

  "It is now," Amalfi said. "We're all Earthmen, Karst. Earth is more than just one little planet, buried in another galaxy than this. Earth is much more important than that.

  "Earth isn't a place. It's an idea."

  ROGUE MOON by Algis Budrys

  CHAPTER ONE

  Late on a day in 1959, Edward Hawks, Doctor of Science, cradled his long jaw in his outsize hands and hunched forward with his sharp elbows on his desk. He was a black-haired, pale-skinned, gangling man who rarely got out in the sun. Compared to his staff of tanned young assistants, he always reminded strangers of a scarecrow.

  Now he watched a young man sitting in the straight chair facing him.

  The young man stared unblinkingly. His trim crewcut was wet with perspiration and plastered to his scalp. His features were clean, clear-skinned and healthy, but his chin was wet. "An dark . . ." he said querulously, "an dark an nowhere starlights. . . ."

  The third man in the office was Weston, the recently hired psychologist, who was sitting in an armchair he'd had brought down to Hawks' office.

  "He's insane," Hawks said to him like a wondering child.

  Weston crossed his legs. "I told you that, Dr. Hawks; I told you the moment we pulled him out of that apparatus of yours. What had happened to him was too much for him to stand."

  "I know you told me," Hawks said mildly. "But I'm responsible for him. I have to make sure." He began to turn back to the young man, then looked again at Weston. "He was young. Healthy. Exceptionally stable and resilient, you told me. He looked it." Hawks added slowly: "He was brilliant."

  "I said he was stable," Weston explained earnestly. "I didn't say he was inhumanly stable. I told you he was an exceptional specimen of a human being. You're the one who sent him to a place no human being should go."

  Hawks nodded. "You're right, of course. It's my fault."

  "Well, now," Weston said quickly, "he was a volunteer. He knew it was dangerous. He knew he could expect to die."

  But Hawks was ignoring Weston. He was looking straight out over his desk again. "Rogan?" he said softly. "Rogan?" He sighed at last and asked Weston: "Can you do anything for him?"

  "Cure him," Weston said confidently. "Electroshock treatments. They'll make him forget what happened to him in that place."

  "I didn't know elec
troshock amnesia was permanent."

  Weston blinked at Hawks. "He may need repetitive treatment now and then, of course."

  "Rogan," Hawks whispered, "Rogan, I'm sorry."

  "An dark ... an dark. ... It hurt me and so cold ... so quiet . . ."

  Edward Hawks, D.Sc., walked alone across the main laboratory's concrete floor, his hands at his sides. He chose a path among the generators and consoles without looking up, and came to a halt at the foot of the matter transmitter's receiving stage.

  The main laboratory occupied tens of thousands of square feet in the basement of Continental Electronics' Research Division building. A year ago, when Hawks had designed the transmitter, part of the first and second floors above it had been ripped out, and the transmitter now towered up nearly to the ceiling along the far wall. Catwalks interlaced the adjoining airspace, and galleries had been built for access to the instruments lining the walls. Dozens of men on Hawks' staff were still moving about, taking final checks before closing down for the day. Their shadows on the catwalks, now and then occluding some overhead light, mottled the floor in shifting patterns of darkness. Hawks stood looking up at the transmitter, his eyes puzzled. Someone abruptly said: "Ed!" and he turned his head in response.

  "Hello, Sam." Sam Latourette, his chief assistant, had walked up quietly. He was a heavy-boned man with loose, papery flesh and dark-circled, sunken eyes. Hawks smiled at him wanly. "The transmitter crew just about finished with their post-mortem, are they?"

  "You'll find the reports on your desk in the morning. There was nothing wrong with the machinery. Nothing anywhere." Latourette waited for Hawks to show interest. But Hawks only nodded his head.

  "Ed!"

  "Yes, Sam?"

  "Stop it. You're doing too much to yourself." He again waited for some reaction, but Hawks only smiled into the machine, and Latourette burst out: "Who do you think you're kidding? How long have I been working with you now? Ten years? Who gave me my first job? Who trained me? You can keep up a front with anybody else, but not with me!" Latourette clenched his fist and squeezed his fingers together emptily. "I know you! But—damn it, Ed, it's not your fault that thing's out there! What do you expect—that you not only won't ever make any mistakes but that nothing'!! ever get hurt, either? What do you want—a perfect world?"

  Hawks smiled again in the same way. "We tear a gateway where no gate has ever been," he said, nodding at the mechanisms, "in a wall we didn't build. That's called scientific investigation. Then we send men through the gate. That's the human adventure. And something on the other side—something that never troubled Mankind; something that's never done us any harm before or troubled us with the knowledge that it was there—kills them. In terrible ways we can't understand, it kills them. So I keep sending in more men. What's that called, Sam?"

  "Ed, we are making progress. This new approach is going to be the answer."

  Hawks looked curiously at Latourette. Latourette said uncomfortably: "Once we get the bugs out of it. That's all it needs."

  Hawks did not change his expression or turn it away. He stood with his fingertips forced against the gray crackle finish. "You mean, we're no longer killing them? We're only driving them insane with it?"

  "All we have to do, Ed," Latourette pressed him, "all we have to do is find a better way of cushioning the shock when the man feels himself die. More sedatives. Something like that."

  Hawks said: "They still have to go into that place. How they do it makes no difference; it won't tolerate them. It was never made for human beings to have anything to do with. It kills them. And no man can stand to die."

  Latourette reached out sharply and touched the sleeve of his smock. "Are you going to shut the program down?"

  Hawks looked at him.

  Latourette was clutching his arm. "Cobey. Isn't he ordering you to cancel it?"

  "Cobey can only make requests," Hawks said gently. "He can't order me."

  "He's company President, Ed! He can make your life miserable! He's dying to get Continental Electronics off this hook!"

  Hawks took Latourette's hand away from his arm. "The Navy originally financed the transmitter's development only because it was my idea. They wouldn't have vouchered that kind of money for anyone else in the world. Not for a crazy idea like this." He stared into the machine. "Even now, even though that place we found is the way it is, they still won't let Cobey back out on his own initiative. Not as long as they think I can keep going. I don't have to worry about Cobey." He smiled softly and a little incredulously. "Cobey has to worry about me."

  "Well, how about you? How much longer can you keep this up?"

  Hawks stepped back. He looked at Latourette thoughtfully. "Are we worrying about the project, now, or are we worrying about me?"

  Latourette sighed. "All right, Ed, I'm sorry," he said. "But what're you going to do?"

  Hawks looked up and down at the matter transmitter's towering height. In the laboratory space behind them, the technicians were now shutting off the lights in the various sub-sections of the control array. Darkness fell in horizontal chunks along the galleries of instruments, and in black diagonals like jackstraws being laid upon the catwalks overhead.

  "We can't do anything about the nature of the place to which they go," Hawks said. "And we've reached the limit of what we can do to improve the way we send them there. It seems to me there's only one thing left to do. We must find a different kind of man to send. A man who won't go insane when he feels himself die." He looked quizzically into the machine's interior.

  "There are all sorts of people in the world," he said. "Perhaps we can find a man who doesn't fear Death, but loves her."

  Latourette said bitterly: "Some kind of psycho."

  "Maybe that's what he is. But I think we need him, nevertheless." Almost all the laboratory lights were out, now. "What it comes down to is we need a man who's attracted by what drives other men to madness. And the more so, the better. ... A man who's impassioned by Death." His eyes lost focus, and his gaze extended itself to infinity. "So now we know what I am. I'm a pimp."

  Continental Electronics' Director of Personnel was a broad-faced man named Vincent Connington. He came briskly into Hawks' office and pumped his hand enthusiastically. He was wearing a light blue shantung suit and russet cowboy boots, and as he sat down in the visitors' chair, he looked around and remarked: "Got the same office layout myself, upstairs. But it sure looks a lot different with some carpeting on the floor and some good paintin's on the walls." He turned back to Hawks, smiling. "I'm glad to get down here and talk to you, Doctor. I've always had a lot of admiration for you. Here you are, running a department and still getting in there and working right with your crew. All I do all day is sit behind a desk and make sure my clerks handle the routine without foulin' up."

  "They seem to do rather well," Hawks said in a neutral voice. He was beginning to draw himself up unconsciously in his chair, and to slip a mask of expressionlessness over his face. His glance touched Connington's boots once, and then stayed away. "At least, your department's been sending me some excellent technicians."

  Connington grinned. "Nobody's got any better." He leaned forward. "But that's routine stuff." He took Hawks' interoffice memo out of his breast pocket. "This, now— This request, I'm going to fill personally."

  Hawks said carefully: "I certainly hope you can. I expect it may take some time to find a man fitting the outlined specifications. I hope you understand that, unfortunately, we don't have much time. I—"

  Connington waved a hand. "Oh, I've got him already. Had him in mind for you for a long time."

  Hawks' eyebrows rose. "Really?"

  Connington grinned shrewdly across the plain steel desk. "Hard to believe?" He lounged back in his chair. "Doctor, suppose somebody came to you and asked you to do a particular job for him—design a circuit to do a particular job. Now, suppose you reached out a piece of paper and said: 'Here it is.' What about that? And then when he was all through shaking his head and saying how
it was hard to believe you'd have it right there, you could explain to him about how electronics was what you did all the time. About how when you're not thinking about some specific project, you're still thinking about electronics in general. And how, being interested in electronics, you kept up on it, and you knew pretty much where the whole field was going. And how you thought about some of the problems they were likely to run into, and sometimes answers would just come into your head so easily it couldn't even be called work. And how you filed these things away until it was time for them to be brought out. See? That way, there's no magic. Just a man with a talent, doing his work."

  Connington grinned again. "Now I've got a man who was made to work on this machine project of yours. I know him inside out. And I know a little bit about you. I've got a lot to learn about you, yet, too, but I don't think any of it's goin' to surprise me. And I've got your man. He's healthy, he's available, and I've had security clearances run on him every six months for the last two years. He's all yours, Doctor. No foolin'.

  "You see, Doctor—" Connington folded his hands in his lap and bent them backward, cracking his knuckles, "you're not the only mover in the world."

  Hawks frowned slightly. "Mover?" Now his face betrayed nothing.

  Connington chuckled softly to himself over some private joke that was burgeoning within him. "There're all kinds of people in this world. But they break down into two main groups, one big and one smaller. There's the people who get moved out of the way or into line, and then there's the people who do the moving. It's safer and a lot more comfortable to go where you're pushed. You don't take any of the responsibility, and if you do what you're told, every once in a while you get thrown a fish. Being a mover isn't safe, because you may be heading for a hole, and it isn't comfortable because you do a lot of jostling back and forth, and what's more, it's up to you to find your own fish. But it's a hell of a lot of fun." He looked into Hawks' eyes. "Isn't it?"