Barker leaned back. "And that's how I die? But it's not real death, as long as I don't feel it and can step out of the receiver. What do I care where my particles come from?"
"That's not how you die. You're quite right—if a man can step out of the receiver and feel himself to be the same man who went into the transmitter, you could say that for all practical purposes no one has died.
"No, that's not how you die. What I've described to you is the experimental system Continental Electronics set up last year, and which was scheduled to begin experimental line-of-sight wireless transmissions to a receiver in the Sierras, some time right about now. Everything was going smoothly, for an experimental project, and we were even beginning to think of setting up a corollary staff to begin theoretical research into exactly what electrons were being manipulated, and how, to reproduce what portion of the scanned object. It was my hope that sometime within my lifetime wc would be able to manipulate individual electrons without the use of billion-dollar equipment covering several city blocks.
"All that is temporarily gone by the board. We're on a crash footing, here, and the thing we're after is practical results, nothing else. And that happened because of this."
He reached into a desk drawer, took out a map, unfolded it, and laid it down on the desk, facing Barker. "This is a map of approximately fifty square miles of the surface on the other side of the Moon."
Barker whistled softly between his teeth. He leaned forward. "Rough country," he said, looking at the painstakingly drawn hachure marks. "How'd you get this?"
"Topographical survey." Hawks touched a black-lined square on the map. "That's a Navy base. And this"—he touched an irregularly-shaped black area near the square—"is where you're going."
Barker frowned at it. "This what you showed me that ground photo of?"
"But that came a good deal later. Very early this year, the Air Force obtained one radioed photograph from a rocket it attempted to put into a Lunar orbit. The attempt failed, and the rocket crashed, somewhere beyond the edge of the visible disk. But that one photograph showed this."
He took a glossy enlargement out of its folder and passed it to Barker. "You can see how bad its quality is: almost hopelessly washed out and striated by errors in transmission from the rocket's radiophoto transmitter. But this area, of which a part is visible in this corner, is clearly not a natural formation."
Barker raised his eyebrows. "Whose?"
"No one's. No one's on Earth. We know that, and nothing more about its origin." He looked across the desk. "I'm deadly serious, Barker. So was the government. With rocketry in its present state, there was no apparent hope of investigating that formation before the Russians did. There was therefore every expectation that the Russians would be able to make a first-class scientific discovery— almost certainly one that would tip the balance decisively; possibly one which might involve the entire world in traffic with extraterrestrial beings. It was vitally necessary that we somehow get there first; find out what that thing was, who put it there, and why."
"So you went on a crash basis."
"Precisely. After repeated attempts, the Army managed to drop a relay tower on the edge of the visible disk, and a rudimentary receiver, fairly near the unknown formation. A man was sent through to set up another receiver which would accommodate construction and exploration equipment; the Moon project began."
"And what did it find out?"
"About the formation? It found out it kills people."
"In unbelievable ways, Doctor? Over and over?"
"Characteristically and persistenyly, in ways beyond the comprehension of human senses. I'm the one who kills them over and over."
Barker and Hawks looked at each other. Finally, Barker smiled. Hawks frowned, and said:
"The Lunar formation has been measured, it is roughly a hundred meters in diameter and twenty meters high, with irregularities and amorphous features we cannot accurately describe. We know almost nothing of its nature. But the first man to investigate it—the man who first went up through the small receiver—went into it against orders while waiting for the Navy crew to come up. He wasn't found until several weeks ago. His was the second photograph I showed you. His body was inside the thing, and looked to the autopsy surgeons as though he had fallen from a height of several thousand meters under terrestrial gravity."
"Could that have happened?"
"No."
"I see."
"I can't see, Barker, and neither can anyone else. We don't even know what to call that place. The eye won't follow it, and photographs convey only the most fragile impression. There is reason to suspect it exists in more than three spatial dimensions. Nobody knows what it is, why it's located there, what created it. We don't know whether it's animal, vegetable, or mineral. We don't know whether it's somehow natural, or artificial. We know, from the geology of several meteorite craters that have heaped rubble against its sides, that it's been there for, at the very least, half a million years.
"We need to determine, with no margin for error or omission, exactly what the formation can do to men. We need to have a complete guide to its limits and capabilities. When we have that, we can, at last risk entering it with technicians trained to study and disassemble it. It will be the technical teams which will actually learn from it as much as human beings can, and convey this host of information into the general body of human knowledge. But this is only what technicians always do. First we must have our chart-maker.
"It's my direct responsibility that you are now that man; it's my direct responsibility that the formation will, I hope, kill you again and again."
"Well, that's fair warning even if it makes no sense. I can't say you didn't give it to me."
"It wasn't a warning," Hawks said. "It was a promise."
Barker shrugged. "Call it whatever you want to."
"I don't often choose my words on that basis," Hawks said. He picked up another folder and thrust it into Barker's hands.
"Look those over. There is only one entrance into the thing. Somehow, our first technician found it, probably by fumbling around the periphery until he stepped through it. It is not an opening in any describable sense; it is a place where the nature of this formation permits entrance by a human being, either by design or accident. It cannot be described in more precise terms, and it cannot be encompassed by the eye or, we suspect, the human brain. Three men died to make the chart which now permits other men, who follow the chart by dead reckoning like navigators in an impenetrable fog, to enter the formation. We know the following things about its interior:
"A man inside it can be seen, very dimly, if we know where to look. He cannot see out as far as we know—no one knows what he sees; no one has ever come back out of it. Non-living matter, such as a photograph or a corpse, can be passed out from inside. But the act of doing so is invariably fatal to the man doing it. That photo of the first volunteer's body cost another man's life.
"Any attempt to retrace one's steps within the formation is fatal. The formation also does not permit electrical signals from its interior. You will not be able to maintain communication, either by broadcast or along a cable, with the observers in the outpost. You will be able to make very limited hand signals, and written notes on a tablet tied to a cord, which the observer team will attempt to draw back after the formation has killed you.
"We have a chart of safe postures and motions which have been established in this manner, as well as of fatal ones. It is, for example, fatal to kneel on one knee while facing Lunar north. It is fatal to raise the left hand above shoulder height while in any position whatsoever. It is fatal past a certain point to wear armor whose air-hoses loop over the shoulders. It is fatal past another point to wear armor whose air tanks feed directly into the suit without the use of hoses at all. It is crippling to wear armor whose dimensions vary greatly from the ones we are using now. It is fatal to use the arm motions required to write the English word 'yes,' either with the left or right hand.
&nb
sp; "We don't know why. We only know what a man can and cannot do while within the formation. Thus far, we have charted a safe path and safe motions to a distance of some twelve meters. The survival time for a man within the formation is now three minutes, fifty-two seconds. And that is almost all we know. We've been going at this thing for months—and it's too slow. It's too wasteful. Our equipment is crude. Our experience is nil. And our time is running out. The recent Russian circumlunar rocket couldn't possibly have shown them anything. The base is camouflaged. In any case, their photographs cover an area of over seven million square miles. The entire Navy installation, and the formation, are contained within an area of about one square mile. But their next show may be in a lower orbit.
Or they may put an expedition up there-they already have a telemetering robot installation somewhere on the visible disk. There's no telling what might happen if they found out we were there, and what we're doing. It's got to be finished—and we have to hope we will find something that will give us a decisive edge in a very short period of time.
"And so I'm hoping you'll work out better than the other men we've sent into the formation."
Barker grinned coldly. "You mean, I might last a few seconds longer than the average man? And that would be a significant gain?"
"No, Barker," Hawks said tiredly. "No—we developed a system. There is no reason why we cannot transmit your signal into two receivers, one on the Moon and one here in the laboratory. That way, we have two Barkers; call them Barker M and Barker L, for convenience. Barker M goes into the formation, does what he can, and dies. Barker L remains in the laboratory, and lives, and furnishes us with two new Barkers the next day."
Barker whistled softly, again. "Foolproof."
"Foolproof, and too slow. We gain very little by it—Barker M might prove a little tougher than the average volunteer. I doubt it. They've been very good men. But in any case, all we'd get from him would be the same driblets of information we've gotten before. That's not enough. No, we modified that system some time ago.
"You see, we found out something. We found that the M and L volunteers showed signs of confusion when they emerged from their respective receivers. For a short time—a moment—the L volunteer behaved as though he were on the Moon, and vice versa."
Barker's eyes widened. "You're kidding—"
"No. Apparently, since so many of the environmental conditions were the same—the two men were both in their units, remember— and since they had identical brains with identical thought chains— we had stumbled on a limited, almost useless form of"—Hawks' mouth twitched distastefully—"telepathy.
"We worked with it. We began introducing a high order of similarity into the M and L environments, and then we arranged the suits so that the L volunteer's sensory receptors would furnish his brain with no data. We stopped up his eyes and ears. We deadened his skin. We partially narcotized him. As we hoped, his brain began hunting for data, as any brain will if it stops getting continuous proof that it is alive. It had only one place to find that data—in the sensory impressions that were registering on the M brain.
"The contact fades, of course. Soon enough, despite anything we can do, the L brain begins to record a trickle of stimuli which come from its own body, and the contact fades sharply. But we can maintain it for nearly twelve minutes, which is more than enough.
"So," Hawks finished, "now we have a means of instantaneous, complete communication with the M volunteer. The L volunteer's brain records everything he feels, everything he sees, everything he thinks. And the information remains there, after the M volunteer dies, and could be extracted by interviewing the L volunteer.
"There is only one drawback. When the M volunteer dies, the L volunteer shares his feelings." Hawks looked steadily at Barker. "Ro-gan. And others before him. They go insane, and the information is lost. So that's your special qualification, Barker. No man can stand to die. But we're hoping you won't go mad when you feel it. We're hoping you'll enjoy it. Over and over again."
Barker straightened his shoulders into perfect symmetry, threw the folded windbreaker half across his back, and stepped past Hawks into the laboratory. He walked out a few feet into the main aisle between the cabinets holding the voltage regulator series and put his hands in his pockets, stopping to look around. Hawks stopped with him.
All the work lights were on. Barker turned his body slowly from the hips, studying the galleries of signal-modulating equipment, and watching the staff assistants running off component checks.
"Busy," he said, looking at the white-coated men, who were consulting check-off sheets on their clipboards, setting switches, cutting in signal generators from the service racks above each gallery, switching off, re-setting, re-testing. His glance fell on the nearest of a linked array of differential amplifier racks on the laboratory floor. "Lots of wiring. I like that. Marvels of science. That sort of thing."
"It's part of a man."
"Oh?" Barker lifted one eyebrow. His eyes were dancing mockingly. "Plugs and wires and little ceramic widgets," he challenged.
Hawks said: "That entire bank of amplifiers is set up to contain an exact electronic description of a man. His physical structure, down to the last moving particle of the last atom in the last molecule in the last cell at the end of his little toe's nail. It knows, thereby, a good deal more than we can learn—his nervous reaction time and volume, the range and nature of his reflexes, the electrical capacity of each cell in his brain. It knows everything it needs to know so it can tell another machine how to build that man.
"It happens to be a man named Sam Latourette, but it could be anyone. It's our standard man. When the matter transmitter's scanner converts you into a series of similar electron flows, the information goes on a tape, to be filed. It also goes in here, so we can read out the differences between you and the standard. That gives us a crosscheck when we need accurate signal definition. That's what we're going to do today. Take our initial scan, so we can have a control tape and a differential reading to use when we transmit tomorrow."
Barker smiled. "Ain't science great?"
Hawks looked at him woodenly. "We're not conducting any manhood contests here, Barker. We're working at a job. It's not necessary to keep your guard up."
"Would you know a contest if you saw one, Doctor?"
Sam Latourette, who had come up behind Barker, growled: "Shut up, Barker!"
Barker turned casually. "Jesus, fellow, didn't eat your baby."
"It's all right, Sam," Hawks said patiently. "Al Barker, this is Sam Latourette. Doctor Samuel Latourette."
"I've been looking over the file Personnel sent down on you, Barker," Latourette said. "1 wanted to see what your chances were of being any use to us here. And I just want you to remember one thing." Latourette had lowered his head until his neck was almost buried between his massive shoulders, and his face was broadened by parallel rows of yellowish flesh that sprang into thick furrows down the sides of his jaw. "When you talk to Doctor Hawks, you're talking to the only man in the world who could have built this." His pawing gesture took in the galleries, the catwalks, the amplifier bank, the transmitter hulking at the far wall. "You're talking to a man who's as far removed from muddleheadedness—from what you and I think of as normal human error—as you are from a chimp. You're not fit to judge his work, or make smart cracks about it. Your little personality twists aren't fit for his concern. You've been hired to do a job here, just like the rest of us. If you can't do it without making more trouble for him than you're worth, get out—don't add to his burden. He's got enough on his mind already." Latourette flashed a deep-eyed look at Hawks. "More than enough." His forearms dangled loosely and warily. "Got it straight, now?"
Barker's expression was attentive and dispassionate as he looked at Latourette. His weight had shifted almost entirely away from his artificial leg, but there was no other sign of tension in him. He was deathly calm.
"Sam," Hawks said, "I want you to supervise the tests on the lab receiver. It needs
doing now. Then I need a check on the telemeter data from the relay tower and the Moon receiver. Let me know as soon as you've done that."
Barker watched Latourette turn and stride soundlessly away down along the amplifier banks toward the receiving stage, where a group of technicians was fluoroscoping a series of test objects being transmitted to it by another team.
"Come with me, please," Hawks said to Barker and walked slowly toward the table where the suit lay.
"So they talk about you like that around here," Barker said, still turning his head from side to side as they walked. "No wonder you get impatient when you're outside dealing with the big world."
"Barker, it's important that you concern yourself only with what you're here to do. It's removed from all human experience, and if we're all to go through it successfully, we must try to keep personalities out of it."
"How about your boy, over there? Latourette?"
"Sam's a very good man," Hawks said slowly.
"And that's his excuse."
"It's his reason for being here. Ordinarily, he'd be in a sanatorium under sedation for his pain. He has an inoperable cancer. He will be dead next year."
They had passed the low wall of linked gray steel cabinets. Barker's head jerked back around. "Oh," he said. "That's why he's the standard man in there. Nothing eating at the flesh. Eternal life."
The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B Page 15
