"And now I have work that has to be done by me, because I made it. I can't go back now and change the boy I grew out of, nor do I want to. How can I deny what I am? I have to work with what I am. A lump of carbon can't rearrange its own structure. It's either a diamond or a lump of coal—it doesn't even know what coal or diamonds are. Someone else has to judge it."
They sat for a long time without speaking, Hawks with the empty brandy glass set on the coffee table beside his out-thrust legs, Elizabeth watching him from against her drawn-up knees. "What are you thinking of now?" she asked when he stirred again and looked at his wristwatch. "Your work?"
"Now?" He smiled from a great distance. "No—I was thinking about something else. I was thinking about how X-ray photographs are taken."
"What about it!"
He shook his head. "It's complicated. When a physician X-rays a sick man, he gets a print showing the spots on his lungs, or the calcium in his arteries, or the tumor in his brain. But to cure the man, he can't take scissors and cut the blotch out of the print. He has to take his scalpel to the man, and before he can do that, he has to decide whether his knife could reach the disease without cutting through some part of the man that can't be cut. He has to decide whether his knife is sharp enough to dissect the malignancy out of the healthy tissue—or whether the man will simply re-grow his illness from the scraps left behind—whether he will have to be whittled at again and again. Whittling the X-ray print does nothing. It only leaves a hole in the celluloid.
"And even if there were some way to arrange the X-ray camera so that it would not photograph the malignancy, and if there were some way of bringing an X-ray print to life, the living print would only have a hole in it through to where the malignancy had been, just as if the surgeon had attacked it that way with his scalpel. It would die of the wound. So what you would need is an X-ray film whose chemicals will not only not reproduce malignancy but would reproduce healthy tissue which they have never seen. You would need a camera that could re-arrange the grains of silver on the film. And who can build such a camera?
"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.
CHAPTER FIVE
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, c
old 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.
"Holiday says I'm generally all right, now, everything considered. But someone must drive me home." His mouth curled. "D'you want the job, Hawks?"
"Yes, I do." Hawks took off his smock and laid it folded down atop the cabinet. "You might as well set up for another shot tomorrow, Sam."
"Don't count on me for it!" Barker sawed.
"We can always cancel, you know." He said to Latourette: "I'll call early tomorrow and let you know."
Barker stumbled forward as Hawks fell into step beside him. They slowly crossed the laboratory floor and went out through the stairwell doors, side by side.
Connington was waiting for them in the upstairs hall, lounging in one of the bright orange plastic-upholstered armchairs that lined the foyer wall. His e
yes flicked once over Barker, and once over Hawks. "Have some trouble?" he asked as they came abreast of him. "I hear you had some trouble down in the lab," he repeated, his eyes glinting.
"God damn you, Connington—" Barker began with the high, tearing note in his voice.
"So I was right." Connington grinned consciously. "Goin' back to Claire, now?" He blew out cigar smoke. "The two of you?"
"Something like that," Hawks said.
Connington scratched the lapel of his jacket. "Think I'll come along and watch." He smiled fondly at Barker, his head to one side. "Why not, Al? You might as well have the company of all the people that're trying to kill you."
Hawks looked at Barker. The man's hands fumbled as though dealing with something invisible in the air just in front of his stomach. He was staring right through Connington, and the personnel man squinted momentarily.
Then Barker said lamely: "There isn't room in the car."
Connington chuckled warmly and mellifluously. "I'll drive it, and you can sit on Hawks' lap. Just like Charlie McCarthy."
Hawks pulled his glance away from Barker's face and said sharply: "I'll drive it."
Connington chuckled again. "There's going to be a meeting of the Joint Chiefs at the Pentagon tomorrow. They got the report on Rogan, and a long memorandum from Cobey and the Con El legal department. There's going to be a decision made on whether to cancel the project contracts. I'll drive." He turned back toward the double plate-glass doors and began walking out. He looked back over his shoulder. "Come along, friends," he said.
Claire Pack stood watching them from the head of the steps up to the lawn. She was wearing a one-piece skirtless cotton swimsuit cut high at the tops of her thighs, and was resting her hands lightly on her hips. As Connington shut off the engine and the three of them got out of the car, she raised her eyebrows.
The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B Page 17
