The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B

by Ben Bova (Ed)

  "Oh, no, Claire—I think you're just afraid of men. And you don't want them to find that out. Particularly not the ones you're most afraid of. You tell them they frighten you, but no one's supposed to think it's true, are they?"

  She stared at him for a moment. Then her back arched, and her head was flung back. She laughed stridently: "Who're you trying to sell that to?" She straightened and took one or two aimless steps. "You're afraid, Hawks!" Her fingers dug into the dress fabric over her tensed thighs. "You're scared, Hawks. You're scared of a real woman, like so many of them are."

  "If you were a real woman, would you blame me? I'm frightened of many things. People who waste things are among them."

  "Why don't you just shut up, Hawks?" she cried. "What do you do, go through life making speeches? You know what you are, Hawks? You're a creep. A bore and a creep. A first class bore. I don't want you around any more. I don't want to ever see you again."

  "I'm sorry you don't want to be any different, Claire. Tell me something. You almost succeeded, a moment ago. You came very close. It would be foolish for me to deny it. If you had done what you tried to do with me, would I still be a creep? And what would you be, making up to a man you despise, for safety's sake?"

  "Oh, get out of here, Hawks!"

  "Does my being a creep make me incompetent to see things?"

  "When are you going to stop trying? I don't want any of your stinking help!"

  "I didn't think you did. I said so. That's really all I've said." He turned away toward the house. "I'm going to see if Al will let me use his phone. I need a ride away from here. I'm getting too old to walk."

  "Go to Hell, Hawks!" she cried out, following him at his own pace, a yard or two behind him.

  Hawks walked away more quickly, his arms swinging through short arcs.

  "Did you hear me? Get lost! Go on, get out of here!"

  Hawks came to the kitchen door, and opened it. Connington was sprawled back against a counter, his beach shirt and his swimming trunks spattered with blood and saliva from his mouth. Barker's hand, tangled in his hair, was all that kept him from tipping over the high stool on which he was being held. Barker's fist was drawn back, smeared and running from deep tooth-gashes over the bone of his knuckles.

  "Just passed out, that's all," Connington was mumbling desperately. "Just passed out in her bed, that's all-she wasn't anywhere around."

  Barker's forearm whipped out, and his fist slapped into Conning-ton's face again.

  Connington fumbled apathetically behind him for a handhold. He had made no effort to defend himself at any time. "Only way you ever would. Find me there." He was crying without seeming to be aware of it. "I thought I had it figured out, at last. I thought today was the day. Never been able to make the grade with her. I can find the handle with everybody else. Everybody's got a weak spot. Everybody cracks, sometime, and lets me see it. Everybody. Nobody's perfect. That's the great secret. Everybody but her. She's got to slip sometime, but I've never seen it. Me, the hotshot personnel man."

  "Leave him alone!" Claire screamed from behind Hawks. She clawed at Hawks' shoulder until he was out of the doorway, and then she raked at Barker, who jumped back with his hand clutching the furrows on his arm. "Get away from him!" she shouted into Barker's face, crouching with her feet apart and her quivering hands raised. She snatched up a towel, wet a corner of it in the sink, and went to Connington, who was slumped back against the stool, staring at her through his watered eyes.

  She bent against Connington and began frantically scrubbing his face. "There, now, honey," she crooned. "There. There. Now." Connington put one hand up, palm out, his lax fingers spread, and she caught it, clutching it and pressing it to the base of her throat, while she rubbed feverishly at his smashed mouth. "I'll fix it, honey—don't worry. . . ."

  Connington turned his head from side to side, his eyes looking blindly in her direction, whimpering as the cloth ground across the cuts.

  "No, no, honey," she chided him. "No, hold still, honey. Don't worry. I need you, Connie. Please." She began wiping his chest, opening the top of the beach shirt and forcing it down over his arms, like a policeman performing a drunk arrest.

  Barker said stiffly: "All right, Claire—that's it. I want your things out of here tomorrow." His mouth turned down in revulsion. "I never thought you'd turn carrion-eater."

  Hawks turned his back and found a telephone on the wall. He dialled with clumsy haste. "This—this is Ed," he said, his throat constricted. "I wonder if you could possibly drive out to that corner on the highway, where the store is, and pick me up. Yes, I—I need a ride in, again. Thank you. Yes, I'll be there, waiting."

  He hung up, and as he turned back, Barker said to him, his expression dazed: "How did you do it, Hawks?" He almost cried: "How did you manage this?"

  "Will you be at the laboratory tomorrow?" Hawks said wearily.

  Barker looked at him through his glittering black eyes. He flung out an arm toward Claire and Connington. "What would I have left, Hawks, if I lost you now?"

  CHAPTER SIX

  "You look tired," Elizabeth said as the studio's overhead fluorescents tittered into light and Hawks sat down on the couch.

  He shook his head. "I haven't been working very hard. It's the same old story when I was a boy on the farm, I'd wear myself out with physical labor, and I'd have no trouble getting to sleep. But now I just sit around and think. I can't sleep at night, and I wake up in the morning feeling worse than I did the day before. I look at myself in the mirror, and a sick man looks back at me—the kind of a man I wouldn't trust to do his share, if we were on a job together." Elizabeth raised an eyebrow. "I think you could use some coffee." He grimaced. "I'd rather have tea, if you have some." "I think so. I'll see." She crossed the studio to the curtained-off corner where the hotplate and cupboard were. . . .

  "Or—look," he called after her, "coffee would be fine, if there's no tea."

  They sat on the couch together, drinking tea. Elizabeth put her cup down on the table. "What happened tonight?"

  Hawks shook his head. Then, after a while, he said abruptly:

  "Women"—he said earnestly—"women have always fascinated me. When I was a boy, 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 didn't know, but there was something about there being two sexes. I don't mean the physical thing. I mean, the intellectual problem.

  "What bothered me was that here were these other intelligent organisms, in the same world with men. Now there were plenty of men to do the thinking. If all women were for was the continuance of the race, what did they need with intelligence at all? A simple set of instincts would have been enough. So why was it necessary for women to have intelligence? What function had forced them to evolve it?

  "But I never found out. I've always wondered."

  Elizabeth smiled at him. "Doctor, would you like another cup of tea?"

  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.

  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.

  "Call me again when you need me," she said.

  "I—I will. Look; I don't want you to always have to come rescue me, or listen to my troubles. I want—" He gestured vaguely. "I don't know what I want for the two of us. But I don't want it to always be like this."

  "Finish the project," she smiled, "and there'll be time."

  "Yes," he said bleakly.

  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. "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."r />
  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? 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? So why don't you just leave me alone? I'm here to do something. I intend to do it. It's all I want to do, right now. All right?"

  Hawks nodded. "All right, Barker. I hope it doesn't take too long to do."

  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 up to six minutes, twelve seconds, Hawks was in his office, tracing his fingertip down the crumpled chart, when his desk telephone rang.

  He glanced 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 red areas, each marked with its instruction and relative time bearing, each bordered by its drift of black 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, and repeated bearings and instructions, opening his eyes and leaning forward again.

  The telephone rang once more, softly but without stopping. He tightened his hand into a momentary fist, then pushed the chart aside and took the handset off its cradle. "Yes, Vivian," he said.

  He listened, and finally said: "All right. Let him come in."

  Hawks looked up curiously from behind his desk as 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," Connington 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. I could have done it with a note or a phone call." He shook his head, puzzled, and looked to Hawks as if for an answer to a question he was asking himself. "I didn't have to do it at all."

  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 out slowly.

  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 came 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 you it."

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

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

  The day the elapsed time reached nine minutes, thirty seconds, Hawks said to Barker:

  "I'm worried. If your elapsed time grows much longer, the contact between M and L will become too fragile. The navigating team tells me your reports are growing measurably less coherent."

  "Let 'em try going up there, then. See how much sense they can make out of it." Barker licked his lips. His eyes were hollow.

  "That's not the point."

  "I know what the point is. There's another point. You can stop worrying. I'm almost out the other side."

  "They didn't tell me that," Hawks said sharply.

  "They don't know. But I've got a feeling."

  "A feeling."

  "Doctor, all that chart shows is what I tell it after I've done a day's work. It has no beginning and no end, except when I put one there. Tomorrow, I put the end to it." He looked around the laboratory, his face bitter. "All this plumbing, Doctor, and in the end it comes down to all revolving around one man." He looked at Hawks. "One man and what's in his mind. Or maybe two of us. I don't know. What's in your mind, Hawks?"

  Hawks looked at Barker. "I don't pry into your mind, Barker. Don't set foot in mine. I have a telephone call to make."

  He walked away across the laboratory, and dialed an outside number. He waited for the answer, and as he waited, he stared without focussing at the blank wall. Suddenly he moved in a spasm of action and smashed the flat of his free hand violently against it. Then the buzz in the earpiece stopped with a click, and he said eagerly:

  "Hello? Elizabeth? This-this is Ed. Listen-Elizabeth-oh, I'm all right. Busy. Listen—are you free tonight? It's just that I've never taken you to dinner, or dancing, or anything. . . . Will you? I—" He smiled at the wall. "Thank you." He hung up the telephone and walked away. He looked back over his shoulder, and saw that Barker had been watching him, and he started self-consciously.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  "Elizabeth—" he began, and then waved his arm annoyedly. "No. It was all going to come out in a rush. It does, so often."

  They were standing atop an arm of rock that thrust out seaward into the surf. Hawks' collar was turned up, and he held his jacket together with one hand. Elizabeth was wearing a coat, her hands in its pockets, a kerchief over her hair. The Moon, setting on the horizon, reflected its light upon the traceries of clouds overhead. Elizabeth smiled up at him, her wide mouth stretching. "This is a very romantic spot you've brought us to, Edward."

  "I—I was just driving. I didn't have any particular place in mind." He looked around. "I have things—things I want to say. Tonight. No later." He took a step forward, turned, and stood facing her, staring ri
gidly over her shoulder at the empty beach, the rise of the highway with his car parked on its shoulder, and the eastern sky beyond. "I don't know what shape they'll take. But they have to come out. If you'll listen."

  "Please."

  He shook his head at her, then forced his hands into his hip pockets and kept his body rigid.

  "Listen—the thing is, people say when a man dies: 'Well, he had a full life, and when his time came, he went peacefully.' Or they say: 'Poor boy—he'd barely begun to live.' But the thing is, dying isn't an incident. It isn't something that happens to a man on one particular day of his life, soon or late. It happens to the whole man—to the boy he was, to the young man he was—to his joys, to his sorrows, to the times he laughed aloud, to the times he smiled. Whether it's soon or late, how can the dying man possibly feel it was enough of a life he lived, or not enough? Who measures it? Who can decide, as he dies, that it was time? Only the body reaches a point where it can't move anymore. The mind—even the senile mind, fogged by the strangling cells of its body's brain—rational or irrational, broad or narrow; that never stops; no matter what, as long as one trickle of electricity can seep from one cell to another, still it functions; still it moves—how can any mind, ever, say to itself: 'Well, this life has reached its logical end,' and shut itself down? Who can.say: 'I've seen enough'? Even the suicide has to blow his brains out, because he has to destroy the physical thing to evade what's in his mind that will not let him rest.

  "The mind, Elizabeth—intelligence; the ability to look at the Universe; to care where the foot falls, what the hand touches—how can it help but go on, and on, drinking in what it perceives around it?"

  His arm swept out in a long, stiff arc that swept over the beach and the sea. "Look at this! All your life, you'll have this, now! And so will I. So will I. In our last moments, we will still be able to look back, to be here again. Years away from here, and thousands of miles away from here, we would still have it. Time, space, entropy—no attribute of the Universe can take this from us, except by killing us; by crushing us out.