"The thing is, the Universe is dying! The stars are burning their substance. The planets are moving more slowly on their axes. They're falling inward toward their suns. The atomic particles that make it all up are slowing in their orbits. Bit by bit, over the countless billions of years, it's slowly happening. It's all running down. Someday, it'll stop. Only one thing in the entire Universe grows fuller, and richer, and forces its way uphill. Intelligence—human lives—we're the only things there are that don't obey the Universal law.
"The Universe kills our bodies; it drags them down with gravity, it drags and drags, until our hearts grow tired with pumping our blood against its pull, until the walls of our cells break down with the weight of themselves, until our tissues sag, and our bones grow weak and bent. Our lungs tire of pulling air in and pushing it out. Our veins and capillaries break with the strain. Bit by bit, from the day we're conceived, the Universe rasps and plucks at our bodies until they can't repair themselves any longer. And in that way, in the end, it kills our brains.
"But our minds . . .
"There's the precious thing; there's the phenomenon that has nothing to do with time and space except to use them; to describe to itself the lives our bodies live in the physical Universe.
"Listen—when I was a little boy, my father took me out for a walk, late one night after a snowfall. We walked along, down a road that had just been ploughed. The stars were out, and so was the Moon. It was a cold, clear night, with the snow drifted and mounded, sparkling in the light. And on the corner where our road met the highway, there was a street lamp on a high pole.
"And I made a discovery. It was cold enough to make my eyes water, and I found out that if I kept them almost closed, the moisture diffused the lights, so that everything—the Moon, the stars, the street lamp—seemed to have halos and points of scattered light around it. The snowbanks seemed to glitter like a sea of spun sugar, and all the stars were woven together by a lace of incandescence, so that I was walking through a Universe so wild, so wonderful, that my heart nearly broke with its beauty.
"For years, I carried that time and place in my mind. It's still there. But the thing is, the Universe didn't make it. did. I saw it, but I saw it because I made myself see it. I took the stars, which are distant suns, and the night, which is the Earth's shadow, and the snow, which is water undergoing a state-change, and I took the tears in my eyes, and I made a wonderland. No one else has ever been able to see it. No one else has ever been able to go there. Not even I can ever return to it physically, it lies thirty-eight years in the past, in the eye-level perspective of a child, its stereoscopic accuracy based on the separation between the eyes of a child. In only one place does it actually exist. In my mind, Elizabeth—in my life.
"But I will die, and where will it be, then?"
Elizabeth looked up at him. "In my mind, a little? Along with the rest of you?"
Hawks looked at her. He reached out and, bending forward as tenderly as a child receiving a snowflake to hold, gently enclosed her in his arms. "Elizabeth, Elizabeth," he said. "I never realized that. I never realized what you were letting me do." "I love you."
They walked together down the beach. "When I was a little girl," she said, "my mother registered me with Central Casting and tried to get me parts in the movies. I remember, one day there was a call for someone to play the part of a Mexican sheepherder's daughter, and my mother very carefully dressed me in a little peasant blouse and a flowered skirt, and bought a rosary for me to hold. She braided my hair, and darkened my eyebrows, and took me down to the studio.
"When we got back to the house that afternoon, my aunt said to my mother: 'Didn't get it, huh?' And my mother, who was in a tearful fury, said: 'It was the lousiest thing I've ever seen! It was terrible! She almost had it, but she got beaten out by some little Spic brat!'
Hawks tightened the arm he held around her shoulders. He looked out to sea, and up at the sky. "This is a beautiful place!" he said.
CHAPTER NINE
Barker was leaning against a cabinet when Hawks came into the laboratory in the morning and walked up to him.
"How do you feel?" Hawks asked, looking sharply at him. "All right?"
Barker smiled faintly. "What do you want to do? Touch gloves before we start the last round?"
"I asked you a question."
"I'm fine. O.K., Hawks? What do you want me to tell you? That I'm all choked up with pride? That I know this is an enormous step forward in science, in which I am honored to find myself participating on this auspicious day? I already got the Purple Heart, Doc—just gimme a coupla aspirin."
Hawks said earnestly: "Barker, are you quite sure you'll be able to come out through the other side of the formation?"
"How can I be sure? Maybe part of its logic is that you can't win. Maybe it'll kill me out of simple spite. I can't tell about that. All I can promise you is that I'm a move away from the end of the only safe pathway. If my next move doesn't get me outside, then there isn't any way out. It is a tomato can, and I've hit bottom. But if it's something else, then, yes, today is the day; the time is now."
Hawks nodded. "That's all I can ask of you. Thank you." He looked around. "Is Sam Latourette at the transmitter?"
Barker nodded. "He told me we'd be ready to shoot in about half an hour."
Hawks nodded. "All right. Fine. You might as well get into your undersuits. But there'll be sorne delay. We're going to have to take a preliminary scan on me, first. I'm going along with you."
Barker ground his cigarette out under his heel. He looked up. "I suppose I should say something about it. Some kind of sarcastic remark about wading intrepidly into the hostile shore after the troops have already taken the island. But I'll be damned if I thought you'd do it at all."
Hawks said nothing, and walked away across the laboratory floor toward the transmitter.
"You knew we had extra suits," he said to Latourette, lying down in the opened armor. The Navy men worked around him, adjusting the set-screws on the pressure plates. The ensign stood watching closely, an uncertain frown on his face.
"Yes, but that was only in case we lost one in a bad scan," Latourette argued, his eyes stubborn. "Ed, being able to do something, and doing it, are two different things. I—"
"Look, you know the situation. You know what we're doing here as well as I do."
"Ed! Any number of things could still go wrong up there today!"
"Suppose they don't. Suppose Barker makes it. Then what? Then he stands there, and I'm down here." He fitted his left hand carefully into its gauntlet inside its tool cluster. The dressers closed the armor. He was wheeled into the chamber, surrounded by the hundred thousand glittering eyes of the scanner faces.
The lights came on in the receiver. He opened his eyes, blinking gently. The receiver door was opened, and the table was slipped under him. The lateral magnets slacked off as their rheostats were turned down, and he drifted into contact with the plastic surface. "I feel normal," he said. "Did you get a good file tape?"
"As far as we know," Sam said into his microphone. "The computers didn't spot any breaks in the transmission."
"Well, that's as good as we can do," Hawks said. "All right—put me back in the transmitter, and hold me there. Get Barker into his suit, jack down the legs on the table, and slide him in under me. Today," he said, "marks another precedent in the annals of exploration. Today, we're going to send a sandwich to the Moon."
Fidanzato, wheeling the table across the laboratory floor, laughed. Latourette jerked his head sideward and looked at him desperately.
Starlight shone down upon them with cold, drab intensity, stronger than anything falling from a Moonless sky upon the Earth at night, but punched through with sharp rents of shadow at every hump and jag of the terrain. From ground level, it was possible to make out the vague shapes of the working Naval installation, each dome and burrow with its latticework of overhead camouflage lying like the wreck of a zeppelin to Hawks' right, looking vaguely gray-green in
color, with no lights showing.
Hawks took a deep breath. "All right, thank you," he said to the Navy receiver crew, his voice distant, mechanical, and businesslike over the radiotelephone circuit. "Are the observer teams ready?"
A Navy man, with a lieutenant's bars painted on his helmet, nodded and gestured toward the left. Hawks turned his head slowly, his expression reluctant, and looked to where the humps of the observation bunker clustered as though huddled in the lee of a cliff, at the foot of the looming black and silver formation.
"The walkway's over here," Barker said, touched Hawks' forearm with the tool cluster at the end of his right sleeve. "Let's go—we'll ran out of air, if we wait for you to dip your toe in the water."
"All right." Hawks moved to follow Barker under the camouflage roofing which followed, like a pergola on which no vines would climb, above the track which had been smoothed for a footpath between the receiver dome and the formation.
The Navy lieutenant made a hand signal of dismissal and began walking away, followed by his working party, taking the other path which led back to their station and their workaday concerns.
"All set?" Barker asked when they reached the formation. "Flash your light toward the observers, there, so they'll know we're starting."
Hawks raised one of his hands and winked its worklight. An acknowledging point of light appeared upon the featureless black face of the bunker.
"That's all there is to it, Hawks. I don't know what you're waiting for. Just do what I do, and follow me. Let's hope this gizmo doesn't mind my not being alone."
"That's an acceptable risk," Hawks said.
"If you say so, Doctor." Barker put his arms out and placed the inner faces of his sleeves against the rippling, glossy wall in which the walkway dead-ended. He shuffled sideward and there was a sharp spang inside Hawks' armor, cracking up through his bootsoles, as the wall accepted Barker and sucked him through.
Hawks looked down at the loose gravel of the walkway, covered with bootprints as though an army had marched past. He came up to the wall and raised his arms, perspiration running down his cheeks faster than the suit's dehumidifiers could dry it.
Barker was scrambling up a tilting plane of glittering blue-black, toward where two faces of coarse dull brown thudded together repeatedly. Curtains of green and white swirled around Hawks. He broke into a run, as shafts of crystal transparency opened through the folds of green and white, with flickering red light dimly visible at their far ends and blue, green, yellow heaving upward underfoot.
Hawks ran with his arms pressed to his sides. He came to where he had seen Barker leave his feet and dive forward, rolling over as he skittered sideward along the running stream of yielding, leaf-like pale fringes. As he dove, he passed over a twisted body in a type of armor that had been discarded.
Barker's white armor suddenly bloomed with frost which scaled off as he ran and lay in Hawks' way like moulds of the equipment, in a heap of previous sleeves, legs, and torsos, to which Hawks' armor added its own as he passed.
Hawks followed Barker down the spiraling funnel whose walls smeared them with light gray powder which fell from their armor slowly, in long, delicate strands, as they swung themselves out to pass Rogan's body, which lay half out of sight in a heap of glazed semicircles like a shipment of broken saucers that had been discarded.
Barker held up his hand, and they stopped at the edge of the field of cross-hatched planes, standing together, looking into each other's faces below the over-hang of the polished tongue of blue-black metal which jutted out above them, rusted a coarse dull brown where Barker had once crawled out on it and now lay sprawled with one white sleeve dangling, a scrap of green surfacing clutched in the convulsively jammed pincers of his tool cluster. Barker looked up at it, back at Hawks, and winked. Then he took hold of one of the crystalline, transparent projections jutting out from the flickering red wall and swung himself out toward the next one, passing out of sight around the bend where blue, green, yellow light could be seen streaming.
Hawks' armored feet pattered at the empty air as he followed around the corner. He went hand-over-hand, carefully keeping his body strained upward to keep his shoulders above the level of his hands as he moved sideward along the high, scalloped coaming of pale yellow, each half-curved leaf yielding waxily to his weight and twisting down almost to where his pincers lost their grip on the surface, which their needle points could not penetrate. He had to cross his arms and shift his weight from each scallop to the next before it had time to drop him, and as he moved along he had to twist his body to avoid the spring-back of each half-saucer from which his grip had been discarded. Down below lay a tangle of broken armor; twisted sleeves and legs and torsos.
Hawks came, eventually, to where Barker lay on his back, resting. He began to sit down beside him, lowering himself awkwardly. Suddenly he threw a glance at his wrist, where the miniaturized gyrocompass pointed at Lunar north. He twisted his body, trying to regain his balance, and finally stood panting, on one foot like a water bird, while Barker steadied him. Overhead, orange traceries flickered through a glassy red mass shaped like a giant rat's head, and then reluctantly subsided.
They walked along an enormous, featureless plain of panchromatic grays and blacks, following a particular hne of footprints among a fan of individual tracks, all of them ending in a huddle of white armor except for this, on which Barker would stop, now and then, just short of his own corpse each time, and step to one side, or simply wait a bit, or shuffle by sideward. Each time he did so, the plain would suddenly flicker back into color from Hawks' point of view. Each time he followed Barker's lead, the color would die, and his suit would thrum with a banging, wooden sound.
At the end of the plain was a wall. Hawks looked at his wristwatch. Their elapsed time inside the formation was four minutes, fifty-one seconds. The wall shimmered and bubbled from their feet up into the black sky with its fans of violet light. Flowers of frost rose up out of the plain where their shadows fell, standing highest where they were farthest from the edges and so least in contact with the light. The frost formed humped, crude white copies of their armor, and, as Hawks and Barker moved against the wall, lay for one moment open and exposed, then burst silently from steam pressure, each outflying fragment of discard trailing a long, delicate strand of steam as it ate itself up and the entire explosion reluctantly subsided.
Barker struck the wall with a sharp rock-hammer, and a glittering blue-black cube of its substance sprang away from it, exposing a coarse brown flat surface. Barker tapped lightly, and it changed color to a glittering white alive with twisting green threads. The facing of the wall turned crystalline and transparent, and disappeared. They stood on the lip of a lake of smoking red fire. On its shore, half-buried, the white paint sooted yellow, charred and molten so that it had run like a cheap crockery glaze, lay Barker's armor. Hawks looked at his wristwatch. Their elapsed time inside the formation was six minutes, thirty-eight seconds. He turned and looked back. On the open, panchromatic plain, a featureless cube of metal lay glittering blue-black. Barker turned back, picked it up, and threw it down on the ground. A coarse brown wall rose up into the air between them and the plain, and behind them, the fire snuffed out. Where Barker's burnt armor had been, was a heap of crystals at the edge of a square, perhaps a hundred meters to a side, of lapis lazuli.
Barker stepped out on it. A section of the square tilted, and the crystals at its edge slid out across it in a glittering fan. Barker walked down carefully among them, until he was at the other edge of the section, steadying it with his weight. Hawks climbed up onto the slope and walked down to join him. Barker pointed. Through the crack between the section and the remainder of the square, they could see men from the observation team, peering blindly in at them. Hawks looked at his wristwatch. Their elapsed time inside the formation was six minutes, thirty-nine seconds. Lying heaped and barely visible between them and the observation team was Barker. The crystals on their section were sliding off into the crack
and falling in long, delicate strands of snow upon the dimly seen armor.
Barker clambered up onto the lazuli square. Hawks followed him, and the section righted itself behind him. They walked out for several meters, and Barker stopped. His face was strained. His eyes were shining with exhilaration. He glanced sideward at Hawks, and his expression grew wary.
Hawks looked pointedly down at his wristwatch. Barker licked his lips, then turned and began to run in a broadening spiral, his boots scuffing up heaps of crystals, at each of which he ducked his head as waves of red, green, yellow light dyed his armor. Hawks followed him, the lazuli cracking out in great radiations of icy fractures that criss-crossed into a network under his feet as he ran around and around.
The lazuli turned steel-blue and transparent, and then was gone, leaving only the net of fractures, on which Barker and Hawks ran, while below them lay the snowed armor and the observing team standing oblivious a few inches from it, and the stars and jagged horizon of the Moon behind them, a broken face against which the arc of the sky was fitted.
Their elapsed time inside the formation was nine minutes, nineteen seconds. Barker stopped again, his feet and pincers hooked in the network, hanging motionless, looking back over his shoulder as Hawks came up. Barker's eyes were desperate. He was breathing in gasps, his mouth working. Hawks clambered to a stop beside him.
The net of fractures began to break into dagger-pointed shards, falling away, leaving great rotten gaps through which swirled clouds of steel-gray smokey particles which formed knife-sharp layers and hung in the great open space above the footing to which Hawks and Barker clung, and whose fringes whirled up and across to interlock the layers into a grid of stony, cleavage-planed cross-hatchings which advanced toward them.
Barker suddenly closed his eyes, shook his head violently in its casque, blinked, and, with a tearful grimace, began to climb up the net, holding his left arm pressed against his side, clutching above him for a new handhold with his right as soon as his weight was off each toehold which his left foot discarded.
The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B Page 20
