The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B

by Ben Bova (Ed)

  When Hawks and Barker emerged at the rim of the net, beside the drifted armor which lay under its crust of broken dagger-points, their elapsed time inside the formation was nine minutes, forty-two seconds. Barker faced the observing team through the wall, and stepped out onto the open Moon. Hawks followed him. They stood looking at each other through their faceplates, the formation directly behind them.

  Barker looked at it. "It doesn't look as if it knows what we've done," he said over the radiotelephone circuit.

  Hawks cast a glance behind him. "Did you expect it to?" he shrugged. He turned to the observer team, who were standing, waiting, in their Moonsuits, their faces patient behind the transparent plastic bubbles of their helmets.

  "Did you gentlemen see anything new happen while wc were in there?"

  The oldest man on the team, a gray-faced, drawn individual whose steel-rimmed spectacles were fastened to an elastic headband, shook his head. "No," his voice came distorted through his throat microphone. "The formation shows no outward sign of discriminating between one individual and another, or of reacting in any special way to the presence of more than one individual. That is, I suppose, assuming all its internal strictures are adhered to."

  Hawks nodded. "That was my impression, too." He turned toward Barker. "That very likely means we can now begin sending technical teams into it. I think you've done your job, Al. I really think you have. Well, let's come along with these gentlemen, here, for a while. We might as well give them our verbal reports, just in case Hawks and Barker L had lost contact with us before we came out." He began to walk along the footpath toward the observation bunker, and the others fell in behind him.

  Latourette knelt down and bent over the opened faceplate. "Are you all right, Ed?" he asked.

  Hawks L looked muzzily up at him. There was a trickle of blood running out of the corner of his mouth. He licked at it, running his tongue over the bitten places in his lower lip. "Must have been more frightened than I thought, after M drifted away from me and I realized I was in the suit." He rolled his head from side to side, lying on the laboratory floor. "Barker all right?"

  "They're getting him out of the receiver now. He seems to be in good shape. Did you make it all right?"

  Hawks L nodded. "Oh, yes, that went well. The last I felt of M,

  he was giving the observation team a verbal report." He blinked to clear his eyes. "That's quite a place, up there. Listen—Sam—" He looked up, his face wrinkled into an expression of distaste as he looked at the man. When he was a boy, and suffering from a series of heavy colds, his father had tried to cure them by giving him scalding baths and then wrapping him in wet sheets, drawing each layer tight as he wound it around Eddie Hawks' body and over his arms, leaving the boy pinned in, in this manner, overnight. "I—I hate to ask this," he said, not realizing that the expression on his face was turned directly up at Latourette, "but do you suppose the crew could get me out of my suit before they do Barker?"

  Sam, who had at first been watching Hawks with interest and concern, had by now become completely offended. "Of course," he said and stalked away, leaving Hawks L alone on the floor, like a child in the night. He lay that way for several moments before one of the technicians who stood in a ring around him realized he might want company and knelt down beside him, in range of the restricted field of vision through the faceplate opening.

  Hawks M watched the chief observer close his notebook. "I think that does it, then," he said to the man. Barker, who was sitting beside him at the steel table, nodded hesitantly.

  "I didn't see any lake of fire," he said to Hawks.

  Hawks shrugged. "I didn't see any jagged green glass archway in its place." He stood up and said to the observer team: "If you gentlemen would please re-fasten our faceplates for us, we'll be on our way."

  The observers nodded and stepped forward. When they were done, they turned and left the room through the airtight hatch to the bunker's interior, so that Hawks and Barker were left alone to use the exterior airlock. Hawks motioned impatiently as the demand valve in his helmet began to draw air from his tanks again, its sigh filling his helmet. "Come along, Al," he said. "We don't have much time."

  Barker said bitterly as they cycled through the lock: "It sure is good to have people make a fuss over you and slap you on the back when you've done something."

  Hawks shook his head. "These people, here, have no concern with us as individuals. Perhaps they should have had, today, but the habit would have been a bad one to break. Don't forget, Al—to them, you've never been anything but a shadow in the night. Only the latest of many shadows. And other men will come up here to die. There'll be times when the technicians slip up. There may be some reason why even you, or perhaps even I, will have to return here. These men in. this bunker will watch, will record what they see, will do their best to help pry information out of this thing—" He gestured toward the obsidian hulk, toppling perpetually, perpetually re-erecting itself, shifting in place, looming over the bunker, now reflecting the light of the stars, now dead black and lustreless. "This enormous puzzle. But you and I, Al, are only a species of tool, to them. It has to be that way. They have to live here until one day when the last technician takes the last piece of this thing apart. And then, when that happens, these people in this bunker, here, will have to face something they've been trying not to think about, all this time."

  Hawks and Barker moved along the footpath.

  "You know, Hawks," Barker said uncomfortably, "I almost didn't want to come out."

  "I know."

  Barker gestured indecisively. "It was the damnedest thing. I almost led us into the trap that caught me last time. And then I almost just stayed put and waited for it to get us. Hawks, I just—I don't know. I didn't want to come out. I had the feeling I was going to lose something. What, I don't know. But I stood there, and suddenly I knew there was something precious that was going to be lost if I came back out onto the Moon."

  Hawks, walking steadily beside Barker, turned his head to look at him for the first time since they had left the bunker. "And did you lose it?"

  "I—I don't know. I'll have to think about it for a long time, I think. I feel different. I can tell you that much." Barker's voice grew animated. "I do."

  "Is this the first time you've ever done something no other man has ever done before? Done it successfully, I mean?"

  "I—well, no, I've broken records of one kind or another, and—"

  "Other men had broken records at the same things, Al."

  Barker stopped, and looked at Hawks. "I think that's it," he frowned. "I think you're right. I've done something no other man has ever done before. And I didn't get killed for it."

  "No precedent and no tradition, Al, but you did it anyway."

  Hawks, too, had stopped. "Perhaps you've become a man in your own right?" His voice was quiet, and sad.

  "I may have, Hawks!" Barker said excitedly. "Look—you can't— that is, it's not possible to take in something like this all at once— but—" He stopped again, his face looking out eagerly through his faceplate.

  They had come almost to the point where the footpath from the bunker joined the system of paths that webbed the terrain between the formation, the receiver, the Navy installation, and the motor pool where the exploration halftracks stood. Hawks waited, motionless, patiently watching Barker, his helmet bowed as he peered.

  "You were right, Hawks!" Barker said in a rush of words. "Passing initiations doesn't mean a thing, if you go right back to what you were doing before; if you don't know you've changed! A man—a man makes himself. He—oh, God damn it, Hawks, I tried to be what they wanted, and I tried to be what I thought I should be, but what am I? That's what I've got to find out—that's what I've got to make something of! I've got to go back to Earth and straighten out all those years! I—Hawks, I'm probably going to be damned grateful to you."

  "Will you?" Hawks began walking again. "Come with me, Al."

  Barker trotted after him. "Where are you
going?"

  Hawks continued to walk until he was on the track that led to the motor pool, and continued past it for a short distance before the camouflaging stopped and the naked terrain lay nearly impassable to an armored man on foot. He waved shortly with one arm. "Out that way."

  "Aren't you taking a chance? How much air is there in these suits?"

  "Not much. A few minutes' more."

  "Well, let's get back to the receiver, then."

  Hawks shook his head. "No."

  "What do you mean? The return transmitter's working, isn't it?"

  "It's working. But we can't use it."

  "Hawks-"

  Hawks reached out and awkwardly touched his right sleeve to the man's armored shoulder. "Long ago, I told you I'd kill you in many ways, Al. When each Barker L came back to consciousness on Earth after each Barker M died, I was letting you trick yourself. You thought then you'd already felt the surest death of all. You hadn't. I have to do it once more.

  "There was always a continuity. Barker M and L seemed to be the same man, with the same mind. When M died, L simply went on. The thread was unbroken, and you could continue to believe that nothing, really, had happened. I could tell you, and you could believe, that in fact there was only a succession of Barkers whose memories dovetailed perfectly. But that's too abstract a thing for a human being really to grasp. At this moment, I think of myself as the Hawks who was born, years ago, in the bedroom of a farm home. Even though I know there's another Hawks, down in the laboratory on Earth, who's been living his own life for some moments, now; even though I know I was born from the ashes of this world twenty minutes ago, in the receiver. All that means nothing to the me who has lived in my mind all these years. I can look back. I can remember."

  Barker said: "Get to the point!"

  "Look, Barker—it's simply that we don't have the facilities, here, for accurately returning individuals to Earth. We don't have the computing equipment, we don't have the electronics hardware, we don't have any of the elaborate safeguards. We will have. Soon we'll have hollowed out a chamber large enough to hold them underground, where they'll be safe from accidents as well as observation. Then we'll either have to pressurize the entire chamber or learn to design electronic components that'll work in a vacuum. And if you think that's not a problem, you're wrong. But we'll solve it. When we have time.

  "There's been no time, Al. These people here—the Navy men, the observers—think of them. They're the best people for their jobs. And all of them, here, know that when they came up here, counterparts of theirs stayed behind on Earth. They had to. We couldn't drain men like those away from their jobs. We couldn't risk having them die—no one knew what might happen up here. Terrible things still might.

  "They all volunteered to come up here. They all understood. Back on Earth, their counterparts are going on as though nothing had happened. There was one afternoon in which they spent a few hours in the laboratory, of course, but that's already a minor part of their past, for them.

  "All of us up here are shadows, Al. But they're a particular kind. Even if we had the equipment, they couldn't go back. When we do get it, they still won't be able to. We won't stop them if they want to try, but, think, Al, about that man who leads the observation team.

  Back on Earth, his counterpart is pursuing a complicated scientific career. He's accomplished a lot since the day he was duplicated. He has a career, a reputation, a whole body of experience which this individual, up here, no longer shares. And the man here has changed, too—he knows things the other doesn't. He has a whole body of divergent experience. If he goes back, which of them does what? Who gets the career, who gets the family, who gets the bank account? It'll be years, up here, before this assignment is over. There'll have been divorces, births, deaths, marriages, promotions, degrees, jail sentences, diseases—No, most of them won't go back. But when this ends, where will they go?

  "We'd better have something for them to do. Away from Earth-away from the world that has no room for them. We've created a whole corps of men with the strongest possible ties to Earth, and no future except in space. But where will they go? Mars? Venus? We don't have rockets that will drop receivers for them there. We'd better have—but suppose some of them have become so valuable we don't dare not duplicate them again? Then what?

  "You called them zombies, once. You were right. They're the living dead, and they know it. And they were made, by me, because there wasn't time. No time to do this systematically, to think this out in all its aspects.

  "And for you and me, now, Al, there's the simple fact that we have a few minutes' air left in our suits and can't go back, at all."

  "For Pete's sake, Hawks, we can walk into any one of these bubbles, here, and get all the air we want!"

  Hawks asked slowly: "And settle down and stay here, you mean, and go back in a year or two? You can if you want to, I suppose. What will you do, in that time? Learn to do something useful, here, wondering what you've been doing meanwhile, on Earth?"

  Barker said nothing for a moment. Then he said: "You mean, I'm stuck here." His voice was quiet. "I'm a zombie. Well, is that bad? Is that worse than dying?"

  "I don't know," Hawks answered. "You could talk to these people up here about it. They don't know, either. They've been thinking about it for some time. Why do you think they shunned you, Barker? Possibly because there was something about you that frightened them more than they could safely bear? We had our wave of suicides after they first came up. The ones who're left are comparatively stable on the subject. But they stay that way because they've learned to think about it only in certain ways. But go ahead. You'll be able to work something out."

  "But, Hawks, I want to go back to Earth!"

  "To the world in your memories, that you want to re-make?"

  "Why can't I use the return transmitter?"

  Hawks said: "I told you. We only have a transmitter up here. We don't have a laboratory full of control equipment. The transmitter here pulses signals describing the typewritten reports and rock samples the Navy crew put in the receiver. It isn't used much for anything, but when it is, that's what it carries. From here—without dead-accurate astronomical data, without our power supply—the signals spread, they miss our antenna down there, they turn to hash in the ionization layers—you just can't do, from the surface of an uninhabited, unexplored, airless satellite, what we can do from there. You can't just send up, from a world with terrestrial gravity, with an atmosphere, with air pressure, with a different temperature range, equipment that will function here. It has to be designed for here and better yet, built here. Out of what? In what factory?

  "It doesn't matter, with marks on paper and lumps of rock, that we've got the bare minimum of equipment we had to have time to adapt. By trial and error, and constant repetition, we push the signals through, and decipher them on Earth. If they're hashed up, we send a message to that effect, and a Navy yeoman types up a new report from his file carbon, and a geologist chips off another rock of the same kind. But a man, Barker—I told you. A man is a phoenix. We simply don't have the facilities here to take scan readings on him, feed them through differential amplifiers, cross-check, and make a file tape to re-check against."

  Hawks raised his arms and dropped them. "Now do you see what I've done to you? Do you see what I've done to poor Sam Latourette, who'll wake up one day in a world full of strangers, only knowing that now he'll be cured but his old, good friend, Ed Hawks, is long dead and gone to dust? I haven't played fair with any of you. I've never once shown any of you mercy, except now and then by coincidence."

  He turned and began to walk away.

  "Wait! Hawks—you don't have to—"

  Hawks said, without stopping or turning his head, walking steadily: "What don't I have to? There's an Ed Hawks in the Universe who remembers all his life, even the time he spent in the Moon formation, up to this very moment as he stands down in the laboratory. What's being lost? There's no expenditure. I wish you well, Al—you'd better hurry and
get to that airlock. Either the one at the return transmitter or the one at the Naval station; it's about the same distance."

  "Hawks!"

  "I have to get out of these people's way," Hawks said abstractedly. "It's not part of their job to deal with corpses on their grounds. I want to get out there among the rocks."

  He walked to the end of the path, the camouflaging's shadows mottling his armor, cutting up the outlines of his body until he seemed to become only another place through which he walked.

  Then he emerged into the starlight, and his armor flashed with the clear, cold reflection.

  "Hawks," Barker said in a muffled voice, "I'm at the airlock."

  "Good luck, Barker."

  Hawks clambered over the rocks until he began to pant. Then he stood, wedged in place. He turned his face up, and stars glinted on the glass. He took one shallow breath after another, more and more quickly. His eyes watered. Then he blinked sharply, said, "No, I'm not going to fall for that." He blinked again and again. "I'm not afraid of you," he said. "Someday I, or another man, will hold you in his hand."

  Hawks L pulled the orange undershirt off over his head, and stood beside the dressing table, wearing nothing but the bottom of the suit, brushing at the talcum on his face and in his hair. His ribs stood out sharply under his skin.

  "You ought to get out in the sun, Hawks," Barker said, sitting on the edge of the table, watching him.

  "Yes," Hawks said abstractedly, thinking he had no way of knowing whether there really had been a plaid blanket on his bed in the farmhouse, or whether it had been a quilted comforter. "Well, I may. I should be able to find a little more time, now that things are going to be somewhat more routine. I may go swimming with a girl I know, or something. I don't know."

  There was a note in his left hand, crumpled and limp with perspiration, where he had been carrying it since before he was put into his armor the first time. He picked at it carefully, trying to open the folds without tearing them.