Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories (21 page)

I nodded. “So naturally, you sent Here’s Johnny for me.”

Hvarlgen laughed and scowled, and I understood for the first time that her scowl was a smile; she just wore it upside down.

“You’re getting ahead of yourself, Major. I interpreted all this to mean that there was a reluctance to communicate with me, which had something to do with my age or my sex or both. Since we hadn’t left for the Moon yet, I used my somewhat extravagant authority and sent the shuttle back down. I recruited an old friend, a former professor of mine—a retired adviser to SETI, in fact—who had spent some time at Houbolt, and brought him to Luna with me. That clipped another three days out of my precious time.”

“So where is he? Out the airlock, I suppose, or I wouldn’t be here.”

“Not quite out the airlock yet,” said Hvarlgen. “Come with me and you’ll see.”

* * *

I had never met Dr. Soo Lee Kim, but I had heard of him. A tiny man with long, flying white hair like Einstein, he was an astronomer, the leader of the deep-space optical team that had been kicked out of Houbolt when it had been turned into a semiautomated warning station. Dr. Kim had won a Nobel Prize. He had a galaxy named after him. Now he occupied one of the two beds in the infirmary under the clear dome in East. The other one was empty.

I smelled death in the room and realized it was PeaceAble, the sinsemilla nasal spray given to terminal patients. It’s a complicated aroma for me, the smell of love and loss together, a curious mixture I knew well from the last weeks of my first wife, the one I went back to when she was dying. But that’s another story altogether.

Dr. Kim looked cheerful enough. He had been expecting us.

“I’m so glad you’re here; now perhaps we can begin to communicate,” he said in Cambridge-accented English. “As you probably know, the Shadow won’t talk with me.”

“The Shadow?”

“That’s what I call it. From your old American radio serial. ‘Who knows what Evil lurks in the Hearts of Men? The Shadow knows!’ ”

“You don’t look that old to me,” I said.

“I’m not; I’ll be seventy-two next week, when the
Diana
returns, if I’m unfortunate enough to last that long.” He took a quick shot of PeaceAble from an imitation ebony spraypipe, and continued: “Collecting old radio tapes was a hobby I picked up when I was at university. They were forty-five years old even then, forty-five years ago. I don’t suppose you remember Sky King and his Radio Ranch?”

“Nobody’s that old, Dr. Kim. I’m only seventy-six. How old do you have to be for this ghost-in-a-bowl?”

“The Shadow,” he corrected. “Oh, you’re quite old enough. I’m old enough, actually, I think. Or would have been, if it weren’t for . . .”

“Start at the beginning, Dr. Kim,” said Hvarlgen. “Please. The Major needs to know everything that has happened.”

“The beginning? Then let’s start at the end, as the Shadow starts.” He laughed enigmatically. “I have learned one thing, at least: Language is contained as much in the musculature as in the brain. The first time, I did as Sunda did; I stuck my hand into the bowl, and my brain was looking on, unattached, as the Shadow picked up my hand, and with it picked up a pencil—”

“And wrote you a letter,” I said.

“Drew me a picture,” Dr. Kim corrected. “Korean is at least partly ideographic.” He reached under the bed and pulled out a paper, on which was written:

“Take me to your leader?” I guessed.

“It means, more or less, ‘okay’; and it suggests a more intimate relationship, which I immediately implemented, so to speak, and which—”

“More intimate?”

“—resulted in this.”

“Like Sunda’s message, it means ‘new growth,’ ” he said. “Which I took, in my case, to mean cancer.”

“Oh.”

I must have winced, because he said, “Oh, it’s all right. I knew it already; colon cancer; I had known it for four months. I just hadn’t told Sunda because I didn’t think it mattered.”

“Then it wasn’t the Shadow that—?” I asked.

“Gave it to me? No,” said Dr. Kim. “The Shadow was in a position, so to speak, to detect it, that’s all.” He either grinned or grimaced in pain (it was hard to tell) and took another shot of PeaceAble. “Don’t forget, ‘The Shadow Knows.’ ”

The young are sentimental around death but the old have no such problem. “Tough,” I said.

“There are no happy endings,” Dr. Kim said. “At least, thanks to the Shadow, I got my trip back to the Moon. With any luck I might even end my days here. Wouldn’t it make a great tombstone, the Moon? Hanging there in the sky, bigger than a thousand pyramids. And lighted, to boot. Would put to rest forever the slander that all Koreans have good taste.” He paused for another shot. “But the problem is, that because of the cancer—apparently—the Shadow won’t relate to me. I think it mistakes the cancer for youth. That second contact was my last. So tomorrow it’s your turn, right?” He looked from me to Hvarlgen.

Hvarlgen and I looked at each other.

“So I’m next,” I said. “Old man number two.”

“This is the point at which I give you the chance to back out,” Hvarlgen said. “Much as I hate to. But if you turn me down, I’ll still have time for one more shot; your alternate is doing his meds right now in Reykjavik.”

I could tell she was lying; if she had only six days left, I was her only hope. “Why me in the first place?” I asked.

“You were the oldest reasonably healthy male I could find on such short notice who was space qualified. I knew you’d been to Houbolt. Plus I liked your looks, Major. Intuition. You looked like the kind of guy who might stick his neck out.”

“Neck?” laughed Dr. Kim, and she shot him a dirty look.

“Of course, I could be wrong,” she said to me.

She was gut-checking me but I didn’t mind; I hadn’t been gut-checked in years. I looked at Hvarlgen. I looked at Dr. Kim. I looked at the million stars beyond them and figured what the hell.

“Okay,” I said. “I guess I can stick my hand in a fishbowl for science.”

Dr. Kim laughed again and Hvarlgen shot him an angry look. “There’s one thing you should know—” she began.

Dr. Kim finished for her: “The Shadow doesn’t want to shake hands with you, Major Bewley. It wants to crawl up your ass and look around. Like it crawled up mine.”

II

I showed up at Grand Central the next morning wearing the bright orange tunic with the SETI patch, just to prove to Hvarlgen I was on her team. We had coffee. “Scared?”

“Wouldn’t you be scared?” I said. “For one thing, this Shadow is a cancer detector. Then, the business with Mersault . . .”

“It’s unlikely that our people in Reykjavik missed anything. And indications are that Mersault may have been independently suicidal. Zippe-Buisson hires some weirdos. But you’re right, Major, one never knows.”

I followed her down the forty-meter tube to East. We were initiating the first contact session in the infirmary, so that Dr. Kim could participate, or at least observe. Hvarlgen was literally rearing to go: The chair was tilted back so far that she rode it almost prone.

Three of the five periphery domes have magnolias—those reptilian trees love the Moon—but it is East’s that is the most lush, its leaves picking up the lunar palette from the regolith of the crater floor and processing it into a new, complex gray unseen before.

Dr. Kim’s bed was under the tree. He was awake, waiting for us. He caressed the spraypipe in his fingers like a good-luck charm. “Good morning, colleagues,” he said.

Hvarlgen rolled to his bedside and kissed his withered cheek.

Two lunies rolled in a wheeled table; on it was the Shadow in its bowl. Another lunie carried the film camera on her shoulder. Another carried a bright yellow plastic chair. It was for me.

The big moment had arrived. Hvarlgen and I approached the table together. When she picked up the bowl, I noticed that the Shadow pulled away from her hands toward the center. It moved in a rippling motion that both repelled and attracted my eyes.

She put the bowl on the floor in front of the chair. “Let’s begin,” she said, clicking on the video recorder she carried on her lap. The film camera whirred as I slipped my pants off, over my shoes, and stood there naked under my tunic. It was 9:46 HT (Houston/Houbolt time) on the wall.

I felt frightened. I felt embarrassed. Worse, I felt ridiculous, especially with the young lunies—girls and boys—sitting on the empty bed, watching.

“Oh, Major, please quit worrying!” Hvarlgen said. “Women are used to being prodded and poked between their legs. Men can put up with it once in a while. Sit down!”

I sat down; the yellow plastic was cold on my butt. Hvarlgen nudged my knees apart wordlessly and pushed the bowl between my feet, then rolled backward to the head of Dr. Kim’s bed, under the magnolia. I clutched pencil in one hand and paper in the other. Hvarlgen and Dr. Kim had explained what would happen, but it was still a shock. The Shadow moved—
twisted
—out of the bowl, flowed up between my legs, and disappeared up my ass.

I watched it, fascinated. I felt no fear or dread. There was no “feeling” as such; it really
was
like a shadow. I kept myself covered by the tunic, out of modesty; but I knew as soon as the Shadow was inside me, because—

There was someone else in the room. He was standing across the room, not far from the foot of Dr. Kim’s bed. He was not quite solid, and not quite full-sized, and he was flickering like a bad light bulb; but I knew immediately “who” it was.

It was me.

I moved my arm slightly, to see if he would move his, like a mirror image, but he didn’t. He flickered and with each flicker got either bigger, or closer, or both. There was no frame of reference; no way to judge his size. It was somehow very clear that he or it was not
in
the room with us; not occupying the same space. It raised the hair on the back of my head, and judging from the palpable silence in the room, everyone else’s as well.

We were seeing a ghost.

It was Hvarlgen who finally spoke. “Who are you?”

There was no answer.

I tried moving my arm again but the Shadow (for already, that was how I thought of the image) answered none of my movements. Somehow that made it better; it was as if I were watching a film of myself and not a reflection. But it was an old film; I looked younger. And when I looked to one side a little, the image disappeared.

“Who are you?” said Hvarlgen again; it was more a statement than a question. “He,” “it,”—the Shadow—started flickering, faster and faster, and I suddenly felt sick at my stomach.

I bent over, almost retching; I covered my mouth and then tried to aim toward the bowl at the foot of the chair. But it didn’t matter—nothing came out, even though I saw the Shadow was pooled back in its bowl.

I shook my hands and examined them; they were clean.

The ghost was gone.

The session was over. Hvarlgen was staring at me. I looked at my watch; it was 9:54. The whole thing had lasted six minutes.

The pad and pencil lay on the floor where I had dropped them. The pad was blank.

“Well, now, that was interesting,” said Dr. Kim, taking a long shot of PeaceAble.

* * *

Hvarlgen sent the lunies out, and had coffee sent in, and we discussed the session over a light lunch. Very light; I was on the high-protein, low-fiber “astronaut’s diet” of moonjirky. Plus, I was still feeling a little queasy.

We all agreed that the image was me, or an approximation of me. “But younger,” said Dr. Kim.

“So what is it trying to say?” asked Hvarlgen. Neither Dr. Kim nor I answered; it seemed useless to speculate. She clicked on her video recorder. Instead of a holovid image, what came up was a ball of bright static. She fast-forwarded but nothing changed.

“Damn! Just as I had suspected,” she said. “If we are to get any image at all, it will be on film. But film has to be processed chemically, which means it has to go all the way back to Earth before we’ll even know if it works. In the meantime—”

“In the meantime,” Dr. Kim said, “why don’t we try it again?”

* * *

Hvarlgen got on her chair-phone and soon the lunies arrived with the Shadow in its bowl, the film camera, and the rest of the crew, who had presumably heard about the morning session. It was 1:35 (HT). Surprisingly, it was just as humiliating for me the second time. But science is science; I took off my pants. The film camera wheezed and whirred on a lunie’s shoulder. I held the pad and pencil in one hand, ready. Hvarlgen rolled back to Dr. Kim’s bed. I sat on the cold plastic chair and spread my legs. I forgot my embarrassment as the Shadow
twisted
out of its bowl and up—and disappeared—