The Gods Themselves (29 page)

"Easy to say," he sighed. "I'm walking well, I hope."

"Very well. I'll have you kangarooing yet."

"And participating in glider races down the surface slopes. Remember, I'm moderately advanced in years. But really, how far have we come?"

"Two miles, I should judge."

"Good Lord! How many miles of corridors are there altogether?"

"I'm afraid I don't know. The residential corridors make up comparatively little of the total. There are the mining corridors, the geological ones, the industrial, the mycological. . . . I'm sure there must be several hundred miles altogether."

"Do you have maps?"

"Of course there are maps. We can't work blind."

"I mean you, personally."

"Well, no, not with me, but I don't need maps for this area; it's quite familiar to me. I used to wander about here as a child. These are old corridors. Most of the new corridors—and we average two or three miles of new corridors a year, I think—are in the north. I couldn't work my way through them, without a map, for untold sums. Maybe not even with a map."

"Where are we heading?"

"I promised you an unusual sight—no, not me, so don't say it—and you'll have it. It's the Moon's most unusual mine and it's completely off the ordinary tourist trails."

"Don't tell me you've got diamonds on the Moon?"

"Better than that."

The corridor walls were unfinished here—gray rock, dimly but adequately lit by patches of electroluminescence. The temperature was comfortable and at a steady mildness, with ventilation so gently effective there was no sensation of wind. It was hard to tell here that a couple of hundred feet above was a surface subjected to alternate frying and freezing as the Sun came and went on its grand biweekly swing from horizon to horizon and then underneath and back.

"Is all this airtight?" asked Denison, suddenly uncomfortably aware that he was not far below the bottom of an ocean of vacuum that extended upward through all infinity.

"Oh, yes. Those walls are impervious. They're all booby-trapped, too. If the air pressure drops as much as ten per cent in any section of the corridors there is such a hooting and howling from sirens as you have never heard and such a flashing of arrows and blazing of signs directing you to safety as you have never seen."

"How often does this happen?"

"Not often. I don't think anyone has been killed through air-lack for at least five years." Then, with sudden defensiveness, "You have natural catastrophes on Earth. A big quake or a tidal wave can kill thousands."

"No argument, Selene." He threw up his hands. "I surrender."

"All right," she said. "I didn't mean to get excited.... Do you hear that?"

She stopped, in an attitude of listening.

Denison listened, too, and shook his head. Suddenly, he looked around. "It's so quiet. Where is everybody? Are you sure we're not lost?"

"This isn't a natural cavern with unknown passageways. You have those on Earth, haven't you? I've seen photographs."

"Yes, most of them are limestone caves, formed by water. That certainly can't be the case of the Moon, can it?"

"So we can't be lost," said Selene, smiling. "If we're alone, put it down to superstition."

"To what?" Denison looked startled and his face creased in an expression of disbelief.

"Don't do that," she said. "You get all lined. That's right. Smooth out. You look much better than you did when you first arrived, you know. That's low gravity and exercise."

"And trying to keep up with nude young ladies who have an uncommon amount of off-time and an uncommon lack of better things "to do than to go on busmen's holidays."

"Now you're treating me like a tourist guide again, and I'm not nude."

"At that, even nudity is less frightening than Intuition-ism. ... But what's this about superstition?"

"Not really superstition, I suppose, but most of the people of the city tend to stay away from this part of the corridor-complex."

"But why?"

"Because of what I'm going to show you." They were walking again. "Hear it now?"

She stopped and Denison listened anxiously. He said, "You mean that small tapping sound? Tap—tap— Is that what you mean?"

She ran ahead in slow, loping strides with the slow-motion movement of the Lunarite in unhurried flight. He followed her, attempting to ape the gait.

"Here—here—"

Denison's eye followed Selene's eagerly pointing finger. "Good Lord," he said. "Where's it coming from?"

There was a drip of what was clearly water. A slow dripping, with each drip striking a small ceramic trough that led into the rock wall.

"From the rocks. We do have water on the Moon, you know. Most of it we can bake out of gypsum; enough for our purposes, since we conserve it pretty well."

"I know. I know. I've never yet been able to manage one complete shower. How you people manage to stay clean I don't know."

"I
told
you. First, wet yourself. Then turn off the water and smear just a little detergent on you. You rub it— Oh, Ben, I'm not going through it yet again. And there's nothing on the Moon to get you all that dirty anyway. . . . But that's not what we're talking about. In one or two places there are actually water deposits, usually as ice near the surface in a mountain shadow. If we locate it, it drips out. This one has been dripping since the corridor was first driven through, and that was eight years ago."

"But why the superstition?"

"Well, obviously, water is the great material resource on which the Moon depends. We drink it, wash with it, grow our food with it, make our oxygen with it, keep everything going with it. Free water can't help but get a lot of respect. Once this drip was discovered, plans to extend the tunnels in this direction were abandoned till it stopped. The corridor walls were even left unfinished."

"That sounds like superstition right there."

"Well—a kind of awe, maybe. It wasn't expected to last for more than a few months; such drips never do. Well, after this one had passed its first anniversary, it began to seem eternal. In fact, that's what it's called: 'The Eternal.' You’ll even find it marked that way on the maps. Naturally people have come to attach importance to it; a feeling that if it stops it will mean some sort of bad fortune."

Denison laughed.

Selene said, warmly, "No one
really
believes it, but everyone part-believes it. You see, it's not really eternal and it must stop some time. As a matter of fact, the rate of drip is only about a third of what it was when it was first discovered, so that it is slowly drying. I imagine people feel that if it happened to stop when they were actually here, they would share in the bad fortune. At least, that's the rational way of explaining their reluctance to come here."

"I take it that you don't believe this."

"Whether I believe it or not isn't the point. You see I'm quite certain that it won't stop sharply enough for anyone to be able to take the blame. It will just drip slower and slower and slower and no one will ever be able to pinpoint the exact time when it stopped. So why worry?"

"I agree with you."

"I do, however," she said, making the transition smoothly, "have other worries, and I'd like to discuss them with you while we're alone." She spread out the blanket and sat on it, cross-legged.

"Which is why you really brought me here?" He dropped to hip and elbow, facing her.

She said, "See, you can look at me easily now. You're getting used to me. ... And, really, there were surely times on Earth when near nudity wasn't something to be exclaimed over."

"Times and places," agreed Denison, "but not since the passing of the Crisis. In my lifetime—"

"Well, on the Moon, do as the Lunarites do is a good enough guide for behavior."

"Are you going to tell me why you really brought me here? Or shall I suspect you of planning seduction?"

"I could carry through seduction quite comfortably at home, thank you. This is different The surface would have been best, but getting ready to go out on the surface would have attracted a great deal of attention. Coming here didn't, and this place is the only spot in town where we can be reasonably safe from interruption." She hesitated.

"Well?" said Denison.

"Barren is angry. Very angry, in fact."

"I'm not surprised. I warned you he would be if you told him that I knew you were an Intuitionist. Why did you feel it so necessary to tell him?"

"Because it is difficult to keep things for long from my —companion. Probably, though, he doesn't consider me that any longer."

"I'm sorry."

"Oh, it was turning sour anyway. It's lasted long enough. What bothers me more—much more—is that he violently refuses to accept your interpretation of the Pionizer experiments you ran after the surface observations."

"I told you the way it would be."

"He said he had seen your results,"

"He glanced at them and grunted."

"It's rather disillusioning. Does everyone just believe what he wants to?"

"As long as possible. Sometimes longer."

"What about you?"

"You mean, am I human? Certainly. I don't believe I'm really old. I believe I'm quite attractive. I believe you seek out. my company because you think I'm charming—even when you insist on turning the conversation to physics."

"No! I mean it!"

"Well, I suspect Neville told you that the data I had gathered were not significant beyond the margin of error, which makes them doubtful, and that's true enough. . . . And yet I prefer to believe they have the meaning I expected them to have to begin with."

"Just because you want to believe that?"

"Not
just
because. Look at it this way. Suppose there is no harm in the Pump, but that I insist on thinking there
is
harm. In that case, I will turn out to be a fool and my scientific reputation will be badly damaged. But A
im
a fool in the eyes of the people who count, and I have no scientific reputation."

"Why is that, Ben? You've hinted around the tale several times. Can't you tell me the whole story?"

"You'd be surprised how little there is to tell. At the age of twenty-five I was still such a child that I had to amuse myself by insulting a fool for no reason other than that he was a fool. Since his folly was not his fault, I was the greater fool to do it. My insult drove him to heights he couldn't possibly have scaled otherwise—"

"You're talking of Hallam?"

"Yes, of course. And as he rose, I fell. And eventually, it dropped me to—the Moon."

"Is that so bad?"

"No, I rather think it's good. So let's say he did me a favor, long-way round. . . . And let's get back to what I'm talking about. I’ve just explained that if I believe the Pump to be harmful and am wrong, I lose nothing. On the other hand, if I believe the Pump to be harmless and am wrong, I will be helping to destroy the world. To be sure, I've lived most of my life already and I suppose I can argue myself into believing that I have no great cause to love humanity. However, only a few people have hurt me, and if I hurt everyone in return that is unconscionable usury.

"Then, too, if you'd rather have a less noble reason, Selene, consider my daughter. Just before I left for the Moon, she had 'applied for permission to have a child. She'll probably get it and before long I'll be—if you don’t mind my saying so—a grandfather. Somehow I'd like to see my grandchild have a normal life expectancy. So I prefer to believe the Pump is dangerous and to act on that belief."

Selene said, intensely, "But here's' my point. Is the Pump dangerous or is it not? I mean, the truth, and not what anyone wants to believe."

"I should ask
you
that. You're the Intuitionist What does your intuition say?"

"But that's what bothers me, Ben. I can't make it really certain either way. I tend to feel the Pump is harmful, but maybe that's because I want to believe that."

"All right. Maybe you do. Why?"

Selene smiled ruefully and shrugged her shoulders. "It would be fun for Barron to be wrong. When he thinks he's certain, he's so
vituperatively
certain."

"I know. You want to see his face when he's forced to back down. I'm well aware of how intense such a desire can be. For instance, if the Pump
were
dangerous and I could prove it, I might conceivably be hailed as the savior of humanity, and yet I swear that I'd be more interested in the look on Hallam's face. I'm not proud of that feeling so I suspect that what I'll do is insist on an equal share of the credit with Lamont, who deserves it after all, and confine my pleasure to watching Lament's face when
he
watches Hallam's face. The pettishness will then be one place removed. .. . But I'm beginning to speak nonsense.. .. Selene?"

"Yes, Ben?"

"When did you find out you were an Intuitionist?"

"I don't quite know."

"You took physics in college, I imagine."

"Oh, yes. Some math, too, but I was never good at that Come to think of it, I wasn't particularly good in physics, either. I used to guess the answers when I was desperate; you know, guess what I was supposed to do to get the right answers. Very often, it worked and then I would be asked to explain why I had done what I did and I couldn't do that very well. They suspected me of cheating but could never prove it"

"They didn't suspect Intuitionism?"

"I don't think so. But then, I didn't either. Until—well, one of my first sex-mates was a physicist. In fact, he was the father of my child, assuming he really supplied the sperm-sample. He had a physics problem and he told me about it when we were lying in bed afterward, just to have something to talk about, I suppose. And I said, 'You know what it sounds like to me?' and told him. He tried it just for the fun of it, he said, and it worked. In fact, that was the first step to the Pionizer, which you said was much better than the proton synchrotron."

"You mean that was
your
idea?" Denison put his finger under the dripping water and paused as he was about to put it in his mouth. "Is this water safe?"