The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B (27 page)

"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.

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.