Robert Sawyer - Mindscan

I caught her bra, wadded it up, and sent it on a trajectory that would get it out of the way, then began to remove my own shirt, which quickly billowed around me as its buttons were undone. My belt was next, a flat eel in the air. And then my pants joined Karen’s, floating freely.

“All right,” I said, to Karen. “Let’s see if we can execute a docking maneuver…”

We had to strap in again ten hours later, as the rocket decelerated for a full sixty minutes. Although most manned flights to the moon apparently went to something called LS One, we were going to land directly at Heaviside Crater.

The landing was done by remote control and there was nothing for us to see; the cargo hold had no window. Still, I knew we were setting down on our tail fins; Jesus at Cape Kennedy had quipped, “In the way that God and Robert Heinlein meant you to,” but I didn’t get it.

It was near the end of the lunar day, which lasted, as I’m sure that Smythe guy would say, a fortnight. The surface temperature apparently was a little over 100 degrees Celsius—but it’s a dry heat. According to Dr. Porter, whom Smythe had consulted about this, we could manage ten or fifteen minutes out in the heat, not to mention the ultraviolet radiation, before we’d have a problem; the lack of air, of course, was a nonissue for us.

The cargo rocket didn’t have an airlock, just a hatch, but it was easy enough to open from the inside; the same safety rules that existed for refrigerators also seemed to apply to spaceships. I hinged the door outward, and the atmosphere that had been carried along with us escaped in a white cloud.

We were inside Heaviside Crater, its rim rising up in the distance. The closest dome of High Eden was maybe a hundred meters away, and—

That must be it. The moonbus, a silvery brick with a blue-green fuel tank strapped to each side, sitting on a circular landing platform. It was attached to an adjacent building by a telescoping access tunnel.

The lunar surface was about twelve meters below my feet—far more than I’d want to fall under Earth’s gravity, but it shouldn’t be a problem here. I looked at Karen and smiled. There was no way for us to speak, since there was no air. But I mouthed the word “Geronimo!” as I stepped out of the hatchway.

The fall was gentle, and took what seemed like forever. When I hit—probably the first pair of Nikes ever to directly touch the lunar soil—a cloud of gray dust went up. Some of it stuck to my clothes (static electricity, I presumed), but the rest filtered back down to the ground.

There were little meteor craters everywhere within this bigger crater: some were a few centimeters across, others a few meters. I turned around and looked up at Karen.

For a woman who had been frail a short time ago, who had had one hip replaced and had doubtless lived in fear of breaking the other, she was quite gutsy. With no hesitation, she copied what I’d done, stepping out of the hatch and beginning the slow descent to the ground.

She was carrying something tubular … of course! She’d remembered to grab the front section of the New York Times , and now had it rolled into a cylinder. It was astonishing not to see her hair billow upward, or her clothes ripple, but there was no air resistance to cause any of that. I took a few quick hopping steps to the right to give her plenty of room to land, and she did so, a big grin on her face.

The sky overhead was totally black. No stars were visible except the sun itself, which glowered fiercely. I reached out a hand, and Karen grasped it, and we took huge bouncing steps together, heading for High Eden, the place we were never supposed to see.

Gabriel Smythe turned out to be a compact man of perhaps sixty, with white-blond hair and a florid complexion. He had taken up residence in High Eden’s transit-control room, which was a cramped space, dimly lit, full of monitor screens and glowing control panels. Through a wide window, we could see the moonbus, just twenty meters away, attached to the Jetway. It had coverings over all the windows I could see, preventing us from looking inside.

“Thank you for coming,” Smythe said, pumping my hand. “Thank you.”

I nodded. I didn’t want to be here—at least not under these circumstances. But I felt a moral responsibility, I guess—although I hadn’t done anything.

“And I see you brought the newspaper,” continued Smythe. “Excellent! All right, there’s a videophone connection between here and the moonbus. That’s the microphone, and that’s the camera pickup. He’s covered all the security cameras inside the bus, but we can still see him through the phone’s camera, when he deigns to transmit video, and he can see us. I’m going to call him now, and let him know you’re here. He’s being at least partially reasonable—he let one of the hostages go. Chandragupta says—”

“Chandragupta?” I repeated, startled. “Pandit Chandragupta?”

“Yes. Why?”

“What’s he got to do with this?”

“He’s the one who cured the other you,” said Smythe.

I felt like slapping my forehead, but that would have been too theatrical. “Christ, of course! He’s also the one who started this whole damn mess with the lawsuit. He issued a death certificate for the Karen Bessarian who died up here.”

“Yes, yes. We saw. We’ve been watching the trial coverage, of course. Needless to say, we’re not pleased. Anyway, he says your, um…”

“Skin,” I said. “I know the slang. My shed skin.”

“Right. He says your skin will have wildly fluctuating neurotransmitter levels in his brain for perhaps another couple of days. Sometimes he’ll be quite rational, and sometimes he’ll have a hair-trigger temper, or be totally paranoid.”

“Christ,” I said.

Smythe nodded. “Who’d have thought it’d be easier to copy a mind than to cure one? Anyway, remember, he’s armed, and—”

“Armed?” Karen and I said in unison.

“Yes, yes. He’s got a piton gun—it’s for mountain climbing, and it shoots metal spikes. He could easily kill someone with it.”

“My God…” I said.

“Indeed,” said Smythe. “I’ll get him on the phone. Don’t promise him anything we can’t deliver, and do your best not to upset him. Okay?”

I nodded.

“Here goes.” Smythe tapped some keys on a small keypad.

The phone bleeped a few times, then: “It better be good news, Gabe.”

The picture on the screen showed the old me, all right: I’d forgotten how much gray I’d had in my hair. There was a wild look in his eyes that I don’t think I’d ever seen before.

“It is, Jake,” Gabe said. It was strange hearing him use my name but not be addressing me. “It’s very good news indeed. Your—the other you is here, with me now, here, in the transit-control room at High Eden.” He gestured for me to come into the camera’s field of view, and I did so.

“Hello,” I said, and my voice sounded mechanical, even to me. I’d forgotten how rich my real—my original —voice had been.

“Hmmph,” said the other me. “Did you bring the newspaper?”

“Yes,” I said. Karen, standing out of view, handed it to me. I held it up to the phone’s lens, so he could read the date and see the main headline.

“I’ll want to examine that later, of course, but for now, all right: I’ll accept that a rocket really came from Earth today, and you might have been on it.”

“Uncover the windows on the moonbus, and you’ll see the rocket,” I said. “It’s about a hundred meters away, and—let’s see—it should be visible off your left side.”

“And you’ve got a sniper, just waiting to pick me off if my face appears in the window.”