Algis Budrys - Rogue Moon

“And now?” Elizabeth asked.

“I’m not a boy any more. It isn’t nineteen thirty-two.”

“Is that your answer?”

“I can say the same thing with more words. I have work that has to be done by me, because I made it. I can’t go back now and change the boy that I grew out of. I can see him; I can see his mistakes as well as his correct decisions. But I’m the man who grew out of the mistakes as well as out of the choices an adult would approve. I have to work with what I am. There’s nothing else I can do — I can’t forever sit in judgment on myself. A lump of carbon can’t rearrange its own structure. It’s either a diamond or a lump of coal — and it doesn’t even know what coal or diamonds are. Someone else has to judge it.”

They sat for a long time without speaking, Hawks with the empty brandy glass set on the coffee table beside his outthrust legs, Elizabeth watching him from the window, the side of her face resting against her drawn-up knees.

“What were you thinking of now?” she asked when he stirred again and looked at his wrist watch. “Your work?”

“Now?” He smiled from a great distance. “No — I was thinking about something else. I was thinking about how X-ray photographs are taken.”

“What about it?”

He shook his head. “It’s complicated. When a physician X-rays a sick man, he gets a print showing the spots on his lungs, or the calcium in his arteries, or the tumor in his brain. But to cure the man, he can’t take scissors and cut the blotch out of the print. He has to take his scalpel to the man, and before he can do that, he has to decide whether his knife could reach the disease without cutting through some part of the man that can’t be cut. He has to decide whether his knife is sharp enough to dissect the malignancy out of the healthy tissue, or whether the man will simply regrow his illness from the scraps left behind — whether he will have to be whittled at again and again. Whittling the X-ray print does nothing. It only leaves a hole in the celluloid. And even if there were some way to arrange the X-ray camera so that it would not photograph the malignancy, and if there were some way of bringing the X-ray print to life, the print still would have a hole through it to where the malignancy had been, just as if a surgeon had attacked it there with his scalpel. It would die of the wound.

“So what you would need is an X-ray film whose chemicals will not only not reproduce the malignancy but would reproduce healthy tissue, which they have never seen, in its place. You would need a camera that could intelligently rearrange the grains of silver on the film. And who could build such a camera? How am I to do that, Elizabeth? How am I going to build that sort of machine?”

She touched his hand at the door. His fingers quivered sharply. She said, “Please call me again as soon as you can.”

“I don’t know when that will be,” he answered. “This — this project I’m on is going to take up a lot of time, if it works out.”

“Call me when you can. If I’m not here, I’ll be home.”

“I’ll call.” He whispered, “Good night, Elizabeth.” He was pressing his hand against the side of his leg. His arm began to tremble. He turned before she could touch him again and went quickly down the loft stairs to his car, the sound of his footsteps echoing clumsily downward.

Hawks was sitting in his office the next morning when Barker knocked on the door and came in. “The guard at the gate told me to see you here,” he said. His eyes measured Hawks’ face. “Decided to fire me, or something?”

Hawks shook his head. He closed the topmost of the bundle of file folders on his desk and pointed toward the other chair. “Sit down, please. You have a great deal to think over before you go to the laboratory.”

“Sure.” Barker’s expression relaxed. He walked over the uncarpeted floor with sharp scuffs of his jodhpur boot heels. “And by the way, good morning, Doctor,” he said, sitting down and crossing his legs. The shim plate bulged starkly under the whipcord fabric stretched across his knee.

“Good morning,” Hawks said shortly. He opened the file and took out a large folded square of paper. He spread it out on his desk facing Barker.

Without looking at it, Barker said, “Claire wants to know what’s going on.”

“Did you tell her?”

“Did the FBI call me a fool?”

“Not in ways that concern them.”

“I hope that’s your answer. I was only reporting a fact you might be interested in.” He smiled mirthlessly. “It cost me my night’s sleep.”

“Can you put in five minutes’ maximum physical effort this afternoon?”

“I’d say so if I couldn’t.”

“All right, then. Five minutes is all you’ll have. Now — this is where you’re going.” He touched the map. “This is the explored part of the far side of the Moon.”

Barker frowned and leaned forward, looking down at the precisely etched hachurelines, the rectangle of territory bounded by lightly sketched areas marked: “No accurate data available.”

“Rough country,” he said. He looked up. “Explored?”

“Topographical survey. The Navy has an outpost located—” he put his finger down on a minute square — “there. Just over the edge of the visible disk at maximum libration. This—” he pointed to a slightly larger ragged circle a quarter inch away — “is where you’re going.”

Barker lifted one eyebrow. “What have the Russians got to say about all this?”

“This entire map,” Hawks said patiently, “encompasses fifty square miles. The naval installation, and the place where you’re going, are contained within an area half a mile square. They’re almost the only unnatural formations at all visible from overhead. The others are the matter receiver beside the naval station and a relay tower near the edge of the visible disk. They’re camouflaged — all but the place you’re going, which can’t be hidden. But the radiophotos from last month’s Russian circumlunar rocket take in an area of at least seven million three hundred thousand square miles of lunar surface alone. Could you see a fly on the side of the Empire State Building’s television tower? Through dirty glasses?”

“If I was up there with it.”

“The Russians are not. We think they have a telemetering robot installation somewhere on the visible Isk, and we expect them to rocket men up to it sometime next year. We haven’t yet found it, but the statistical prediction locates their base about six thousand great circle miles from our installation. I don’t feel we need worry about asking anyone’s permission to go ahead with our program. However that may be, we are there, and this is where you’re going today Now let me tell you how all this happened.”

Barker leaned back in his chair, folded his arms, and arched his eyebrows. “I like your classroom manner,” he murmured. “Have you ever considered a teaching career, Doctor?”

Hawks looked up at him. “I cannot let you die in ignorance,” he finally said. “You’re — you’re free to leave this room at any time and terminate your employment here. Connington delivered your signed releases and contract to the company this morning. If you’ve read your contract, you’ll remember the clause that permits you to cancel.”

“Oh, I’ll stick around, Doctor,” Barker answered lightly.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Barker, you’re not being easy on me at all, are you?”

“You’re not doing so well by me, Doctor.”

Hawks’ right hand stirred the pile of folders, and he looked down at them. “You’re right. Mercy is only a recent human cultural invention.” He said in an overprecise tone, “Let’s get to work. Earlier this year, the Air Force obtained one radioed photograph from a rocket which it attempted to put into a lunar orbit. The rocket came much too close, and crashed somewhere beyond the edge of the visible disk. By fortunate accident, that one photograph showed this.” He took an eight-by-ten glossy print enlargement out of its folder and passed it to Barker. “You can see it’s almost hopelessly washed out and striated by errors in transmission from the rocket’s radiophoto sending apparatus. But this area, of which a part is visible in this corner — here-is clearly not a natural formation.”