Algis Budrys: Rogue Moon

After a while, Elizabeth said, “What did you do?”

“Well, after a while I came back and studied the receiver, and built a replica. And after that we used microwave radar and won the war.

“Listen — the thing is, people say when a man dies, ‘Well, he had a full life, and when his time came, he went peacefully.’ Or they say, ‘Poor boy — he’d barely begun to live.’ But the thing is, dying isn’t an incident. It isn’t something that happens to a man on one particular day of his life, soon or late. It happens to the whole man — to the boy he was, to the young man he was — to his joys, to his sorrows, to the times he laughed aloud, to the times he smiled. Whether it’s soon or late, how can the dying man possibly feel it was enough of a life he lived, or not enough? Who measures it? Who can decide, as he dies, that it was time? Only the body reaches a point where it can’t move any more. The mind — even the senile mind, fogged by the strangling cells of its body’s brain — rational or irrational, broad or narrow; that never stops; no matter what, as long as one trickle of electricity can seep from one cell to another, still it functions; still it moves. How can any mind, ever, say to itself, ‘Well, this life has reached its logical end,’ and shut itself down? Who can say, ‘I’ve seen enough’? Even the suicide has to blow his brains out, because he has to destroy the physical thing to evade whatever it is in his mind that will not let him rest. The mind, Elizabeth — intelligence; the ability to look at the universe; to care where the foot falls, what the hand touches-how can it help but go on, and on, drinking in what it perceives around it?”

His arm swept out in a long, stiff arc that swept over the beach and the sea. “ Look at this! All your life, you’ll have this, now! And so will I. In our last moments, we will still be able to look back, to be here again. Years away from here, and thousands of miles away from here, we would still have it. Time, space, entropy — no attribute of the universe can take this from us, except by killing us, by crushing us out.

“The thing is, the universe is dying! The stars are burning their substance. The planets are moving more slowly on their axes. They’re falling inward toward their suns. The atomic particles that make it all up are slowing in their orbits. Bit by bit, over the countless billions of years, it’s slowly happening. It’s all running down. Some day, it’ll stop. Only one thing in the entire universe grows fuller, and richer, and. forces its way uphill. Intelligence — human lives — we’re the only things there are that don’t obey the universal law. The universe kills our bodies; it drags them down with gravity; it drags, and drags, until our hearts grow tired with pumping our blood against its pull, until the walls of our cells break down with the weight of themselves, until our tissues sag, and our bones grow weak and bent. Our lungs tire of pulling air in and pushing it out. Our veins and capillaries break with the strain. Bit by bit, from the day we’re conceived, the universe rasps and plucks at our bodies until they can’t repair themselves any longer. And in that way, in the end, it kills our brains.

“But our minds … 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.

“Once 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. I 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 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 at the sky. “This is a beautiful place!” he said. “You know, this is a beautiful place.”

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. Full of piss and vinegar. 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 Gersten at the transmitter?”