Algis Budrys - Rogue Moon

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 some delay. We’re going to have to take a preliminary scan on myself, first. I’m going along with you.”

Barker ground out his cigarette 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 Gersten, as he lay 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,” Gersten argued, his eyes stubborn.

“We’ve always had a stock of equipment, in all sizes.”

“Hawks, 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. Once we have a safe pathway, the probing and the study really begin. We’re going to have to disassemble that thing like a bomb; I’m in charge of the project. Up to now, if I were lost to the project, it would have been too much of an expenditure. But now the risk is acceptable. I want to see what that thing’s like. I want to be able to give intelligent directions. Is that so hard to undersand?”

“Hawks, 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. Do you think I wasn’t planning to do this, from the very beginning?”

“Even before you knew Barker?”

“I wish I’d never known Barker. Stand aside and let them close the armor.” He fitted his left hand carefully into its gauntlet inside its tool cluster.

He was wheeled into the chamber. The magnets took hold, and the table was pulled out. The door closed and was dogged shut. He floated in mid-air, his legs and arms outspread, surrounded by the hundred thousand glittering eyes of the scanner faces. He lay looking up through the circle of glass in his helmet, his face expressionless. “Any time, Ted,” he said sleepily into his microphone, and the chamber lights winked out.

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,” Gersten said into his microphone. “The computers didn’t spot any breaks in the transmission.”

“Well, that’s as well 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 nervously. Gersten jerked his head to the side and looked at him.

Hawks and Barker climbed slowly to their feet in the Moon receiver. The Navy specialists waiting outside now opened the door, and stood aside to let them clamber out. The Moon station was bare and gray, with triangular plastic geodesic girders webbing the semiflexible sheet roof of the dome. Lights were hung from it at intervals, like stalactites, and the floor was a sieve of pressed matting over a ground sheet. Hawks looked around him curiously, the helmet of his armor swiveling with a faint grating sound that was instantly taken up by the fabric of the dome and ainpilfled, so that every move each man made was followed by its larger echo. The interior of the building was never still. It creaked and groaned constantly, shivering the lights on their hangers; the group of men — the Navy crew in their undersuits and Hawks and Barker in their armor — were bathed in shifting reflections as though they were at the bottom of a sea beset by a powerful storm above them. At the airlock, the Navy men got back into their own rubberized canvas suits, and then, one by one, they all stepped out onto the open surface of the Moon.

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 graygreen in color, with no lights showing.

Hawks took a deep breath. “All right, thank you,” he said to the Navy men, his voice distant, mechanical, and businesslike over the radiotelephone circuit. “Are the observer teams ready?”

A Navy man, with 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, touching Hawks’ forearm with the tool cluster at the end of his right sleeve. “Let’s go — we’ll run 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 to walk 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 work light. 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 at which the walkway came to a dead end. He shuffled sideways and there was a sharp spang! inside Hawk’s 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 dive forward, rolling over as he skittered to the side along the running stream of yielding, leaflike pale fringes. As he dove, he passed over a twisted body in a type of armor that had been discarded.