Algis Budrys: Rogue Moon

“Will you?” Hawks began walking again. “Come with me, Al.”

Barker trotted after him. “Where are you going?”

Hawks continued to walk until he was on the track that led toward the motor pool, and that continued past it for a short distance before the camouflaging stopped and the naked terrain lay nearly impassable to an armored man on foot. He waved shortly with one arm. “Out that way.”

“Aren’t you taking a chance? How much air is there in these suits?”

“Not much. A few minutes’ more.”

“Well, let’s get back to the receiver, then.”

Hawks shook his head. “No. That’s not for us, Al.”

“What do you mean? The return transmitter’s working, isn’t it?”

“It’s working. But we can’t use it.”

“Hawks—”

“If you want to go to the transmitter and have the Navy crew go through the same procedure that sends samples and reports back to Earth, you can. But first I want you to understand what you’d be doing.”

Barker looked at him in bewilderment through the thick glass. Hawks reached out and awkwardly touched his right sleeve to the man’s armored shoJder. “Long ago, I told you I’d kill you in many ways, Al. When each Barker L came back to consciousness on Earth after each Barker M died, I was letting you trick yourself. You thought then you’d already felt the surest death of all. You hadn’t. I have to do it once more.

“There was always a continuity. Barker M and L seemed to be the same man, with the same mind. When M died, L simply went on. The thread was unbroken, and you could continue to believe that nothing, really, had happened. I could tell you, and you could believe, that in fact there was only a succession of Barkers whose memories dovetailed perfectly. But that’s too abstract a thing for a human being to really grasp. At this moment, I think of myself as the Hawks who was born, years ago, in the bedroom of a farm home. Even though I know there’s another Hawks, down in the laboratory on Earth, who’s been living his own life for some moments, now; even though I know I was born from the ashes of this world twenty minutes ago, in the receiver. All that means nothing to the me who has lived in my mind all these years. I can look back. I can remember.

“That’s the way it was with you, too. I told you. Long ago, I told you that the transmitter sends nothing but a signal. That it destroys the man it scans to derive that signal. But I knew as I told you that all the talk in the world wouldn’t make you feel it that way, as long as you could wake up each morning in your own skin. So I suppose I was wasting all that talk. I often feel that I do. But what could I say to myself, now, if I hadn’t tried to tell you?”

Barker said, “Get to the point!”

Hawks burst out in exasperation, “I’m trying to! I wish people would get it through their heads, once and for all, that the short answer is only good for familiar questions! What do you think we’re dealing with, here — something Leonardo da Vinci could have handled? If he could have, he would have, and we would have had the Twentieth Century in Fifteen Hundred! If you want the answer at all, then you’d better let me put it in context.”

“All right, Hawks.”

“I’m sorry,” Hawks said, the flare dying down. “I’m sorry. A man has things bottled up inside him, and they come out, in the end. Look, Barker — it’s simply that we don’t have the facilities here for accurately returning individuals to Earth. We don’t have the computing equipment, we don’t have the electronic hardware, we don’t have any of the elaborate safeguards. We will have. Soon we’ll have hollowed out a chamber large enough to hold them underground, where they’ll be safe from accidents’ as well as observation. Then we’ll either have to pressurize the entire chamber or learn to design electronic components that’ll work in a vacuum. And if you think that’s not a problem, you’re wrong. But we’ll solve it. When we have time.

“There’s been no time , Al. These people here-the Navy men, the observers — think of them. They’re the best people for their jobs. Competent people. Competent people have families, careers, interests, properties of one kind or another; it’s a fallacy to think that a man who makes a good astronomer, or a good cartographer, isn’t good at many other areas of life. Some of them aren’t. Most of them are. And all of them here know that when they came up here, counterparts of theirs stayed behind on Earth. They had to. We couldn’t drain men like those away from their jobs. We couldn’t risk having them die-no one knew what might happen up here. Terrible things still might. They all volunteered to come up here. They all understood. Back on Earth, their counterparts are going on as though nothing had happened. There was one afternoon in which they spent a few hours in the laboratory, of course, but that’s already a minor part of their past, for them.

“All of us up here are shadows, Al. But they’re a particular kind. Even if we had the equipment, they couldn’t go back. When we do get it, they still won’t be able to. We won’t stop them if they want to try, but think, Al, about that man who leads the observation team. Back on Earth, his counterpart is pursuing a complicated scientific career. He’s accomplished a lot since the day he was duplicated. He has a career, a reputation, a whole body of experience which this individual, up here, no longer shares. And the man here has changed, too — he knows things the other doesn’t. He has a whole body of divergent experience. If he goes back, which of them does what? Who gets the career, who gets the family, who gets the bank account? They can try to work it out, if they want to. But it’ll be years, up here, before this assignment is over. There’ll have been divorces, births, deaths, marriages, promotions, degrees, jail sentences, diseases — No, most of them won’t go back. But when this ends, where will they go? We’d better have something for them to do. Away from Earth — away from the world that has no room for them. We’ve created a whole corps of men with the strongest possible ties to Earth, and no future except in space. But where will they go? Mars? Venus? We don’t have rockets that will drop receivers for them there. We’d better have — but suppose some of them have become so valuable we don’t dare not duplicate them again? Then what?

“You called them zombies, once. You were right. They’re the living dead, and they know it. And they were made, by me, because there wasn’t time. No time to do this systematically, to think this out in all its aspects, to comb the world for men we could use without subjecting them to this disruption. And for you and me, now, Al, there’s the simple fact that we have a few minutes’ air left in our suits and we can’t go back, at all.”

“For Pete’s sake, Hawks, we can walk into any one of these bubbles, here, and get all the air we want!”

Hawks asked slowly, “And settle down and stay here, you mean, and go back in a year or two? You can if you want to, I suppose. What will you do, in that time? Learn to do something useful, here, wondering what you’ve been doing meanwhile, on Earth?”

Barker said nothing for a moment. Then he said, “You mean, I’m stuck here.” His voice was quiet. “I’m a zombie. Well, is that bad? Is that worse than dying?”

“I don’t know,” Hawks answered. “You could talk to these people up here about it. They don’t know, either. They’ve been thinking about it for some time. Why do you think they shunned you, Barker? Because there was nothing about you that frightened them more than they could safely bear? We had our wave of suicides after they first came up. The ones who’re left are comparatively stable on the subject. But they stay that way because they’ve learned to think about it only in certain ways. But go ahead. You’ll be able to work something out.”