Algis Budrys: Rogue Moon

“But, Hawks, I want to go back to Earth! ”

“To the world in your memories, that you want to remake?”

“Why can’t I use the return transmitter?”

Hawks said, “I told you. We only have a transmitter up here. We don’t have a laboratory full of control equipment The transmitter here pulses signals describing the typewritten reports and rock samples the Navy crew put in the receiver. It isn’t used much for anything, but when it is, that’s what it carries. From here-without dead-accurate astronomical data, without our power supply — the signals spread, they miss our antenna down there, they turn to hash in the ionization layers — you just can’t do, from the surface of an uninhabited, unexplored, airless satellite, what we can do from there. You can’t just send up, from a world with Terrestrial gravity, with an atmosphere, with air pressure, with a different temperature range, equipment that will function here. It has to be designed for here and better yet, built here. Out of what? In what factory? It doesn’t matter, with marks on paper and lumps of rock, that we’ve got the bare minimum of equipment we had to have time to adapt. By trial and error, and constant repetition, we push the signals through, and decipher them on Earth. If they’re hashed up, we send a message to that effect, and a Navy yeoman types up a new report from his file carbon, and a geologist chips off another rock of the same kind. But a man, Barker — I told you. A man is a phoenix. We simply don’t have the facilities here to take scan readings on him, feed them through differential amplifiers, cross-check, and make a file tape to recheck against.

“You can try it, Al. You can get into the return transmitter, and the Navy men will pull the switches. They’ve done it before, for other men who had to try it. As always, the scanner will destroy you painlessly and instantaneously. But what arrives on Earth, Al — what arrives on Earth is also not the man you’ve become since you were last put in the laboratory transmitter. I guarantee you that, Al.”

Hawks raised his arms and dropped them. “Now do you see what I’ve done to you? Do you see what I’ve done to poor Sam Latourette, who’ll wake up one day in a world full of strangers, never knowing what I did to him after I put him into the amplifiers, only knowing that now he’ll be cured but his old, good friend, Ed Hawks, has died and gone to dust? I haven’t played fair with any of you. I’ve never once shown any of you mercy, except now and then by coincidence.”

He turned and began to walk away.

“Wait! Hawks — You don’t have to—”

Hawks said, without stopping or turning his head, walking steadily, “What don’t I have to? There’s an Ed Hawks in the universe who remembers all his life, even the time he spent in the Moon formation, up to this very moment as he stands down in the laboratory. What’s being lost? There’s no expenditure. I wish you well, Al — you’d better hurry and get to that airlock. Either the one at the return transmitter or the one at the naval station. It’s about the same distance, either way.”

“Hawks!”

“I have to get out of these people’s way,” Hawks said abstractedly. “It’s not part of their job to deal with corpses on their grounds. I want to get out there among the rocks.”

He walked to the end of the path, the camouflaging’s shadows mottling his armor, cutting up the outlines of his body until he seemed to become only another jagged, broken portion of the place through which he walked.

Then he emerged into the starlight, and his armor flashed with the clear, cold reflection.

“Hawks,” Barker said in a muffled voice, “I’m at the airlock.”

“Good luck, Barker.”

Hawks clambered over the rocks until he began to pant. Then he stood, wedged in place. He turned his face up, and stars glinted on the glass. He took one shallow breath after another, more and more quickly. His eyes watered. Then he blinked sharply, viciously, repeatedly. “No,” he said. “No, I’m not going to fall for that.” He blinked again and again. “I’m not afraid of you,” he said. “Someday I, or another man, will hold you in his hand.”

Hawks L pulled off the orange undershirt over his head, and stood beside the dressing table, wearing nothing but the bottom of the suit, brushing at the talcum on his face and in his hair. His ribs stood out sharply under his skin.

“You ought to get out in the sun, Hawks,” Barker said, sitting on the edge of the table, watching him.

“Yes,” Hawks said abstractedly, thinking he had no way of knowing whether there really had been a plaid blanket on his bed in the farmhouse, or whether it had been a quilted comforter. “Well, I may. I should be able to find a little more time, now that things are going to be somewhat more routine. I may go swimming with a girl I know, or something. I don’t know.”

There was a note in his left hand, crumpled and limp with perspiration, where he had been carrying it since before he was’ put into his armor the first time. He picked at it carefully, trying to open the folds without tearing them.

Barker asked, “Do you remember, anything much about what happened to us on the Moon after we got through the formation?”

Hawks shook his head. “No, I lost contact with Hawks M shortly. And please try to remember that we have never been on the Moon.”

Barker laughed. “All right. But what’s the difference between being there and only remembering being there?”

Hawks mumbled, working at the note, “I don’t know. Perhaps the Navy will have a report for us on what Hawks M and Barker M did afterward. That might tell us something. I rather think it will.”

Barker laughed again. “You’re a peculiar duck, Hawks.”

Hawks looked at him sidelong. “That sums me up, does it? Well, I’m not Hawks. I remember being Hawks, but I was made in the receiver some twenty-five minutes ago, and you and I have never met before.”

“All right , Hawks,” Barker chuckled. “Relax!” Hawks was no longer paying any attention to him. He opened the note, finally, and read the blurred message with little difficulty, since it was in his own handwriting and, in any case, he knew what it said. It was:

“Remember me to her.”