Algis Budrys: Rogue Moon

“Oh, don’t worry,” Barker answered her. “You’ll be the first to know.”

Claire smiled. “Then you haven’t made up your mind yet? Isn’t the job attractive enough?”

Hawks watched Barker frown in annoyance.

The kitchen door of the house sighed shut on its air spring, and Connington broke into a chuckle behind them. None of them had heard him come across the strip of grass between the house and this end of the pool.

He dangled a used glass from one hand, and held a partially emptied bottle in the other. His face was flushed, and his eyes were wide with the impact of a great deal of liquor consumed over a short period of time. “Gonna do it, Al?”

Instantly, Barker’s mouth flashed into a bare-toothed, fighting grimace. “Of course!” he exclaimed in a startlingly desperate voice. “I couldn’t let it pass — not for the world!”

Claire smiled faintly to herself.

Hawks watched all three of them.

Connington chuckled again. “What else could you’ve said?” he laughed at Barker. His arm swept out in irony. “Here’s a man famous for split-second decisions. Always the same ones.” The secret was out. The joke was being delivered. “You don’t understand, do you?” he said to the three at the edge of the pool. “Don’t see things the way I do. Let me explain.

“A technician — like you, Hawks — sees the whole world as cause an’ effect. And the world’s consistent, explained that way, so why look for any further? Man like you, Barker, sees the world moved by deeds of strong men. And your way of lookin’ at it works out, too.

“But the world’s big. Complicated. Part-answer can look like the whole answer and act like the whole answer for a long time. For instance, Hawks can think of himself as manipulating causes an’ producing effects he wants. ’N you, Barker, you can think of Hawks and you as s’perior, Overman types. Hawks can think of you as specified factor t’ be inserted in new environment, so Hawks can solve new ’vironment. You can think of yourself as indomitable figure slugging it out with th’ unknown. And so it goes, roun’ and roun’, an’ who’s right? Both of you? Maybe. Maybe. But can you stan’ to be on the same job together?”

Connington laughed again, his high heels planted in the lawn. “Me, I’m personnel man. I don’t look cause and effect. I don’t look heroes. Explain the world in a different way. People — that’s all I know. ’S enough. I feel ’em. I know ’em. Like a chemist knows valences. Like a physicist knows particle charges. Positive, negative. Atomic weight, ’tomic number. Attract, repel. I mix ’em. I compound ’em. I take people, an’ I find a job for them, the co-workers for ’em. I take a raw handful of people, and I mutate it, and make isotopes out of it — I make solvents, reagents — an’ I can make ’splosives, too, when I want. That’s my world!

“Sometimes I save people up — save ’em for the right job to make ’em react the right way. Save ’em up for the right people.

“Barker, Hawks — you’re gonna be my masterpiece. ’Cause sure as God made little green apples, he made you two to meet An’ me, me , I found you, an’ I’ve done it, I’ve rammed you two together an’ now it’s done, an’ nothing’ll ever take the critical mass apart, and sooner, later, it’s got to ’splode, and who’re you gonna run to then, Claire?”

Hawks broke the silence. He reached out, pulled the bottle out of Connington’s hand, and swung toward the cliff. The bottle flailed away and disappeared over the edge. Then Hawks turned to Barker and said quietly, “There are a few more things I ought to tell you before you definitely accept the job.”

Barker’s face was strained. He was looking at Connington. His head snapped around in Hawks’ direction and he growled, “I said I’d do the damned job!”

Claire reached out and took hold of his hand, pulling him down beside her. She thrust herself forward to kiss the underside of Barker’s jaw. “That’s the ol’ fight, Hardrock.” She began nibbling the skin with its faint stubble of beard, gradually inching her mouth down his throat, leaving a row of regularly spaced marks: wet, round, red parentheses of her lipstick, enclosing the sharper, pinker blotches where her incisors had worried his flesh. “He’ll do it, Ed,” she murmured sidelong. “Or at least he’ll give it as much of a try as any man could.”

“Don’t the three of you care? ” Connington blurted, his head jerking back and forth. “Didn’t you hear? ”

“We heard you,” Hawks said.

“Well, what about it?” Connington challenged them incredulously.

“Tell me something, Connington,” Hawks said. “Did you make your little speech so we’d stop now? Or could anything make us stop, now things are in motion the way you hoped?”

“ Not hoped,” Connington said. “Planned.”

Hawks nodded. “All right, then,” he said in a tired voice. “I thought so. All you wanted to do was make a speech. I wish you’d chosen another time.”

Claire chuckled, a silvery ladder of sound. “Isn’t it too bad, Connie? You were so sure we’d all fall down. But it’s just like it always was. You still don’t know where to push.”

Connington backed away incredulously, his arms spread as if to knock their heads together. “Are you three crazy? Do you think I made this stuff up out of my head? Listen to yourselves — even when you tell me it’s all malarkey, you have to say it each a certain way. You can’t shake loose from yourselves even for a second; you’ll go where your feet take you, no matter what — and you’re laughing at me? You’re laughin’ at me? ”

He lurched around suddenly. “Go to hell, all of you!” he cried. ’G’wan!” He began to run clumsily across the grass to his car.

Hawks looked after him. “He’s not fit to drive back.”

Barker grimaced. “He won’t. He’ll cry himself to sleep in the car for a few hours. Then he’ll come in the house, looking for Claire’s comfort.” He looked down at Claire with a jerk of his head that broke the chain of nibbles. “Isn’t that right? Doesn’t he always do that?”

Claire’s lips pinched together. “I can’t help what he does.”

“No?” Barker said. “It’s me he’s after?”

In a vicious, throaty snarl, Claire said, “Maybe he’s had you. He’s never had me.”

Barker’s hand cracked over, and Claire fell back, holding her cheek. Then she grinned. “You’ve done better than that. You used to do a lot better. But that wasn’t bad,” she admitted.

“Barker,” Hawks said, “I want to tell you what you’re going to have to face.”

“Tell me when I get there!” Barker snapped. “I’m not going to back out now.”

Claire said, “Maybe that’s what he wants you to say, Al. Putting it that way.” She smiled up toward Hawks. “Who says Connington’s the only schemer?”

“What’s the simplest way for me to get back to town?” Hawks said.

“I’ll drive you,” Barker said coldly. His eyes locked on Hawks. “If you want to try it.”

Claire murmured a chuckle and suddenly rubbed her cheek down the length of Barker’s thigh. She did this with a spasm of her entire body; an undulant motion that was completely serpentine. She stared up at Hawks through wide, pleasurably moist eyes, her upstretched arms curled around Barker’s waist. “Isn’t he grand?” she said huskily to Hawks. “Isn’t he a man?”

Barker trotted stiffly down to the garage apron and flung up the overhead doors with a crash, as Hawks waited at the head of the flagstone steps. Claire said murmurously behind him, “Look at him move — look at him do things. He’s like a wonderful machine made out of gut and hickory wood. There aren’t any other men like him, Ed — nobody’s as much of a man as he is!” Hawks’ nostrils widened.