The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B (15 page)

But Amalfi had done his work well. The city of IMT did not
stop rising. With a profound, visceral shock, Amalfi realized that it was
already nearly a mile up, and still accelerating. The air would be thinning up
there, and the Proctors had forgotten too much to know what to do—

A mile and a half.

Two miles.

It grew smaller. At five miles it was just a wavery
ink-blot, lit on one side. At seven miles it was a point of dim light..

A bristle-topped head and a pair of enormous shoulders
lifted cautiously from a nearby gully. It was Karst. He continued to look aloft
for a moment, but IMT at ten miles was invisible. He looked down to Amalfi.

"Can . . . can it come back?" he said huskily.

"No," Amalfi said, his breathing gradually coming
under control. "Keep watching, Karst. It isn't over yet. Remember that the
Proctors had called the Earth cops—"

At that same moment, the city of IMT reappeared—in a way. A
third sun flowered in the sky. It lasted for three or four seconds. Then it
dimmed and died.

"The cops were warned," Amalfi said softly,
"to watch for an Okie city trying to make a getaway. They found it, and
they dealt with it. Of course they got the wrong city, but they don't know
that. They'll go home now—and now we're home, and so are you and your people.
Home on Earth, for good."

Around them, there was a murmuring of voices, hushed with
disaster, and with something else, too—something so old, and so new, that it
hardly had a name on the planet that IMT had ruled. It was called freedom.

"On Earth?" Karst repeated. He and the mayor
climbed painfully to their feet. "What do you mean? This is not
Earth—"

Across the Barrens, the Okie city glittered—the city that
had pitched camp to mow some lawns. A cloud of stars was rising behind it.

"It is now," Amalfi said. "We're all
Earthmen, Karst. Earth is more than just one little planet, buried in another
galaxy than this. Earth is much more important than that.

"Earth isn't a place. It's an idea."

Late on a day in 1959, Edward Hawks, Doctor of Science,
cradled his long jaw in his outsize hands and hunched forward with his sharp
elbows on his desk. He was a black-haired, pale-skinned, gangling man who
rarely got out in the sun. Compared to his staff of tanned young assistants, he
always reminded strangers of a scarecrow.

Now he watched a young man sitting in the straight chair
facing him.

The young man stared unblinkingly. His trim crewcut was wet
with perspiration and plastered to his scalp. His features were clean,
clear-skinned and healthy, but his chin was wet. "An dark . . ." he
said querulously, "an dark an nowhere starlights. . . ."

The third man in the office was Weston, the recently hired
psychologist, who was sitting in an armchair he'd had brought down to Hawks'
office.

"He's insane," Hawks said to him like a wondering
child.

Weston crossed his legs. "I told you that, Dr. Hawks; I
told you the moment we pulled him out of that apparatus of yours. What had happened
to him was too much for him to stand."

"I know you told me," Hawks said mildly. "But
I'm responsible for him. I have to make sure." He began to turn back to
the young man, then looked again at Weston. "He was young. Healthy.
Exceptionally stable and resilient, you told me. He looked it." Hawks
added slowly: "He was brilliant."

"I said he was stable," Weston explained
earnestly. "I didn't say he was inhumanly stable. I told you he was an
exceptional specimen of a human being. You're the one who sent him to a place
no human being should go."

Hawks nodded. "You're right, of course. It's my
fault."

"Well, now," Weston said quickly, "he was a
volunteer. He knew it was dangerous. He knew he could expect to die."

But Hawks was ignoring Weston. He was looking straight out
over his desk again. "Rogan?" he said softly. "Rogan?" He
sighed at last and asked Weston: "Can you do anything for him?"

"Cure him," Weston said confidently.
"Electroshock treatments. They'll make him forget what happened to him in
that place."

"I didn't know electroshock amnesia was
permanent."

Weston blinked at Hawks. "He may need repetitive
treatment now and then, of course."

"Rogan," Hawks whispered, "Rogan, I'm
sorry."

"An dark ... an dark. ... It hurt me and so cold ... so
quiet . . ."

Edward Hawks, D.Sc., walked alone across the main
laboratory's concrete floor, his hands at his sides. He chose a path among the
generators and consoles without looking up, and came to a halt at the foot of
the matter transmitter's receiving stage.

The main laboratory occupied tens of thousands of square
feet in the basement of Continental Electronics' Research Division building. A
year ago, when Hawks had designed the transmitter, part of the first and second
floors above it had been ripped out, and the transmitter now towered up nearly
to the ceiling along the far wall. Catwalks interlaced the adjoining airspace,
and galleries had been built for access to the instruments lining the walls.
Dozens of men on Hawks' staff were still moving about, taking final checks
before closing down for the day. Their shadows on the catwalks, now and then
occluding some overhead light, mottled the floor in shifting patterns of
darkness. Hawks stood looking up at the transmitter, his eyes puzzled. Someone
abruptly said: "Ed!" and he turned his head in response.

"Hello, Sam." Sam Latourette, his chief assistant,
had walked up quietly. He was a heavy-boned man with loose, papery flesh and
dark-circled, sunken eyes. Hawks smiled at him wanly. "The transmitter
crew just about finished with their post-mortem, are they?"

"You'll find the reports on your desk in the morning.
There was nothing wrong with the machinery. Nothing anywhere." Latourette
waited for Hawks to show interest. But Hawks only nodded his head.

"Ed!"

"Yes, Sam?"

"Stop it. You're doing too much to yourself." He
again waited for some reaction, but Hawks only smiled into the machine, and
Latourette burst out: "Who do you think you're kidding? How long have I
been working with you now? Ten years? Who gave me my first job? Who trained me?
You can keep up a front with anybody else, but not with
me!"
Latourette
clenched his fist and squeezed his fingers together emptily. "I
know
you!
But—damn it, Ed, it's not your fault that thing's out there! What do you
expect—that you not only won't ever make any mistakes but that nothing'!! ever
get hurt, either? What do you want—a perfect world?"

Hawks smiled again in the same way. "We tear a gateway
where no gate has ever been," he said, nodding at the mechanisms, "in
a wall we didn't build. That's called scientific investigation. Then we send
men through the gate. That's the human adventure. And something on the other
side—something that never troubled Mankind; something that's never done us any
harm before or troubled us with the knowledge that it was there—kills them. In
terrible ways we can't understand, it kills them. So I keep sending in more
men. What's that called, Sam?"

"Ed, we
are
making progress. This new approach
is going to be the answer."

Hawks looked curiously at Latourette. Latourette said
uncomfortably: "Once we get the bugs out of it. That's all it needs."

Hawks did not change his expression or turn it away. He
stood with his fingertips forced against the gray crackle finish. "You
mean, we're no longer killing them? We're only driving them insane with
it?"

"All we have to do, Ed," Latourette pressed him,
"all we have to do is find a better way of cushioning the shock when the
man feels himself die. More sedatives. Something like that."

Hawks said: "They still have to go into that place. How
they do it makes no difference; it won't tolerate them. It was never made for
human beings to have anything to do with. It kills them. And no man can stand
to die."

Latourette reached out sharply and touched the sleeve of his
smock. "Are you going to shut the program down?"

Hawks looked at him.

Latourette was clutching his arm. "Cobey. Isn't he
ordering you to cancel it?"

"Cobey can only make requests," Hawks said gently.
"He can't order me."

"He's company
President,
Ed! He can make your
life miserable! He's dying to get Continental Electronics off this hook!"

Hawks took Latourette's hand away from his arm. "The
Navy originally financed the transmitter's development only because it was my
idea. They wouldn't have vouchered that kind of money for anyone else in the
world. Not for a crazy idea like this." He stared into the machine.
"Even now, even though that place we found is the way it is, they still
won't let Cobey back out on his own initiative. Not as long as they think I can
keep going. I don't have to worry about Cobey." He smiled softly and a
little incredulously. "Cobey has to worry about me."

"Well, how
about
you? How much longer can you
keep this up?"

Hawks stepped back. He looked at Latourette thoughtfully.
"Are we worrying about the project, now, or are we worrying about
me?"

Latourette sighed. "All right, Ed, I'm sorry," he
said. "But what're you going to do?"

Hawks looked up and down at the matter transmitter's
towering height. In the laboratory space behind them, the technicians were now
shutting off the lights in the various sub-sections of the control array.
Darkness fell in horizontal chunks along the galleries of instruments, and in
black diagonals like jackstraws being laid upon the catwalks overhead.

"We can't do anything about the nature of the place to
which they go," Hawks said. "And we've reached the limit of what we
can do to improve the way we send them there. It seems to me there's only one
thing left to do. We must find a different kind of man to send. A man who won't
go insane when he feels himself die." He looked quizzically into the
machine's interior.

"There are all sorts of people in
the
world,"
he said. "Perhaps we can find a man who doesn't fear Death, but loves
her."

Latourette said bitterly: "Some kind of psycho."

"Maybe that's what he is. But I think we need him,
nevertheless." Almost all the laboratory lights were out, now. "What
it comes down to is we need a man who's attracted by what drives other men to
madness. And the more so, the better. ... A man who's impassioned by
Death." His eyes lost focus, and his gaze extended itself to infinity.
"So now we know what I am. I'm a pimp."

Continental Electronics' Director of Personnel was a
broad-faced man named Vincent Connington. He came briskly into Hawks' office
and pumped his hand enthusiastically. He was wearing a light blue shantung suit
and russet cowboy boots, and as he sat down in the visitors' chair, he looked
around and remarked: "Got the same office layout myself, upstairs. But it
sure looks a lot different with some carpeting on the floor and some good
paintin's on the walls." He turned back to Hawks, smiling. "I'm glad
to get down here and talk to you, Doctor. I've always had a lot of admiration
for you. Here you are, running a department and still getting in there and
working right with your crew. All I do all day is sit behind a desk and make
sure my clerks handle the routine without foulin' up."

"They seem to do rather well," Hawks said in a
neutral voice. He was beginning to draw himself up unconsciously in his chair,
and to slip a mask of expressionlessness over his face. His glance touched
Connington's boots once, and then stayed away. "At least, your
department's been sending me some excellent technicians."

Connington grinned. "Nobody's got any better." He
leaned forward. "But that's routine stuff." He took Hawks'
interoffice memo out of his breast pocket.
"This,
now— This
request, I'm going to fill personally."

Hawks said carefully: "I certainly hope you can. I
expect it may take some time to find a man fitting the outlined specifications.
I hope you understand that, unfortunately, we don't have much time. I—"

Connington waved a hand. "Oh, I've got him already. Had
him in mind for you for a long time."

Hawks' eyebrows rose. "Really?"

Connington grinned shrewdly across the plain steel desk.
"Hard to believe?" He lounged back in his chair. "Doctor,
suppose somebody came to you and asked you to do a particular job for
him—design a circuit to do a particular job. Now, suppose you reached out a piece
of paper and said: 'Here it is.' What about that? And then when he was all
through shaking his head and saying how it was hard to believe you'd have it
right there, you could explain to him about how electronics was what you did
all
the time. About how when you're not thinking about some specific project,
you're still thinking about electronics in general. And how, being interested
in electronics, you kept up on it, and you knew pretty much where the whole
field was going. And how you thought about some of the problems they were likely
to run into, and sometimes answers would just come into your head so easily it
couldn't even be called work. And how you filed these things away until it was
time for them to be brought out. See? That way, there's no magic. Just a man
with a talent, doing his work."

Connington grinned again. "Now I've got a man who was
made to work on this machine project of yours. I know him inside out. And I
know a little bit about you. I've got a lot to learn about you, yet, too, but I
don't think any of it's goin' to surprise me. And I've got your man. He's
healthy, he's available, and I've had security clearances run on him every six
months for the last two years. He's all yours, Doctor. No foolin'.