The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B (22 page)

Barker said: "So what does it all add up to—am I taking
a chance on coming out so hashed-up I'd be a monster who needed killing?"

Hawks shook his head quickly. "Oh, no, no—I told you;
there won't be any gross errors. This is a simple business—transmitting along a
cable to the receiver here. You may not be able to remember whether your first
schoolbooks were covered in red or blue. Or you may remember incorrectly. And
who could check it?"

"And that's all? For Pete's sake, Doctor, so
what?"

Hawks shrugged uncomfortably. "I don't know. I suppose
it all depends on how much of yourself you feel can be lost without your dying
as an individual. But, remember—the equipment doesn't know, or care, and we at
least don't know."

Barker smiled up viciously. "Just so long as you care,
Doctor."

Hawks came up to the transmitter, where Sam Latourette was
waiting for him.

"All set, Ed," Latourette said.
"Anytime," he said with a bitter look toward Barker.

Hawks took a deep breath. "Sam, I want to talk to you
for a minute." He walked toward a quiet corner of the laboratory, and
Latourette followed.

"What's the trouble, Ed?"

"Sam, do you want me to put Ted Gersten in charge of
the project right now?"

Latourette turned pale. "Why? What for? Don't you think
I can handle it?" He blushed suddenly. In an embarrassed mumble, he said:
"Look, it bothers me, but not that much. I've got a few more months left
before I have to . . . you know, go to the hospital. I mean, sure, I have to
take a lot of aspirin these days, but it's not
bad."

Hawks grimaced. "Sam, I need him more than I do
you." He turned away suddenly, and stared at the wall. "Either leave
him and me alone, or I've got to take you off this project. All it would take
would be one slip—one dial setting wrong, one calculation off by a decimal
place, and I wouldn't have him any longer. Do you understand what I'm saying,
Sam? Unless you can put yourself in a state of mind where you won't be liable
to make that mistake—unless you can calm down, and leave us alone—I can't risk
it. All right, Sam? Do you understand?"

"Ed. . . God damn it, Ed . . ."

Hawks turned around. "Let's get things rolling,
Sam." He walked toward the transmitter. He looked more like a scarecrow
than ever.

"We're going to wheel you in now, Barker," Hawks
said into his chest microphone.

"Roger, Doctor," came from the p.a. speaker
mounted over the transmitter's portal.

"When you're in, we'll switch on the chamber
electromagnets. You'll be held in mid-air, and we'll pull the table out. You
won't be able to move, and don't try—you'll burn out the suit motors. You'll
feel yourself jump a few inches into the air, and your suit will spread-eagle
rigidly. That's the magnetic field. You'll feel another jolt when we close the
chamber door and the fore-and-aft magnets take hold."

"I read you loud and clear."

"We're simulating conditions for a Moon shot. I want
you to be familiar with them. So we'll turn out the chamber lights. And there
will be a trace component of formalin in your air, to deaden your olfactory
receptors."

"Uh-huh."

"Next, we'll throw the scanning process into operation.
There is a thirty second delay on that switch on the scanner; that same impulse
will first activate certain automatic functions of the suit. We're doing our
best to eliminate human error, as you can see."

"I dig."

"A general anesthetic will be introduced into your air
circulation. It will dull your nervous system without quite making you lose
consciousness. It will numb your skin temperature-and-pressure receptors
entirely. It will cycle out after you resolve in the receiver. All traces of
anesthesia will be gone five minutes after you resolve."

"Got you."

"All right. Finally I'm going to switch off my
microphone. Unless there's an emergency, I won't switch it on again. And from
this point on, the microphone switch controls the two servoactivated ear plugs
in your helmet. You'll feel the plugs nudging your ears; I want you to move
your head as much as necessary to allow them to seat firmly. They won't injure
you, and they'll retract the instant I have any emergency instructions to give
you, if any. Your microphone will remain on, and we'll be able to hear you if
you need any help, but you won't be able to hear yourself.

"You'll find that with your senses deadened or shut
off, you'll soon begin to doubt you're alive. You'll have no way of proving to
yourself that you're exposed to any external stimuli. You will begin to wonder
if you have a mind at all. If this condition were to persist long enough, you
would go into an uncontrollable panic. The required length of time varies from
person to person. If yours exceeds the few minutes you'll be in the suit today,
that'll be long enough. If it's less, we'll hear you shouting, and I'll begin
talking to you."

"That'll be a great comfort."

"It will."

"Anything else, Doctor?"

"No." He motioned to the Navy crew, and they began
rolling the table into the chamber.

Hawks looked around. Latourette was at the transmitter
control console. Then his glance swept undeviatingly over Weston, who was
leaning back against an amplifier cabinet, his arms and ankles crossed, and
over Holiday, the physician, standing tensely pot-bellied at the medical remote
console.

The green bulb was still lighted over the transmitter
portal, but the chamber door was dogged shut, trailing the cable that fed power
to its share of the scanner components. The receiver chamber was sealed. The
hiss of Barker's breath, calm but picking up speed, came from the speaker.

"Sam, give me test power," Hawks said. Latourette
punched a console button, and Hawks glanced at the technicians clustered around
the input of the amplifier bank. A fresh spool of tape lay in the output deck,
its end threaded through the brake rollers and recording head to the empty
takeup reel. Petwill, the engineer borrowed from Electronic Associates, nodded
to Hawks.

"Sam, give me operating power," Hawks said.
"Shoot." The lights over the transmitter and receiver portals leaped
from the green bulbs into the red. Barker's breath sighed into near silence.

Hawks watched the clock mounted in the transmitter's face.
Thirty seconds after he had called for power, the multi-channel tape began to
whine through the recording head, its reels blurred and roaring. A brown disk
began to grow around the takeup spindle with fascinating speed. The green bulb
over the receiver portal burst into life. The green bulb came back on over the
transmitter.

The brakes locked on the tape deck. The takeup reel was
three-quarters filled. Barker's shallow breath came through the speaker.

Hawks said, "Doctor Holiday, anytime you're ready to
ease up on the anesthesia. . . ."

Holiday nodded. He cranked the reduction-geared control
wheel remote-linked to the tank of anesthetic gas in Barker's armor.

Barker's breathing grew stronger. It was still edging up
toward panic, but he had not yet begun to mumble into his microphone.

"How does it sound to you, Weston?" Hawks asked.

The psychologist listened reflectively. "He's doing
pretty well. And it sounds like panic breathing; no pain."

Hawks shifted his glance. "What about that, Doctor
Holiday?"

The little man nodded. "Let's hear how he does with a
little less gas." He put his hands back on the controls.

Hawks thumbed his microphone switch. "Barker," he
said gently.

The breathing in the speaker became stronger and calmer.

"Barker."

"Yes, Doctor," Barker's irritated voice said.
"What's your trouble?"

"Doctor Hawks," Holiday said from the console,
"he's down to zero anesthesia now."

Hawks nodded. "Barker, you're in the receiver. You'll
be fully conscious almost immediately. Do you feel any pain?"

"No!" Barker snapped. "Are you all through
playing games?"

"I'm turning the receiver chamber lights on now. Can
you see them?"

"Yes!"

"Can you feel all of your body?"

"Fine, Doctor. Can you feel all of yours?"

"All right, Barker. We're going to take you out,
now."

The Navy crew began pushing the table toward the receiver as
Latourette cut the fore-and-aft magnets and technicians began un-dogging the
chamber door. Weston and Holiday moved forward to begin examining Barker as
soon as he was free of the suit.

Hawks walked to the control console. "All right,
Sam," he said as he saw the table slip under Barker's armor. "You can
slack down on the primary magnets."

"You figure he's all right?" Latourette asked in a
neutral voice.

"I'll let Weston and Holiday tell me about that. He
certainly sounded as if he's as functional as ever." He essayed a Utile
chuckle.

"Okay," Latourette said.

Hawks began again, gently: "Come on, Sam—let's go for a
walk. We'll have Weston's and Holiday's preliminary reports in a minute. The
boys can start setting up for tomorrow's shot."

"I'll start setting up for tomorrow's shot,"
Latourette growled.

Hawks sighed. "All right, Sam," he said and walked
away.

Hawks sat with his back pressed into the angle of the couch
in Elizabeth Cummings' studio. He held his brandy glass cupped loosely in his
hands, and watched the night sky through the frames of glass behind her. She
was curled in the window seat, her profile to him, her arms clasped around her
drawn-up knees.

"My first week in high school," he said to her,
"I had to make a choice. Did you go to grammar school here in the
city?"

"Yes."

"I went to school in a very small town. The school was
fairly well equipped—there were four rooms for less than seventy pupils. But there
were only three teachers, including the principal, and each of them taught
three grades, including pre-primary. It meant that two thirds of each day, my
teachers were unavailable to me. When I went to high school, I suddenly found
myself with a teacher for
each subject.

"Toward the end of the first week, the high school
principal and I happened to meet in the hall. She'd read my intelligence test
results and things, and she asked me how I liked high school. I told her I was
having a wonderful time."

Hawks smiled down at his brandy glass. "She drew
herself up, and her face turned to stone. 'You're not here to have fun!' she
said, and marched away.

"So I had a choice. I could either find my school work
a punishment, after that, and find ways to evade it, or I could pretend I felt
that way about it, and use the advantages that pretense gives. I had a choice
between honesty and dishonesty. I chose dishonesty. I became very grim, and
marched to classes carrying a briefcase full of books and papers. I asked serious
questions and mulled over my homework even in the subjects that bored me. I
became an honor student. In a very little while, it
was
a punishment.
But I had done it to myself, and I took the consequences of my
dishonesty."

He looked around. "This is a very nice studio you have
here, Elizabeth. I'm glad I was able to see it. I wanted to see where you
worked—what you did."

"Please go on telling me about yourself," she said
from the window.

"Well, you see," he said after a while in which he
simply sat and looked at her, smiling, "that tells a great deal about me.
I'd been made to realize so many things in one blow. I was never the same after
that. I was—well, I was on my way here." He smiled uncomfortably.

"It happens to a lot of us—I mean, to a lot of us youngsters
who aren't constituted to see learning as work, or even as a luxury. Some of us
react one way, some of us another, on that day when we suddenly see into the
hearts of our fellow men. I did what a lot of us do— I shut myself up, and kept
out of the world's way. It seemed to me that science; a place where I could
deal with known quantities, or at least with a firm discipline, away from
people who might be concealing
anything
within them—it seemed to me, as
I say, that science was the best place for me.

"And now I have work that has to be done by me, because
I made it. I can't go back now and change the boy I grew out of, nor do I want
to. How can I deny what I am? I have to work with what I am. A lump of carbon
can't rearrange its own structure. It's either a diamond or a lump of coal—it
doesn't even know what coal or diamonds are. Someone else has to judge
it."

They sat for a long time without speaking, Hawks with the
empty brandy glass set on the coffee table beside his out-thrust legs,
Elizabeth watching him from against her drawn-up knees. "What are you
thinking of now?" she asked when he stirred again and looked at his
wristwatch. "Your work?"

"Now?" He smiled from a great distance. "No—I
was thinking about something else. I was thinking about how X-ray photographs
are taken."

"What about it!"

He shook his head. "It's complicated. When a physician
X-rays a sick man, he gets a print showing the spots on his lungs, or the
calcium in his arteries, or the tumor in his brain. But to cure the man, he can't
take scissors and cut the blotch out of the print. He has to take his scalpel
to the man, and before he can do that, he has to decide whether his knife could
reach the disease without cutting through some part of the man that can't be
cut. He has to decide whether his knife is sharp enough to dissect the
malignancy out of the healthy tissue—or whether the man will simply re-grow his
illness from the scraps left behind—whether he will have to be whittled at again
and again. Whittling the X-ray print does nothing. It only leaves a hole in the
celluloid.

"And even if there were some way to arrange the X-ray
camera so that it would not photograph the malignancy, and if there were some
way of bringing an X-ray print to life, the living print would only have a hole
in it through to where the malignancy had been, just as if the surgeon had
attacked it that way with his scalpel. It would die of the wound. So what you
would need is an X-ray film whose chemicals will not only not reproduce
malignancy but would reproduce healthy tissue which they have never seen. You
would need a camera that could re-arrange the grains of silver on the film. And
who can build such a camera?