The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B (26 page)

Hawks shook his head. Then, after a while, he said abruptly:

"Women"—he said earnestly—"women have always
fascinated me. When I was a boy, I did the usual amount of experimenting. It
didn't take me long to find out life wasn't like what happened in those
mimeographed stories we had circulating around the high school. No, there was
something else—what, I didn't know, but there was something about there being
two sexes. I don't mean the physical thing. I mean, the intellectual problem.

"What bothered me was that here were these other
intelligent organisms, in the same world with men. Now there were plenty of men
to do the thinking. If all women were for was the continuance of the race, what
did they need with intelligence at all? A simple set of instincts would have
been enough. So why was it necessary for women to have intelligence? What
function had forced them to evolve it?

"But I never found out. I've always wondered."

Elizabeth smiled at him. "Doctor, would you like
another cup of tea?"

He stood up finally, his hands in his pockets, having sat
without saying anything for a long time. "It's late. I'd better go,"
he said.

She drove him home to the stuccoed pastel apartment house,
built in the mid 1920's, where he had his one-and-one-half room efficiency
flat.

"Call me again when you need me," she said.

"I—I will. Look; I don't want you to always have to
come rescue me, or listen to my troubles. I want—" He gestured vaguely.
"I don't know what I want for the two of us. But I don't want it to always
be like this."

"Finish the project," she smiled, "and
there'll be time."

"Yes," he said bleakly.

Barker came into the laboratory the next day with his eyes
red-rimmed. His hands shook as he got into his undersuits.

Hawks walked up to him. "Are you sure you're all right?
If you're not feeling well, we can cancel until tomorrow."

Barker said: "Just stop worrying about me."

Hawks put his hands in his pockets. "Well. Have you
been to see the navigating specialists?"

Barker nodded.

"Were you able to give them a clear account of
yesterday's results?"

"They acted happy. Why don't you wait until they get it
digested and put the reports on your desk? What does it matter to you what I
find up there? All I'm doing is blazing a trail so your smart technicians won't
trip over anything when they go up to there to take it apart, right? So what's
it to you, unless you lose me and have to go find a new boy, right? So why
don't you just leave me alone? I'm here to do something. I intend to do it.
It's all I want to do, right now. All right?"

Hawks nodded. "All right, Barker. I hope it doesn't
take too long to do."

That day, the elapsed time Barker was able to survive within
the formation was raised to four minutes, thirty-eight seconds.

On the day that the elapsed time was brought up to six
minutes, twelve seconds, Hawks was in his office, tracing his fingertip down
the crumpled chart, when his desk telephone rang.

He glanced at it with a flicker of his eyes, hunched his
shoulders, and continued with what he was doing. His fingertip moved along the
uncertain blue line, twisting between the shaded red areas, each marked with
its instruction and relative time bearing, each bordered by its drift of black
x's, as if the chart represented a diagram of a prehistoric beach, where one
stumbling organism had marked its labored trail up upon the littered sand,
between the long rows of drying kelp and other flotsam which now lay stranded
under the lowering sky. He stared down raptly at the chart, his lips moving,
then closed his eyes, frowned, and repeated bearings and instructions, opening
his eyes and leaning forward again.

The telephone rang once more, softly but without stopping.
He tightened his hand into a momentary fist, then pushed the chart aside and
took the handset off its cradle. "Yes, Vivian," he said.

He listened, and finally said: "All right. Let him come
in."

Hawks looked up curiously from behind his desk as Connington
walked slowly across the office. "Wanted to talk to you," he mumbled as
he sat down. "It seemed as if I ought to." His eyes searched
restlessly back and forth.

"Why?" Hawks asked.

"Well—I don't know, exactly. Except that it wouldn't
feel right, just sort of letting it drop. There's—I don't know, exactly, what
you'd call it, but there's a pattern to life . . . ought to be a pattern,
anyhow; a beginning, a middle, and an end. Chapters, or something. I mean,
there's got to be a pattern, or how could you control things?"

"I can see that it might be necessary to believe
that," Hawks said patiently.

"You still don't give an inch, do you?" Connington
said.

Hawks said nothing, and Connington waited a moment, then let
the matter drop. "Anyhow," he said, "I wanted you to know I was
leaving."

Hawks sat back in his chair and looked at him
expressionlessly. "Where are you going?"

Connington gestured vaguely. "East. I'll find a job
there, I guess."

"Is Claire going with you?"

Connington nodded, his eyes on the floor. "Yes, she
is." He looked up and smiled desperately. "It's a funny way to have
it end up, isn't it?"

"Exactly the way you planned it," Hawks pointed
out. "All but the part about eventually becoming company president."

Connington's expression set into a defiant grin. "Oh, I
didn't really figure it was as sure a thing as that. I just wanted to see what
happened when I put some salt on your tail." He stood up quickly.
"Well, I guess that's that. I just wanted to let you know how it all came
out in the end."

"Well, no," Hawks said. "Barker and I are
still not finished."

"I am," Connington said defiantly. "I've got
my part of it. Whatever happens from now on doesn't have anything to do with
me."

"Then you're the winner of the contest."

"Sure," Connington said.

"And that's what it always is. A contest. And then a
winner emerges, and that's the end of that part of everyone's life. All right.
Goodbye, Connington."

"Goodbye, Hawks." He turned away, and hesitated.
He looked back over his shoulder. "I guess that was all I wanted to say. I
could have done it with a note or a phone call." He shook his head, puzzled,
and looked to Hawks as if for an answer to a question he was asking himself.
"I didn't have to do it at all."

Hawks said gently: "You just wanted to make sure I knew
who the winner was, Connington. That's all."

"I guess," Connington said unsurely, and walked
out slowly.

The next day, when the elapsed time was up to six minutes,
thirty-nine seconds, Hawks came into the laboratory and said to Barker: "I
understand you're moving into the city, here."

"Who told you?"

"Winchell." Hawks looked carefully at Barker.
"The new personnel director."

Barker grunted. "Connington's gone East,
someplace." He looked up with a puzzled expression on his face. "He
and Claire came out to get her stuff yesterday, while I was here. They smashed
all those windows looking from the living room out on the lawn. I'll have to
have them all replaced before I can put the place up for sale. I never thought
he was like that."

"I wish you'd keep the house. I envy you it."

"That's none of your business, Hawks."

Nevertheless, the elapsed time had been brought up to six
minutes, thirty-nine seconds.

The day the elapsed time reached nine minutes, thirty
seconds, Hawks said to Barker:

"I'm worried. If your elapsed time grows much longer,
the contact between M and L will become too fragile. The navigating team tells
me your reports are growing measurably less coherent."

"Let 'em try going up there, then. See how much sense
they can make out of it." Barker licked his lips. His eyes were hollow.

"That's not the point."

"I know what the point is. There's another point. You
can stop worrying. I'm almost out the other side."

"They didn't tell me that," Hawks said sharply.

"They don't know. But I've got a feeling."

"A feeling."

"Doctor, all that chart shows is what I tell it after
I've done a day's work. It has no beginning and no end, except when I put one
there. Tomorrow, I put the end to it." He looked around the laboratory,
his face bitter. "All this plumbing, Doctor, and in the end it comes down
to all revolving around one man." He looked at Hawks. "One man and
what's in his mind. Or maybe two of us. I don't know. What's in your mind,
Hawks?"

Hawks looked at Barker. "I don't pry into your mind,
Barker. Don't set foot in mine. I have a telephone call to make."

He walked away across the laboratory, and dialed an outside
number. He waited for the answer, and as he waited, he stared without focussing
at the blank wall. Suddenly he moved in a spasm of action and smashed the flat
of his free hand violently against it. Then the buzz in the earpiece stopped
with a click, and he said eagerly:

"Hello? Elizabeth? This-this is Ed.
Listen-Elizabeth-oh, I'm all right. Busy. Listen—are you free tonight? It's
just that I've never taken you to dinner, or dancing, or anything. . . . Will
you? I—" He smiled at the wall. "Thank you." He hung up the
telephone and walked away. He looked back over his shoulder, and saw that
Barker had been watching him, and he started self-consciously.

"Elizabeth—" he began, and then waved his arm
annoyedly. "No. It was all going to come out in a rush. It does, so
often."

They were standing atop an arm of rock that thrust out
seaward into the surf. Hawks' collar was turned up, and he held his jacket
together with one hand. Elizabeth was wearing a coat, her hands in its pockets,
a kerchief over her hair. The Moon, setting on the horizon, reflected its light
upon the traceries of clouds overhead. Elizabeth smiled up at him, her wide
mouth stretching. "This is a very romantic spot you've brought us to,
Edward."

"I—I was just driving. I didn't have any particular
place in mind." He looked around. "I have things—things I want to
say. Tonight. No later." He took a step forward, turned, and stood facing
her, staring rigidly over her shoulder at the empty beach, the rise of the
highway with his car parked on its shoulder, and the eastern sky beyond.
"I don't know what shape they'll take. But they have to come out. If
you'll listen."

"Please."

He shook his head at her, then forced his hands into his hip
pockets and kept his body rigid.

"Listen—the thing is, people say when a man dies:
'Well, he had a full life, and when his time came, he went peacefully.' Or they
say: 'Poor boy—he'd barely begun to live.' But the thing is, dying
isn't
an
incident.
It isn't something that happens to a man on one particular day
of his life, soon or late. It happens to the
whole
man—to the boy he
was, to the young man he was—to his joys, to his sorrows, to the times he
laughed aloud, to the times he smiled. Whether it's soon or late, how can the
dying man possibly feel it was
enough
of a life he lived, or not enough?
Who measures it? Who can decide, as he dies, that it was
time?
Only the
body reaches a point where it can't move anymore. The mind—even the senile
mind, fogged by the strangling cells of its body's brain—rational or
irrational, broad or narrow; that
never
stops; no matter
what,
as
long as one trickle of electricity can seep from one cell to another, still it
functions; still it
moves—
how can
any
mind, ever, say to itself:
'Well, this life has reached its logical end,' and shut itself down? Who
can.say: 'I've seen enough'? Even the suicide has to
blow
his brains
out, because he has to destroy the physical thing to evade what's in his mind
that will not let him rest.

"The mind, Elizabeth—intelligence; the ability to
look
at the Universe; to
care
where the foot falls, what the hand
touches—how can it help but go on, and on, drinking in what it perceives around
it?"

His arm swept out in a long, stiff arc that swept over the
beach and the sea.
"Look
at this! All your life, you'll have this,
now! And so will I. So will I. In our last moments, we will still be able to
look back, to
be
here again. Years away from here, and thousands of miles
away from here, we would still have it. Time, space, entropy—no attribute of
the Universe can take this from us, except by killing us; by crushing us out.

"The thing is, the Universe is
dying!
The stars
are burning their substance. The planets are moving more slowly on their axes.
They're falling inward toward their suns. The atomic particles that make it all
up are slowing in their orbits. Bit by bit, over the countless billions of
years, it's slowly happening. It's all running down. Someday, it'll stop. Only
one thing in the entire Universe grows fuller, and richer, and
forces
its
way uphill. Intelligence—human
lives—
we're the only things there are
that don't obey the Universal law.

"The Universe kills our bodies; it drags them down with
gravity, it drags and drags, until our hearts grow tired with pumping our blood
against its pull, until the walls of our cells break down with the weight of
themselves, until our tissues sag, and our bones grow weak and bent. Our lungs
tire of pulling air in and pushing it out. Our veins and capillaries break with
the strain. Bit by bit, from the day we're conceived, the Universe rasps and
plucks at our bodies until they can't repair themselves any longer. And in that
way, in the end, it kills our brains.

"But our
minds
. . .