The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B (28 page)

Barker struck the wall with a sharp rock-hammer, and a
glittering blue-black cube of its substance sprang away from it, exposing a
coarse brown flat surface. Barker tapped lightly, and it changed color to a
glittering white alive with twisting green threads. The facing of the wall
turned crystalline and transparent, and disappeared. They stood on the lip of a
lake of smoking red fire. On its shore, half-buried, the white paint sooted
yellow, charred and molten so that it had run like a cheap crockery glaze, lay
Barker's armor. Hawks looked at his wristwatch. Their elapsed time inside the
formation was six minutes, thirty-eight seconds. He turned and looked back. On
the open, panchromatic plain, a featureless cube of metal lay glittering
blue-black. Barker turned back, picked it up, and threw it down on the ground.
A coarse brown wall rose up into the air between them and the plain, and behind
them, the fire snuffed out. Where Barker's burnt armor had been, was a heap of
crystals at the edge of a square, perhaps a hundred meters to a side, of lapis
lazuli.

Barker stepped out on it. A section of the square tilted,
and the crystals at its edge slid out across it in a glittering fan. Barker
walked down carefully among them, until he was at the other edge of the
section, steadying it with his weight. Hawks climbed up onto the slope and
walked down to join him. Barker pointed. Through the crack between the section
and the remainder of the square, they could see men from the observation team,
peering blindly in at them. Hawks looked at his wristwatch. Their elapsed time
inside the formation was six minutes, thirty-nine seconds. Lying heaped and
barely visible between them and the observation team was Barker. The crystals
on their section were sliding off into the crack and falling in long, delicate
strands of snow upon the dimly seen armor.

Barker clambered up onto the lazuli square. Hawks followed
him, and the section righted itself behind him. They walked out for several
meters, and Barker stopped. His face was strained. His eyes were shining with
exhilaration. He glanced sideward at Hawks, and his expression grew wary.

Hawks looked pointedly down at his wristwatch. Barker licked
his lips, then turned and began to run in a broadening spiral, his boots
scuffing up heaps of crystals, at each of which he ducked his head as waves of
red, green, yellow light dyed his armor. Hawks followed him, the lazuli
cracking out in great radiations of icy fractures that criss-crossed into a
network under his feet as he ran around and around.

The lazuli turned steel-blue and transparent, and then was
gone, leaving only the net of fractures, on which Barker and Hawks ran, while
below them lay the snowed armor and the observing team standing oblivious a few
inches from it, and the stars and jagged horizon of the Moon behind them, a
broken face against which the arc of the sky was fitted.

Their elapsed time inside the formation was nine minutes,
nineteen seconds. Barker stopped again, his feet and pincers hooked in the
network, hanging motionless, looking back over his shoulder as Hawks came up.
Barker's eyes were desperate. He was breathing in gasps, his mouth working.
Hawks clambered to a stop beside him.

The net of fractures began to break into dagger-pointed
shards, falling away, leaving great rotten gaps through which swirled clouds of
steel-gray smokey particles which formed knife-sharp layers and hung in the
great open space above the footing to which Hawks and Barker clung, and whose
fringes whirled up and across to interlock the layers into a grid of stony,
cleavage-planed cross-hatchings which advanced toward them.

Barker suddenly closed his eyes, shook his head violently in
its casque, blinked, and, with a tearful grimace, began to climb up the net,
holding his left arm pressed against his side, clutching above him for a new
handhold with his right as soon as his weight was off each toehold which his
left foot discarded.

When Hawks and Barker emerged at the rim of the net, beside
the drifted armor which lay under its crust of broken dagger-points, their
elapsed time inside the formation was nine minutes, forty-two seconds. Barker
faced the observing team through the wall, and stepped out onto the open Moon.
Hawks followed him. They stood looking at each other through their faceplates,
the formation directly behind them.

Barker looked at it. "It doesn't look as if it knows
what we've done," he said over the radiotelephone circuit.

Hawks cast a glance behind him. "Did you expect it
to?" he shrugged. He turned to the observer team, who were standing,
waiting, in their Moonsuits, their faces patient behind the transparent plastic
bubbles of their helmets.

"Did you gentlemen see anything new happen while wc
were in there?"

The oldest man on the team, a gray-faced, drawn individual
whose steel-rimmed spectacles were fastened to an elastic headband, shook his
head. "No," his voice came distorted through his throat microphone.
"The formation shows no outward sign of discriminating between one
individual and another, or of reacting in any special way to the presence of
more than one individual. That is, I suppose, assuming all its internal strictures
are adhered to."

Hawks nodded. "That was my impression, too." He
turned toward Barker. "That very likely means we can now begin sending
technical teams into it. I think you've done your job, Al. I really think you
have. Well, let's come along with these gentlemen, here, for a while. We might
as well give them our verbal reports, just in case Hawks and Barker L had lost
contact with us before we came out." He began to walk along the footpath
toward the observation bunker, and the others fell in behind him.

Latourette knelt down and bent over the opened faceplate.
"Are you all right, Ed?" he asked.

Hawks L looked muzzily up at him. There was a trickle of
blood running out of the corner of his mouth. He licked at it, running his
tongue over the bitten places in his lower lip. "Must have been more
frightened than I thought, after M drifted away from me and I realized I was in
the suit." He rolled his head from side to side, lying on the laboratory
floor. "Barker all right?"

"They're getting him out of the receiver now. He seems
to be in good shape. Did you make it all right?"

Hawks L nodded. "Oh, yes, that went well. The last I
felt of M,

he was giving the observation team a verbal report." He
blinked to clear his eyes. "That's quite a place, up there. Listen—Sam—"
He looked up, his face wrinkled into an expression of distaste as he looked at
the man. When he was a boy, and suffering from a series of heavy colds, his
father had tried to cure them by giving him scalding baths and then wrapping
him in wet sheets, drawing each layer tight as he wound it around Eddie Hawks'
body and over his arms, leaving the boy pinned in, in this manner, overnight.
"I—I hate to ask this," he said, not realizing that the expression on
his face was turned directly up at Latourette, "but do you suppose the
crew could get me out of my suit before they do Barker?"

Sam, who had at first been watching Hawks with interest and
concern, had by now become completely offended. "Of course," he said
and stalked away, leaving Hawks L alone on the floor, like a child in the
night. He lay that way for several moments before one of the technicians who
stood in a ring around him realized he might want company and knelt down beside
him, in range of the restricted field of vision through the faceplate opening.

Hawks M watched the chief observer close his notebook.
"I think that does it, then," he said to the man. Barker, who was
sitting beside him at the steel table, nodded hesitantly.

"I didn't see any lake of fire," he said to Hawks.

Hawks shrugged. "I didn't see any jagged green glass
archway in its place." He stood up and said to the observer team: "If
you gentlemen would please re-fasten our faceplates for us, we'll be on our
way."

The observers nodded and stepped forward. When they were
done, they turned and left the room through the airtight hatch to the bunker's
interior, so that Hawks and Barker were left alone to use the exterior airlock.
Hawks motioned impatiently as the demand valve in his helmet began to draw air
from his tanks again, its sigh filling his helmet. "Come along, Al,"
he said. "We don't have much time."

Barker said bitterly as they cycled through the lock:
"It sure is good to have people make a fuss over you and slap you on the
back when you've done something."

Hawks shook his head. "These people, here, have no
concern with us as individuals. Perhaps they should have had, today, but the
habit would have been a bad one to break. Don't forget, Al—to them, you've never
been anything but a shadow in the night. Only the latest of many shadows. And
other men will come up here to die. There'll be times when the technicians slip
up. There may be some reason why even you, or perhaps even I, will have to
return here. These men in. this bunker will watch, will record what they see,
will do their best to help pry information out of this thing—" He gestured
toward the obsidian hulk, toppling perpetually, perpetually re-erecting itself,
shifting in place, looming over the bunker, now reflecting the light of the
stars, now dead black and lustreless. "This enormous puzzle. But you and
I, Al, are only a species of tool, to them. It has to be that way. They have to
live here until one day when the last technician takes the last piece of this
thing apart. And then, when that happens, these people in this bunker, here,
will have to face something they've been trying not to think about, all this
time."

Hawks and Barker moved along the footpath.

"You know, Hawks," Barker said uncomfortably,
"I almost didn't want to come out."

"I know."

Barker gestured indecisively. "It was the damnedest
thing. I almost led us into the trap that caught me last time. And then I
almost just stayed put and waited for it to get us. Hawks, I just—I don't know.
I didn't want to come out. I had the feeling I was going to lose something.
What, I don't know. But I stood there, and suddenly I knew there was something
precious that was going to be lost if I came back out onto the Moon."

Hawks, walking steadily beside Barker, turned his head to
look at him for the first time since they had left the bunker. "And did
you lose it?"

"I—I don't know. I'll have to think about it for a long
time, I think. I feel different. I can tell you that much." Barker's voice
grew animated. "I do."

"Is this the first time you've ever done something no
other man has ever done before? Done it successfully, I mean?"

"I—well, no, I've broken records of one kind or
another, and—"

"Other men had broken records at the same things,
Al."

Barker stopped, and looked at Hawks. "I think that's
it," he frowned. "I think you're right. I've done something no other
man has ever done before. And I didn't get killed for it."

"No precedent and no tradition, Al, but you did it
anyway."

Hawks, too, had stopped. "Perhaps you've become a man
in your own right?" His voice was quiet, and sad.

"I may have, Hawks!" Barker said excitedly.
"Look—you can't— that is, it's not possible to take in something like this
all at once— but—" He stopped again, his face looking out eagerly through
his faceplate.

They had come almost to the point where the footpath from
the bunker joined the system of paths that webbed the terrain between the
formation, the receiver, the Navy installation, and the motor pool where the
exploration halftracks stood. Hawks waited, motionless, patiently watching
Barker, his helmet bowed as he peered.

"You were
right,
Hawks!" Barker said in a
rush of words. "Passing initiations doesn't mean a thing, if you go right
back to what you were doing before; if you don't
know
you've changed! A
man—a man makes himself. He—oh, God
damn
it, Hawks, I tried to be what
they
wanted, and I tried to be what I thought I
should
be, but what
am
I? That's what I've got to find out—that's what I've got to make something
of! I've got to go back to Earth and straighten out all those
years!
I—Hawks,
I'm probably going to be damned grateful to you."

"Will you?" Hawks began walking again. "Come
with me, Al."

Barker trotted after him. "Where are you going?"

Hawks continued to walk until he was on the track that led
to the motor pool, and continued past it for a short distance before the
camouflaging stopped and the naked terrain lay nearly impassable to an armored
man on foot. He waved shortly with one arm. "Out that way."

"Aren't you taking a chance? How much air is there in
these suits?"

"Not much. A few minutes' more."

"Well, let's get back to the receiver, then."

Hawks shook his head. "No."

"What do you mean? The return transmitter's working,
isn't it?"

"It's working. But we can't use it."

"Hawks-"

Hawks reached out and awkwardly touched his right sleeve to
the man's armored shoulder. "Long ago, I told you I'd kill you in many
ways, Al. When each Barker L came back to consciousness on Earth after each
Barker M died, I was letting you trick yourself. You thought then you'd already
felt the surest death of all. You hadn't. I have to do it once more.

"There was always a continuity. Barker M and L seemed
to be the same man, with the same mind. When M died, L simply went on. The
thread was unbroken, and you could continue to believe that nothing, really,
had happened. I could tell you, and you could believe, that in fact there was
only a succession of Barkers whose memories dovetailed perfectly. But that's
too abstract a thing for a human being really to grasp. At this moment, I think
of myself as the Hawks who was born, years ago, in the bedroom of a farm home.
Even though I know there's another Hawks, down in the laboratory on Earth,
who's been living his own life for some moments, now; even though I know I was
born from the ashes of this world twenty minutes ago, in the receiver. All that
means nothing to the me who has lived in my mind all these years. I can look
back. I can remember."