The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B (29 page)

Barker said: "Get to the point!"

"Look, Barker—it's simply that we don't have the
facilities, here, for accurately returning individuals to Earth. We don't have
the computing equipment, we don't have the electronics hardware, we don't have
any of the elaborate safeguards. We will have. Soon we'll have hollowed out a
chamber large enough to hold them underground, where they'll be safe from
accidents as well as observation. Then we'll either have to pressurize the
entire chamber or learn to design electronic components that'll work in a
vacuum. And if you think that's not a problem, you're wrong. But we'll solve
it. When we have time.

"There's been no
time,
Al. These people here—the
Navy men, the observers—think of them. They're the best people for their jobs.
And all of them, here, know that when they came up here, counterparts of theirs
stayed behind on Earth. They had to. We couldn't drain men like those away from
their jobs. We couldn't risk having them die—no one knew what might happen up
here. Terrible things still might.

"They all volunteered to come up here. They all
understood. Back on Earth, their counterparts are going on as though nothing
had happened. There was one afternoon in which they spent a few hours in the
laboratory, of course, but that's already a minor part of their past, for them.

"All of us up here are shadows, Al. But they're a
particular kind. Even if we had the equipment, they couldn't go back. When we
do get it, they still won't be able to. We won't stop them if they want to try,
but, think, Al, about that man who leads the observation team.

Back on Earth, his counterpart is pursuing a complicated
scientific career. He's accomplished a lot since the day he was duplicated. He
has a career, a reputation, a whole body of experience which this individual,
up here, no longer shares. And the man here has changed, too—he knows things
the other doesn't. He has a whole body of divergent experience. If he goes
back, which of them does what? Who gets the career, who gets the family, who
gets the bank account? It'll be years, up here, before this assignment is over.
There'll have been divorces, births, deaths, marriages, promotions, degrees,
jail sentences, diseases—No, most of them won't go back. But when this ends,
where
will
they go?

"We'd better have something for them to do. Away from
Earth-away from the world that has no room for them. We've created a whole
corps of men with the strongest possible ties to Earth, and no future except in
space. But where will they go? Mars? Venus? We don't have rockets that will
drop receivers for them there. We'd better have—but suppose some of them have
become so valuable we don't dare not duplicate them again? Then what?

"You called them zombies, once. You were right. They're
the living dead, and they know it. And they were made, by me, because there
wasn't
time.
No time to do this systematically, to think this out in all
its aspects.

"And for you and me, now, Al, there's the simple fact
that we have a few minutes' air left in our suits and can't go back, at
all."

"For Pete's sake, Hawks, we can walk into any one of
these bubbles, here, and get all the air we want!"

Hawks asked slowly: "And settle down and stay here, you
mean, and go back in a year or two? You can if you want to, I suppose. What
will you do, in that time? Learn to do something useful, here, wondering what
you've been doing meanwhile, on Earth?"

Barker said nothing for a moment. Then he said: "You
mean, I'm stuck here." His voice was quiet. "I'm a zombie. Well, is
that bad? Is that worse than dying?"

"I don't know," Hawks answered. "You could
talk to these people up here about it. They don't know, either. They've been thinking
about it for some time. Why do you think they shunned you, Barker? Possibly
because there was something about you that frightened them more than they could
safely bear? We had our wave of suicides after they first came up. The ones
who're left are comparatively stable on the subject. But they stay that way
because they've learned to think about it only in certain ways. But go ahead.
You'll be able to work something out."

"But, Hawks, I want to go back to
Earth!"

"To the world in your memories, that you want to
re-make?"

"Why
can't
I use the return transmitter?"

Hawks said: "I told you. We only have a transmitter up
here. We don't have a laboratory full of control equipment. The transmitter
here pulses signals describing the typewritten reports and rock samples the
Navy crew put in the receiver. It isn't used much for anything, but when it is,
that's what it carries. From here—without dead-accurate astronomical data,
without our power supply—the signals spread, they miss our antenna down there,
they turn to hash in the ionization layers—you just can't do, from the surface
of an uninhabited, unexplored, airless satellite, what we can do from there.
You can't just send up, from a world with terrestrial gravity, with an
atmosphere, with air pressure, with a different temperature range, equipment
that will function here. It has to be designed for here and better yet, built
here. Out of what? In what factory?

"It doesn't matter, with marks on paper and lumps of
rock, that we've got the bare minimum of equipment we
had
to have time
to adapt. By trial and error, and constant repetition, we push the signals
through, and decipher them on Earth. If they're hashed up, we send a message to
that effect, and a Navy yeoman types up a new report from his file carbon, and
a geologist chips off another rock of the same kind. But a man, Barker—I told
you. A man is a phoenix. We simply don't have the facilities here to take scan
readings on him, feed them through differential amplifiers, cross-check, and
make a file tape to re-check against."

Hawks raised his arms and dropped them. "Now do you see
what I've done to you? Do you see what I've done to poor Sam Latourette, who'll
wake up one day in a world full of strangers, only knowing that now he'll be
cured but his old, good friend, Ed Hawks, is long dead and gone to dust? I
haven't played fair with any of you. I've never once shown any of you mercy,
except now and then by coincidence."

He turned and began to walk away.

"Wait! Hawks—you don't have to—"

Hawks said, without stopping or turning his head, walking
steadily: "What don't I have to? There's an Ed Hawks in the Universe who remembers
all his life, even the time he spent in the Moon formation, up to this very
moment as he stands down in the laboratory. What's being lost? There's no
expenditure. I wish you well, Al—you'd better hurry and get to that airlock.
Either the one at the return transmitter or the one at the Naval station; it's
about the same distance."

"Hawks!"

"I have to get out of these people's way," Hawks
said abstractedly. "It's not part of their job to deal with corpses on
their grounds. I want to get out there among the rocks."

He walked to the end of the path, the camouflaging's shadows
mottling his armor, cutting up the outlines of his body until he seemed to
become only another place through which he walked.

Then he emerged into the starlight, and his armor flashed
with the clear, cold reflection.

"Hawks," Barker said in a muffled voice, "I'm
at the airlock."

"Good luck, Barker."

Hawks clambered over the rocks until he began to pant. Then
he stood, wedged in place. He turned his face up, and stars glinted on the
glass. He took one shallow breath after another, more and more quickly. His
eyes watered. Then he blinked sharply, said, "No, I'm not going to fall
for that." He blinked again and again. "I'm not afraid of you,"
he said. "Someday I, or another man, will hold you in his hand."

Hawks L pulled the orange undershirt off over his head, and
stood beside the dressing table, wearing nothing but the bottom of the suit,
brushing at the talcum on his face and in his hair. His ribs stood out sharply
under his skin.

"You ought to get out in the sun, Hawks," Barker
said, sitting on the edge of the table, watching him.

"Yes," Hawks said abstractedly, thinking he had no
way of knowing whether there really had been a plaid blanket on his bed in the
farmhouse, or whether it had been a quilted comforter. "Well, I may. I should
be able to find a little more time, now that things are going to be somewhat
more routine. I may go swimming with a girl I know, or something. I don't
know."

There was a note in his left hand, crumpled and limp with
perspiration, where he had been carrying it since before he was put into his armor
the first time. He picked at it carefully, trying to open the folds without
tearing them.

Barker asked: "Do you remember anything much about what
happened to us on the Moon after we got through the formation?"

Hawks shook his head. "No, I lost contact with Hawks M
shortly afterward. And please try to remember that we have never been on the
Moon."

Barker laughed. "All right. But what's the difference
between being there and only remembering being there?"

Hawks mumbled, working at the note: "I don't know.
Perhaps the Navy will have a report for us on what Hawks M and Barker M did
afterward. That might tell us something. I think it will."

Barker laughed again. "You're a peculiar duck,
Hawks."

Hawks looked at him sidelong. "That sums me up, does
it? Well, I'm
not
Hawks. I remember being Hawks, but I was made in the
receiver some twenty-five minutes ago, and you and I have never met
before."

"All
right,
Hawks," Barker chuckled.
"Relax!"

Hawks was no longer paying any attention to him. He opened
the note, finally, and read the blurred writing with little difficulty, since
it was in his own handwriting and, in any case, he knew what it said. It was:

"Remember me to her."

"sergeant
dixonS"

Kurt stiffened. He knew
that
voice. Dropping the
handles of the wooden plow, he gave a quick "rest" to the private and
a polite "by your leave, sir" to the lieutenant who were yoked
together in double harness. They both sank gratefully to the ground as Kurt
advanced to meet the approaching officer.

Marcus Harris, the commander of the 427th Light Maintenance
Battalion of the Imperial Space Marines, was an imposing figure. The three
silver eagle feathers of a full colonel rose proudly from his war bonnet and
the bright red of the flaming comet insignia of the Space Marines that was
painted on his chest stood out sharply against his sun-blackened, leathery
skin. As Kurt snapped to attention before him and saluted, the colonel surveyed
the fresh-turned earth with an experienced eye.

"You plow a straight furrow, soldier!" His voice
was hard and metallic, but it seemed to Kurt that there was a concealed glimmer
of approval in his flinty eyes. Dixon flushed with pleasure and drew back his
broad shoulders a little further.

The commander's eyes flicked down to the battle-ax that
rested snugly in its leather holster at Kurt's side. "You keep a clean
side-arm, too."

Kurt uttered a silent prayer of thanksgiving that he had
worked over his weapon before reveille that morning until there was a satin
gloss to its redwood handle and the sheen of black glass to its obsidian head.

"In fact," said Colonel Harris, "you'd be
officer material if—" His voice trailed off.

"If what?" asked Kurt eagerly.

"If," said the colonel with a note of paternal
fondness in his voice that sent cold chills dancing down Kurt's spine,
"you weren't the most completely unmanageable, undisciplined, overmuscled
and under-brained knucklehead I've ever had the misfortune to have in my command.
This last little unauthorized jaunt of yours indicates to me that you have as
much right to sergeant's stripes as I have to have kittens. Report to me at ten
tomorrow! I personally guarantee that when I'm through with you—if you live
that long—you'll have a bare forehead!"

Colonel Harris spun on one heel and stalked back across the
dusty plateau toward the walled garrison that stood at one end. Kurt stared
after him for a moment and then turned and let his eyes slip across the wide
belt of lush green jungle that surrounded the high plateau. To the north rose a
great range of snow-capped mountains and his heart filled with longing as he
thought of the strange and beautiful thing he had found behind them. Finally he
plodded slowly back to the plow, his shoulders stooped and his head sagging.
With an effort he recalled himself to the business at hand.

"Up on your aching feet, soldier!" he barked to
the reclining private. "If you please, sir!" he said to the
lieutenant. His calloused hands grasped the worn plow handles.

"Giddiup!" The two men strained against their
collars and with a creak of harness the wooden plow started to move slowly
across the arid plateau.

Conrad Krogson, Supreme Commander of War Base Three of
Sector Seven of the Galactic Protectorate, stood at quaking attention before
the visiscreen of his space communicator. It was an unusual position for the
commander. He was accustomed to having people quake while
he
talked.

"The Lord Protector's got another hot tip that General
Carr is still alive!" said the sector commander. "He's yelling for
blood, and if it's a choice between yours and mine, you know who will do the
donating!"

"But, sir," quavered Krogson to the figure on the
screen, "I can't do anything more than I am doing. I've had double security
checks running since the last time there was an alert, and they haven't turned
up a thing. And I'm so shorthanded now that if I pull another random purge, I
won't have enough techs left to work the base."