Rogue Moon

“We can’t ask for more than that, can we?” Hawks said.

“No, we can’t,” Latourette said implacably. “It’ll do the same for him.” He jerked his head in the direction of the dressing table. “Don’t worry.”

“All right, Sam.” Hawks sighed. “I wouldn’t propose him for membership in a country club, either.” He looked around. “Is Ted Gersten with the receiver crew?”

“He’s up working on one of the signal modulation racks. It’s the only one that didn’t test out. He’s having it torn down. Say’s he’ll have it rewired tonight in plenty of time for tomorrow.”

Hawks frowned thoughtfully. “I’d better go up there and talk to him. And I think he should be here with us when Barker goes in for the scan.” He turned away, then looked back. “I wish you’d cycle Jocko through once more. Just to be sure.”

Latourette’s lips pinched together. He motioned to the monkey’s attendant with a clawed sweep of his arm.

Gersten was a spare man with leathery features and deep, round eyesockets whose rims stood out clearly under his taut facial skin. His broad, thin lips were nearly the color of his face. When he spoke, they peeled back from his teeth to give an impression of great intensity. His voice, in contrast, was soft, deep, and low. He stood gently scratching his iron-gray hair, watching the two technicians who were lifting a component chassis out of its rack, which had been pulled out of the array and set down on the gallery floor.

The test-signal generator’s leads dangled from the service rack overhead. Other pieces of test equipment were set down around the three men. As Hawks came walking up from the ladder at the end of the gallery, Gersten turned and watched him. “Hello, Ed.”

“Ted.” Hawks nodded and looked down at the work being done. “What’s the problem?”

“Voltage divider. It’s picked up some kind of intermittent. Tests out fine for a while, then gets itself balled up, and straightens out again.”

“Uh-huh. Sam tells me you’re O.K. otherwise.”

“That’s right.”

“O.K. Listen, I’m going to need you on the transmitter with Sam and myself when we scan the new volunteer. Want to come with me now?”

Gersten glanced at the technicians. “Sure. The boys’re doing fine.” He stepped clear of the test instruments and walked down the gallery toward the ladder, beside Hawks.

When they were out of earshot of the technicians, Hawks said, casually, “You may have a lot to do tomorrow, Ted. No sense wasting time on a wiring job tonight, when you could be sleeping. Requisition a new divider from Manufacturing, messenger express delivery, and send the old one back to them. Let it be their headache. Either way, you’d have to run complete tests all over again anyhow.”

Gersten blinked. “I should have looked at it that way myself, I think.” He glanced at Hawks. “Yes. I should have.” He stopped and said, “I’ll be right down after you, Ed.” He turned and walked back toward his technicians.

Hawks lowered himself down the iron ladder, his shoe soles tapping regularly and softly. He walked back across the laboratory floor, where Latourette was watching the instruments above the tape deck of a castered gray cabinet co

Hawks watched silently as Latourette compared the taped readings with the data being given to him by a technician from the receiver crew, who was operating another service computer.

“All right, Bill,” Latourette said, turning away. “But let’s run both sets together for comparison, now. Let me know if anything’s off.”

The technician nodded.

“Well,” Latourette said to Hawks, “as far as I could tell from the rough check, your friend Barker still has the equipment one hundred per cent behind him.” He looked toward the spider monkey. “And Jocko certainly looks healthy enough.” He turned back. “Where’s Gersten?”

“He’ll be right down.” Hawks looked up at the galleries. “I wish I knew Gersten better. He’s a hard man to understand. He never shows more than he has to. It’s very hard to accommodate yourself to a man like that.”

Latourette looked at him peculiarly.

5

Barker lay on the table, enclosed in the armor suit, with his faceplate open. He looked calmly up as Hawks bent over him.

“All right?” Hawks asked.

“Fine.” Barker’s voice echoed in the helmet and came distorted through the narrow opening. His air hoses lay coiled on his stomach.

The ensign, standing beside Hawks, said, “He seems to be quite comfortable. I don’t think there’ll be any trouble with claustrophobia. Of course, we won’t know until we’ve closed his faceplate and had him breathing tanked air for a while.”

“Son,” Barker said, “I’ve dived more feet in my life than you’ve walked.”

“This is hardly scuba gear, sir.”

Hawks moved into the line of vision between Barker’s face and the ensign’s. He said, “Barker, I told you I was going to give you a chance to back out now, if you wanted to.”

“I like the way you put that, Doctor.”

“The reason we have all this elaborate control gear should be obvious,” Hawks persisted. “The fidelity of the resolving process depends on the clarity of the signal that arrives at the receiver. And even the tightest beam we can drive up to the Moon is going to pick up a certain amount of noise. So we feed from the transmitter here to the amplifier banks, checking the signal against the readings we take on the first scan.

“There’s always a variation between the file tape and the signal, of course. We make a new file tape with every transmission, but there’s stili a time lag between the making of the latest tape and the next transmission of the same object. But that’s why we have a standard man, and a statistical table of the probable degree of variation over given periods of time. By setting up crude analogies in the amplifiers, and introducing the proper statistical factor, we can introduce a certain measure of control.”

“I hope you think I’m following this, Hawks.”

“I hope you try. Now. When we’ve done all this, we have as much accuracy as we can. At that point, the signal is pulsed up to the Moon, not once but repeatedly. Another differential amplifier bank in the receiver there compares each bit of information in each signal pulse to each bit of all the signals it has received. It rejects any bit which differs from a majority of its counterparts. Any error created by transmission noise is almost certain to be discarded in the process.

“What we’re going to do today is scan you for the first time. Nine tenths of our control equipment is useless until it has scan readings to work from. So, the first time, you’re trusting entirely to our ability as electronic engineers, and my skill as a designer. I can’t guarantee that the Al Barker who is resolved in the laboratory receiver will be the same man you are now. You can test an electronic component until you’re blue in the face, and have it fail at the most critical moment. The very process of testing it may have weakened it just enough. And the sca

“When Thomas Edison spoke into the horn of his sound reproducer, the vibration of his voice against a diaphragm moved a needle linked to that diaphragm, and scratched a variable line on the rotating wax cylinder. When he played it back, out came ‘Mary had a little lamb.’ But there Edison was stopped. If the needle came loose, or the wax had a flaw, or the drive to the cylinder varied, out came something else — an unintelligible hash of noise.