Rogue Moon

“Be sure and tell me what it is when I come out of this, huh?”

Fidanzato, pushing at the foot of the table, chuckled very softly.

Hawks looked around. Latourette was at the transmitter control console. “Watch Sam,” Hawks said to Gersten standing beside him, “and remember everything he does. Try not to miss anything.” Hawks’ eyes had not turned toward Gersten; his glance had swept undeviatingly over Weston, who was leaning back against an amplifier cabinet, his arms and ankles crossed, and over Holiday, the physician, standing tensely potbellied at the medical remote console.

Gersten grunted, “All right,” and Hawks’ eyes flickered with frustration.

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 sca

“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. “Switch on.” 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 multicha

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

Hawks pressed his hand against the back of his bent neck and pulled it around across the taut muscle that corded down to his shoulder. “Doctor Holiday, any time 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 to push the table toward the receiver as Latourette cut the fore-and-aft magnets and technicians began undogging the chamber door. Weston and Holiday moved forward to begin examining Barker as soon as he was free of the suit.

Hawks said quietly to the ensign, “Be sure to tell him your name,” as he walked to the control console. “All right, Sam,” he said as he saw the table slip under Barker’s a

“You figure he’s all right?” Latourette asked.

“I’ll let Weston and Holiday tell me about it. He certainly sounded as if he’s as functional as ever.”

“That’s not much,” Latourette growled.

“It’s—” Hawks took a deep breath and began again, gently. “It’s what I need to do the job.” He put his arm around Latourette’s shoulders. “Come on, Sam, let’s go for a walk,” he said. “We’ll have Weston’s and Holiday’s preliminary reports in a minute. Ted can start setting up for tomorrow’s shot.”

“I want to do it.”

“No — No, you let him take care of it. It’s all right. And — and you and I’ll be able to go up and get out in the sunshine. There’s something I have to tell you.”

CHAPTER FOUR

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 preprimary. It meant that, two thirds of each day, my teachers were unavailable to me. They were there, teaching the other two grades things I either knew or wasn’t expected to understand. Then 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 took a sip of brandy. “I wonder, sometimes, what I would have become if I’d chosen to go on the way I had been in grammar school — dipping into my teachers for whatever interested me, letting the rest of it slide, and continuing to enjoy my education”

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.

“I had only one other choice to make in high school,” he said after a while in which he had simply sat and looked at her. “It was in my junior year, and I was about to take my first science subject. Physics. The physics teacher during my sophomore year had been a first-class man named Haziet. His students nearly worshipped the ground he walked on. I had begun thinking by then in my life that going into the sciences was the answer for me.

“When I reported to class the first day of my junior year, I was full of anticipation. I had read a great deal of fiction about super-science and competent people doing competent things with it, and I expected more, I think, than even Hazlet could have crammed into a high-school physics class.