Rogue Moon

Barker stared flatly up at him. “That’s too bad.”

“How do you want me to talk about it?” Hawks answered rapidly. A vein bulged down the center of his forehead. “Do you want me to talk about what we’re here to do, or do you want me to say something else? Are you going to argue morality with me? Are you going to say that, duplicate man or no duplicate man, a man dies on the Moon and makes me no less a murderer? Do you want to take me to court and from there to a gas chamber? Do you want to look in the law books and see what penalties apply to the repeated crime of systematically driving men insane? Will that help us here? Will it smooth the way?

“Go to the Moon, Barker. Die. And if you do, in fact, find that you love Death as feverishly as you’ve courted her, then, just perhaps, you’ll be the first man to come back in condition to claim revenge on me!” He clutched the edge of the opened chest plate and slammed it shut. He held himself up with the flats of his palms on it and leaned down until his face was directly over Barker’s faceplate opening. “But before you do, you’ll tell me how I can usefully do it to you again.”

3

The Navy crew pushed Barker into the transmitter. The lateral magnets lifted him off the table, and it was pulled out from beneath him. The door was dogged shut, and the fore-and-aft magnets came on to hold him locked immobile for the sca

Up on the roof, there was a radar dish focused in parallel with the transmitter ante

Gersten looked at his console, turned to Hawks and said, “Green board.”

Hawks said, “Shoot.”

The red light went on over the transmitter portal, and the new file tape began roaring into the takeup pulleys of the delay deck. One and a quarter seconds later, the leader of the tape began to pass through the playback head feeding the L signal to the laboratory receiver. The first hard beat of the M signal simultaneously reached the Moon.

The end of the tape clattered into the takeup reel. The green light lit over the laboratory receiver’s portal. Barker L’s excited breathing came through the P.A. speaker, and he said, “I’m here, Doctor.”

Hawks stood in the middle of the floor with his hands in his pockets, his head cocked to one side, his eyes vacant.

After a time, Barker L said peevishly in a voice distorted by his numb lips, “All right, all right, you Navy bastards, I’m goin’ in!” He muttered, “Won’t even talk to me, but they’re sure great at moving a man along.”

“Shut up, Barker,” Hawks said urgently under his breath.

“Going in now, Doctor,” Barker said clearly. His breathing cycle changed. Once or twice after that, he grunted, and once he made an unconscious, high, keening noise of strain in his throat.

Gersten touched Hawks’ arm and nodded toward the stopwatch in his hand. It showed two hundred forty seconds’ of elapsed time since Barker had gone into the formation. Hawks nodded a nearly imperceptible reply. Gersten saw he was not moving his eyes away, and continued to hold the watch up.

Barker screamed. Hawks’ body jumped in reflex, and his flailing arm sent the watch cartwheeling out of Gersten’s hand.

Holiday, at the medical console, brought his palm down flat against a switch stud. Adrenalin fired into Barker L’s heart as the anesthesia cut off.

“Get him out!” Weston was shouting. “Get him out!”

“There’s no hurry any longer,” Hawks said softly, as if the psychologist were standing where he could hear him. “Whatever was going to happen to him has happened.”

Gersten looked toward the shattered watch and back M Hawks. “That’s what I was thinking,” he said.

Hawks frowned and began to walk toward the receiver chamber as the dressing crew pushed the armor table through the portal.

Barker sat hunched on the edge of the table, the opened armor lying dismembered beside him, and wiped his gray face. Holiday was listening to his heartbeat with a stethoscope, looking aside periodically to take a new blood-pressure reading as he squeezed the manometer bulb he kept in his hand. Barker sighed. “If there’s any doubt,, just ask me if I’m alive. If you hear an answer, you’ll know.” He looked wearily over Holiday’s shoulder as the physician ignored him, and he said to Hawks, “Well?”

Hawks glanced at Weston, who nodded imperturbably. “He’s made it, Dr. Hawks,” Weston said. “After all, many neurotic personality constellations have often proved useful on a functional level.”

“Barker,” Hawks said, “I’m—”

“Yes, I know. You’re happy everything worked out all right.” He looked around. His eyes were darting in jerks from side to side. “So am I. Has somebody here got a cigarette?”

“Not yet,” Holiday said sharply. “If you don’t mind, chUm, we’ll leave your capillaries at normal dilation for a while, yet.”

“Everyone’s so tough,” Barker mused. “Everyone knows what’s best.” He looked around again at the laboratory people crowding around the table. “Could some of you stare at me a little later, please?” They retreated indecisively, then moved back to work.

“Barker,” Hawks said gently, “do you feel all right?”

Barker looked at him expressionlessly. “I got up there, and out of the receiver, and started looking around the outpost. A bunch of zombies in light Navy suits handled me like you’d handle an ugly ghost. They wouldn’t say two words to me without sounding as if they were paying for them. They showed me that camouflaged walkway they’ve built from the outpost bubble, and half-pushed me onto it. One of them walked along with me until I got to the formation, and never looked me in the face.”

“They have problems of their own,” Hawks said.

“I’m sure they do. Anyway, I got into the thing all right, and I moved along O.K It’s—” His face forgot its a

Hawks nodded. “Don’t worry. We have a good deal of time, now.”

Barker gri

Barker’s face began to flush crimson, and his eyes bulged whitely. His lips fluttered. “The— the—” He stared at Hawks. “I can’t!” he cried out. “I can’t— Hawks—” He struggled against Holiday and Weston, who were trying to hold his shoulders, and curled his hands rigidly on the edge of the table, his arms locked taut, quivering in spasms. “Hawks!” he shouted as though from behind a thick glass wall. “Hawks, it didn’t care! I was nothing to it! I was— I was—” His mouth locked partly open and the tip of his tongue fluttered against the backs of his upper teeth. “N-n-n No — N-nothing!” He searched Hawk’s face, desperate. He breathed as though there could never be enough air for him.

Weston was grunting with the effort to force Barker over backward and make him lie down. Holiday was swearing as he precisely and steadily pushed the needle of a hypedermic through the diaphragm of an ampule he had plucked out of his bag.